The temporary hijrah subsection has moved to a page of its own, located here.

US general tells British special forces:  Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you're making us look bad.  I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.  Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army's 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations.  I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

After the Debacle:  Six Concrete Steps to Restore U.S. Credibility.  The indelible images from Kabul this week have done serious damage to U.S. credibility abroad.  The Chinese Communist Party media mouthpiece, the Global Times, has already used the chaos in Afghanistan to warn Taiwan that the United States cannot be counted on to come to its aid when China eventually attacks the island.  There will be ample time to assess how things went so wrong so quickly for the Biden administration in this still-unfolding crisis.  We fully support our diplomats and troops as they execute their mission to evacuate U.S. citizens, allied diplomats, and the United States' Afghan friends over the coming days and weeks.  Rather than get drawn into a political blame game over the harrowing scenes the world is watching on TV, we believe it is far more important for the United States to immediately take steps to shore up its alliances and diplomatic standing, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.  Fortunately, there are efforts that can be undertaken without delay to reassert U.S. leadership.

Biden Can't Escape Blame for Afghanistan Fiasco.  The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul.  Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs.  Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities.  Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis — only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its hated oil before the U.S. midterms? [...] And why not, when our own military jousts with the windmills of "white supremacy" as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?

Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.  There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now:  Failure must be punished.  The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years.  It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon.  Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out.  Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.  When President Joe Biden ordered them to get out, there wasn't a lot of time for planning, but they managed to get what they did wrong.  US forces fled Bagram under cover of darkness, with no warning to anyone.  (But botched even that, turning off the lights as they left, which gave looters free rein for many hours before Afghan officials showed up.)

6 Reasons China, Not Just Taliban, Benefits from US Exit From Afghanistan.  [Scroll down]  China now could have access to oil, copper, and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, experts say.  The communist regime also will want infrastructure, roads, and railways to access mining areas.  The connection would be part of China's "Belt and Road Initiative," a multi-trillion-dollar strategy of investing abroad to gain influence over other countries.  "China benefits immensely" from the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, said Marco Rimanelli, a professor of political science and international security at Saint Leo University in Florida.  "By expanding the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese are using a form of predatory capitalism by making nations completely dependent on China," Rimanelli told The Daily Signal.  "Once a country is unable to pay back its debts, China tries to extract political concessions."  China has used this model to gain leverage in Africa and in Latin America, often in smaller countries with extensive natural resources.

Lara Logan confirms what we feared about Afghanistan.  Biden's pullout from Afghanistan has been the worst managed event in American history.  With Saigon as an example, the administration knew exactly how bad it would be.  There's a lot of finger-pointing going on now but, at bottom, people are wondering if the unconditional Taliban takeover, including the trapped Americans, is a deliberate policy.  On Tucker Carlson's Wednesday show, Lara Logan said, "Yes, it is.  This was what the government wanted." [...] [Unlike Japan,] We never flattened Afghanistan.  Instead, we imposed ourselves on top of a medieval Islamic country, including the whole LGBTQ+ madness.  It worked for those already geared to Western values and those looking to take American money.  The Afghan military, many members of which were brave fighters, clearly would never be ready to lose their training wheels — with our military being the training wheels.  Some of you may remember this video, which embodies problems of both culture and competency:  [Video clip]

Assabiya Wins Every Time.  Democrats and Republicans are right to blame each other for the fall of Kabul.  It's a loss for America's bipartisan foreign policy establishment as a whole.  For nearly two decades Washington sent thousands of Americans to their deaths and spent trillions of taxpayer dollars to wage a strategically pointless war.  And because both sides of the political divide should be held accountable, military as well as civilian officials, too, it is unlikely that anyone ever will be.  Since everyone is to blame, holding anyone accountable implicates everyone.  The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra.  The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America's clandestine service.  Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it.  When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort's cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.  Yet military strategists, political pundits, foreign correspondents, and even historians will spend the next several decades wondering how a gang of rough Pashtun tribesmen galvanized by a fundamentalist version of Islam managed to defeat the most advanced military in the world.

Afghanistan's Tragic Collapse And The Death Of U.S. Influence.  It's one thing to lose a war intentionally, quite another to botch it so badly that it damages our relations around the world.  But thanks to the epic ineptitude of the Biden administration, our military leaders and dysfunctional intelligence agencies, that's exactly what has happened.  The news couldn't be more depressing.  Our president's response was, no joke, a strongly worded letter to the Taliban from our United Nations ambassador.  At the same time, our own State Department informed U.S. citizens now stuck in the capital of Kabul that they should make their way to Karzai Airport if they can, but that the U.S. can't guarantee their safety.  Even as the horrible images of the Taliban's takeover come tumbling in over social media and news sites, the harm to the U.S. and its global reputation has been significant.  The Taliban has already started killing people, including a woman for not wearing a burka, while making up more comprehensive death lists of those who will be summarily murdered once it takes total control.

If You Live in Taiwan, Time to Worry.  Taiwan needs to worry about American reliability.  Unlike Afghanistan, where the United States had committed its forces for two decades, Taiwan has no U.S. forces and no assurance that the United States will come to their defense if attacked by China.  The United States has a bad habit of walking out on its allies and friends.  The list is long.  It includes Vietnam and Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran.  In all of those cases, one way or another, the United States, for its own reasons, took a hike.  Obama pulled U.S. troops from Iraq, opening the door to Iran.  While the United States has a few thousand soldiers still in Iraq in training and advisory capacities, they're under siege and it's unlikely the United States will protect them.  In fact, President Joe Biden has said the United States will end combat missions in Iraq by the end of 2021.  Unless U.S. troops are pulled out in the middle of the night, as they were in Afghanistan, they'll quite possibly have to shoot themselves out while exiting.

The 'Thank You for Your Service' Red Pill.  One thing we need to examine is our dogmatic praise of the military and its members.  For the last 80 years, since the great shift to the post-World War II order, the military has become a hallmark of the American regime.  But this was not always the case.  Praising a professional military, especially a massive, standing army in times of peace, would have been antithetical to American virtue to most Americans living during the first 150 years of our history.  During the founding, for instance, professional soldiers were seen for what they are:  mercenaries.  We debated some after establishing our regime about if and how much we needed some small portion of a professional cadre of soldiers, but I have never come across a founder who did not see professional soldiers essentially as scum.  Ours was to be a republic, and republics cannot use mercenary armies.  The hallmark of the American military was the citizen-soldier — the direct opposite of the professional.  The logic is simple.  There is something less than admirable about someone who would fight and kill for a living.

The very center of all US problems is the rejection of Christianity.  Christianity has always been hand in hand with the greatest empires.  The abandonment of Christianity has always led to the collapse of any nation or people or family or person who abandons it.  This is an axiom. [...] Christianity itself is the most difficult way of life to live.  Any other religion is far, far easier, because they don't require of the faithful what Christ does:  everything.  Many people use "Christianity" as a brand to justify their own existence and behavior.  Look at Imposter Joe, for example.  He claims to be a "devout Roman Catholic", yet he supports gay marriage, abortion anytime anywhere, and acts like a pedophile at times.  He is false.  He probably doesn't think he is false, and many who prefer him because of political (not religious) reasons will participate in perpetuating the delusion.  But "by [his] fruits", we see he is no follower of Christ, he is instead, a hijacker of Christ, using the Lord's good name to get ahead politically among seculars.

The Pandemic Gave Americans A Taste Of Government 'Help' And They Didn't Like It.  It's fair to say Americans, especially the pre-revolution colonists, have always had a healthy skepticism of government.  What's frightening is some days we seem dangerously close to losing the unique quality that separates this country from every other.  The Washington Examiner's Byron York posted last week in his Daily Memo some interesting data that tells us a lot about Americans' attitudes about their government.  He tracked a long-term Fox News survey in which respondents are asked which message they would send the government if they had the chance: "lend me a hand" or "leave me alone."  Over the course of the last decade, only in August 2020 did a majority (57%) say it would ask for government help.  In that same poll, 36% said "leave me alone."  This year, however, the numbers were flipped — 47% said "leave me alone" while 44% still wanted aid.

Our Ridiculous Way of Fighting Wars.  As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars.  If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward. [...] Which "victory" was more decisive:  World War II or Vietnam?  Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Tucker Carlson:  We must hold someone accountable for what is happening in Afghanistan.  There's a pattern, if you look around for a moment, you may notice things that add up:  gas lines, inflation, spiraling crime, collapsing cities.  If you're over 40, it could look familiar.  It's the 1970s, but without the free speech and Brezhnev running our government and, as if it could get more perfect, now we may have another fall of Saigon.  Remember the fall of Saigon?  If you were watching television in April of 1975, April 30th, you remember it well.  It was the single most humiliating day in the history of the United States abroad.  American officials fleeing in terror as a peasant army swept through the capital city, desperate civilians clinging to the struts of helicopters as they took off from the roof of the U.S. embassy.  It was a complete disaster.  It was a total ignominious defeat.  We'd spent more than a decade in Vietnam and in the end, we lost.  So no matter how you felt about that war, it was painful to see it happen and nobody wants to see it again.  Last month, Joe Biden promised we never will see it again.

Why Everything We Thought About Drugs Was Wrong.  Over the last 20 years the U.S. liberalized drug laws.  During that time, deaths from illicit drugs rose from 17,000 to 93,000. Two and a half times more people die from illicit drug use than from car accidents; five times more die from drugs than homicide.  Many of those people are homeless and die alone in the hotel rooms and apartment units given away as part of the harm reduction-based "Housing First" approach to homelessness.  Others are children found dead by their parents on the floors of their rooms.  Many progressives today say the problem is that we didn't go far enough, and to some extent they are right.  A big factor behind rising drug deaths has been the contamination of cocaine, heroin, and counterfeit prescription opioids with fentanyl.  Others say that concerns over rising drug deaths are misplaced, and that alcohol and tobacco kill more people than illicit drugs.  But drug deaths were rising in the U.S. long before the arrival of fentanyl, and most of the people who die from tobacco and alcohol do so in old age, not instantly, like they do when they are poisoned or overdose.  Of the nearly 90,000 people in the U.S. who die of alcohol-related causes annually, just 2,200 die immediately from acute alcohol poisoning.

Accountability for Afghanistan.  It is probably too much to expect that there will be accountability for the debacle in Afghanistan — we have a Democratic president, after all.  But we can still hope.  We can turn to the foreign press for their perspectives on what is happening.  France24 posted this video of chaos at Kabul's airport:  [Video clip] [...] One country that isn't withdrawing its people is Russia.  They expect to get along just fine with the Taliban.

My scooter was stolen last week. Unknown to the thief, I hid two Airtags inside it.  [Thread reader]  I was able to use the Apple Find My network and UWB direction finding to recover the scooter today. [...] Here are a few lessons learned if you're using Airtags for theft recovery:
  [#1]   Use an Airtag adhesive that blends in and muffles noise.  It's clear my thief was looking for them.
  [#2]   Do not turn on Lost Mode.  It immediately alerts the thief they're being tracked.
  [#3]   Act quickly, before the anti-stalking feature kicks in.  Damage done to my handlebars was likely in response to the regular noises from the Airtag.
  [#4]   Limit your in-person interactions and always involve the police.  Don't try to retrieve your stolen goods until you have backup.

Where was the US Navy when Iran Took Over the Strait of Hormuz?  Neither Congress, nor President Biden, nor even the U.S. Navy has registered interest in the following alarming developments in the Gulf of Arabia, first reported by Israeli intelligence.  On Tuesday, August 3, at least six ships off the coast of the UAE in the Gulf of Oman suddenly announced via their Automatic Identification System trackers, nearly simultaneously, that they were "not under command."  In other words, they had lost power and could no longer control their steering.  Shortly afterward, Britain's maritime trade agency reported a "potential hijack" unfolding off the UAE coast.  One of the stricken ships, the Asphalt Princess tanker, was boarded by operatives suspected of being Iranian troops, seized and towed into Iranian waters, and then released the following day.  This was not the first attack against a tanker off the UAE in the Gulf of Oman.  Iran apparently used one or more armed drones to carry out a deadly tanker attack the previous Thursday against the Mercer Street in those same waters.

'Preppers' Quietly Stock Up for the 'Perfect Storm'.  A crippling ice storm that left Travis Maddox and thousands of other Missouri residents without power in 2007 had an "almost apocalyptic feel to it."  "No one could move.  It just shut the whole region down for two weeks.  I wasn't as prepared as I thought," said Maddox, a burly man of 43, sporting a long black beard, T-shirt, cargo pants, and baseball cap, while tending his garden.  Those two weeks made Maddox realize that being prepared — "prepping," as it's called today — was the key to a life of self-reliance and personal freedom.  As an Eagle Scout, he never forgot the Boy Scout motto:  Be prepared.  "To me, the ultimate level of prepping is being self-sufficient.  You're still being modern, but you're in control," Maddox told The Epoch Times on Aug. 5.

British Commentator's Monologue on the Nature of Freedom Will Make You Stand up and Cheer.  I've never heard of Neil Oliver before today, but I am now following him on social media and I can count myself as a bonafide fan after reading his Twitter timeline and watching this incredibly moving and salient monologue on the nature of freedom.  Oliver is an archeologist and podcaster out of the United Kingdom. [...] But it's not his accent or his smooth, calming tones that are most engaging.  Oliver's most recent weekly monologue on freedom and the nature of freedom is a must-watch for everyone, but especially those who believe freedom is a privilege that can only be meted out with the guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen.  Oliver's monologue is quite Mike Rowe-esque, and should be shared everywhere.

Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future.  In 2019, Steven Spielberg called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that "movie theaters need to be around forever" and that audiences had to be given "the motion picture theatrical experience" for a movie to be a movie.  Spielberg's fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not.  Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for "everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time," and for "giving filmmakers more ways to share art."  Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall:  Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.

Will China bail out Biden?  Renmin University professor Jin Canrong has Washington's attention.  The senior director for China at the US National Security Council, Rush Doshi, cited him two dozen times in a new book entitled "The Long Game:  China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order."  Professor Jin's warning on Friday [7/30/2021] at the "Observer" website that US inflation might lead to the bankruptcy of the US government will be read carefully in Washington — especially because Jin claims that China can help America out of its economic problems.  "The United States is in a state of mental transition," the Chinese academic averred, citing the late Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  America was in denial three years ago, and shifted to anger, but "some sane people may be ready for the third stage," and "be ready to bargain."

Did Karl Marx Really Know What He Was Talking About?  [Scroll down]  Perhaps Marx's communist economic model reflected how he lived his personal life.  To put it bluntly, Karl Marx was a lifelong free-loader, was always in debt, and was constantly begging for money to pay his bills from his mother, his wife's family, and from a generous, rich Friedrich Engels (whose father was a rich industrialist!). So, while Marx was busy attacking the industrialist class, he was living off the money of a rich industrialist, an extraordinary brazen act of hypocrisy by the "leader of the proletariat."  Although he lived in poverty in a poor section of London, Marx had a family maid, Helen Demuth, although he really couldn't afford one.  In 1851 while Marx's wife was away on the Continent begging for money, Marx impregnated the maid and fathered an illegitimate son, Fredrick Demuth, who Marx never saw and totally abandoned.  It gets worse.  To cover up Marx's betrayal of his wife, professed principles, and public image, Engels agreed to pose as the father of Marx's illegitimate son and paid off the maid to keep quiet.

Slouching Toward Dictatorship.  "Progressives" (the quotes flag the falsehood behind the label) are corrupters of reality who think nothing of corrupting even science in order to achieve their goals.  Taking no lessons from history and drunk on political power, they move ahead to make the state command every aspect of our lives in the mad obsession to own us.  Their contempt for reality punches us with "justice" that kills babies because they happen to be on the wrong side of a mother's abdominal wall.  It thumps us with "reasoning" that makes killing a non-human creature a criminal act and killing a human being legitimate because Homo sapiens is not on a list of endangered species.  And so it is that the government in an America adulterated by "progress," exercising a power taken from its people by eviscerating the Constitution, has the "authority" to control every aspect of our lives.  And that includes everything we own and everything we need to stay alive.

Conservatism Is Over:  A New Vocabulary for a New Right.  [Scroll down]  Surveying American life and government in 2021, the failure of American conservatives cannot be denied.  What we lost was precisely the vision of American governance and virtues that Benjamin Franklin warned us would be a struggle to maintain.  Equality under the law?  Despite successes in recognizing the humanity of previously oppressed minority groups, the free market has enabled a crass commodification of legal representation that ensures many Americans must routinely settle for inferior counsel.  Another sign of bias in the legal institutions is that informed citizens who aren't lawyers can reliably predict the outcome of key cases merely by learning the number of the circuit court before which they will be argued.  But the betrayal of equality under the law isn't only evident in formal court proceedings — it can be seen in things like the increasingly discriminatory affirmative action policies in higher education, or the Biden Administration's overt racial favoritism in allocating COVID relief funds.

There's Something Happening Here...  There is an undercurrent going on that is felt but not seen at this time.  Stills's words expressed great dissatisfaction with the national government, estrangement of government from the discontented, and a sense that the government is ignoring and does not care about the masses.  There is a real sense of physical threat by the progressive government against the people.  And there is a real arrogance by the powerful government elite that the populist masses, including the patriots, just cannot do anything about progressive abuse of power.  A real sense of estrangement, isolation, and unfairness that the outsiders felt in the '60s, is what the patriots (conservatives/Christians/constitutionalists) feel today.  There appear to be many events happening all at once and closely linked that give hope.  And the people are aware and noticing.

Taiwan Is Next, but Should We Care?  Taiwan is a small island state (about 24 million inhabitants) in the western Pacific.  There, Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, took refuge following the fall of China to Mao and the Chinese communists in 1949. Since then, Taiwan has remained a contentious issue for Beijing's communist government, which has vowed to "reunite" Taiwan with mainland China either peacefully or through force of arms.  But let there be no doubt:  Taiwan is one of the brightest lights of freedom and prosperity in the world.  Fully democratic, Taiwan routinely holds free and fair elections.  Taiwan elected a female (Tsai Ing-wen) as the country's (yes, I will refer to Taiwan as a country!) president in 2016 and remains staunchly anti-communist.  President Tsai was reelected in 2020 with a historically strong majority.  Taiwan boasts a significant free market economy, producing the 20th-largest GDP globally — incredible for such a small population.  And Taiwan's per capita income ranks with that of the United States.

What Is to Be Done?  Restore Federalism and Elect DeSantis as President.  One of the things the Left hates most about the United States of America is that there are 50 of them.  A leftist revolution is more easily accomplished in a country in which power is already consolidated in a single place among a small group of people.  Despite the vast territory of the Russian empire under the last of the Tsars, Lenin was able to hijack the initial anti-Tsarist revolt and turn it into a Bolshevik seizure of power.  Over the course of the centuries, similar things have happened in France, England, and Germany. [...] The system of checks and balances instituted by the Founders cooled the passions as it was designed to do, rejecting the "fierce urgency of now" in favor of gradual change.  From 13 east-coast colonies to 50 states, marked by deep regional differences, America weathered the storms of civil war, anarchism, socialism, National Socialism, and communism without succumbing to any of them.  But the hammering on the gates of our republican democracy has only grown louder and more insistent.

The radical left is going to wish Rush Limbaugh had lived to age 99, when they see the people who replace him.
The only reason the media tries to cancel Joe Rogan: He terrifies them.  Joe Rogan is staying one step ahead of Cancel Culture, but not if the media has anything to say about it.  The host of "The Joe Rogan Experience," the podcast sensation who joined Spotify last year following a jaw-dropping $100 million deal, is under near-constant attack from his woke critics — and, sadly, journalists who pledge allegiance to the new woke order.  The short list of complaints against Rogan?
  •   He's too willing to speak to fringe players like conspiracy monger Alex Jones.
  •   He's too willing to give "problematic" voices like Abigail Shrier, a critic of the trans agenda, a platform.
  •   He's too willing to question the government's COVID-19 dog-eared rule book.
  •   He's too willing to curse out Cancel Culture.
  •   He's too enamored of free speech, worst of all.
Rogan invites guests on his show who have been deplatformed by social media giants (Jones, for example).  He blasted Joe Biden as too old during the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign after endorsing an even older Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries.  More recently he brought up President Biden's mental fitness anew, something the mainstream media refuses to consider after years of questioning the mental state of Donald Trump.

When 'Woke' is More Sacred than Old Glory.  On my desk is a framed political cartoon with the caption:  "Burning the American Flag is a form of free speech?  Try burning a rainbow flag and see if that too is considered a form of free speech?"  You could replace "rainbow flag" with "BLM flag," or even "Antifa flag."  The cartoon lances the recent rise in free-speech hypocrisy that promptly abandons the First Amendment and drums up hysterical charges of "hate speech" when certain sacred cows du jour are so much as mildly criticized.  In the Left's campaign to "fundamentally transform" America and rid it of soi-disant racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other perceived ills, certain symbols — the American flag, and a panoply of images of western culture — have been isolated as representative of "the white patriarchy," deserving of derision and destruction.  Therefore, it has become perfectly acceptable to desecrate them.  At the same time, it has become hateful to even give a disapproving look to banners or murals representing the LGBTQ+, militant black groups, or anything remotely leftist.  "Woke" symbols are untouchable; free speech [notwithstanding].

Liberals do have more mental health issues.  [Elizabeth] Condra offers few opinions as to why liberals have more mental health issues, such as "an unrelenting focus on oppression, verbal violence, and microaggression."  And while I do agree with her analysis, I think it's an even deeper issue.  Conservatives are inherently more grateful for the country we're born into.  It's in the very name we call ourselves:  we want to "conserve" our country.  Progressives want it to "progress" into something else.  Conservatives are more focused on micro-values (improve myself to be the best I can be) and liberals on macro-values (improve society to be the best it can be).  The problem with focusing on macro-values is it's a lot harder to change society.  I have massive influence over my own disposition and perspectives, but I have little effect on society at large.  Conservatives are more logical.  As much as I might want to change society into improving, I know that logically I can control only myself and perhaps influence those around me.  So I am not depressed when my efforts at producing a "utopia" fail.  Conservatives have more traditional values.  And, perhaps, those values have been around for centuries because they make a happier society, not just due to the evil "patriarchy."

America's 'forever war' is here to stay.  America's withdrawal from Afghanistan is already leaving chaos in its wake.  The power vacuum will be exploited by the Taliban, Islamic terrorists, Russia and China.  The disregard for America's strategic interests and the resulting human calamity could end up matching President Obama's callous dismissal of the ISIS threat.  These days, both Republicans and Democrats think blasting a policy of "forever wars" makes for a good line.  The refrain may score cheap points with voters, but it also telegraphs to the world that America is increasingly conflict-averse and tired of leading on the world stage.  Make no mistake: an increasingly aggressive Communist China waits in the wings to assume that mantle.

A brilliant Twitter thread perfectly explains what drives today's conservatives.  Darryl Cooper, AKA MartyrMade, is a researcher, writer, and podcaster who has put together one of the most brilliant Twitter threads you will ever read.  Over the course of 35 tweets, he examines fact after fact from the last five years to explain why conservatives — the people who used to believe in our government, in law enforcement, in the election process — have become cynical, disillusioned, and prone to accepting conspiracy theories to explain the manifest breakdowns in the American system.

Great Thread on How the Election Was Rigged, and How the Nation Was Stolen.  [Scroll down]  Not a single person has gone to jail.  Even Kevin Clinesmith, the fall guy — and no one believes he forged that document without orders from Comey or McCabe or Lisa Page — got community service, and what was, effectively, a one month suspension of his law license.  Not a single other person paid any price.  And we're supposed to keep believing in the government, huh?  We're supposed to keep enlisting in the military?  We're supposed to keep obeying the laws?  We're supposed to keep believing the FBI and law enforcement?  We're supposed to keep returning "guilty" verdicts at trial when the Ruling Class tells us to?  Why?  The Ruling Class ignores the laws.

Does the Biden Administration Understand Inflation?  There seems to be a lot of confusion today about inflation.  Pick up the paper or follow an internet site and you will read that the inflation rate this year is expected to be 2% or 3%.  What they really mean is that prices are expected to rise 2% or 3%.  But is that inflation?  Inflation is an increase in the money supply.  So why is the difference in definition critical?  Prices rise because of inflation; they are the result of inflation but they are not inflation, nor are they the cause of inflation.  This is important because the government is the only one that can increase the money supply.  This is done in a number of ways, but for the moment just think of it as printing more money.  That is what countries have done when they ran out of money; they just printed more money until it came to the point where their money was almost worthless, where a wheelbarrow load of money would just barely purchase a loaf of bread.

The Costs of Biden's Big Government.  The Biden administration submitted its first 10-year budget to Congress last month.  The budget projects average annual economic growth for 2023 through 2031, after it's done with all the stimulus spending in 2021-22, of 1.9%.  What does 1.9% growth mean?  Economist John Cochrane, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, notes that from 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at 3.5% per year.  Average real income over that period grew from $16,000 per person to $50,000.  Suppose instead of 3.5%, growth over that period of time was 2%, asks Cochrane.  With average growth of 2% instead of 3.5%, a $16,000 income would have grown over the 50 years to $23,000 rather than $50,000.  In recent years, since 2000, average growth has been more sclerotic, in the range of 2%.  What's the problem?  Too much growth of government, says Cochrane.

America's Ruling Class and China's Ruling Class Are More Similar Than You Think.  In the oft-cited issues of the day, we discuss censorship in public spaces, corporate and military institutionalized wokeness, Critical Race Theory indoctrination of our youth in publicly-funded government education centers, upending traditional cultural norms, domestic surveillance of political opposition, an election no one is permitted to question, enormous spikes in murders and drug deaths across every major American city coupled with the demonization of law enforcement, a financial sector that is increasingly working against the interests of working and middle-class Americans, and a manufacturing base that has been sold off to our greatest world rival, the People's Republic of China (who bears responsibility for a deadly worldwide pandemic that likely emitted from their dangerous lab experiments in Wuhan).  If you dare to speak out about any of the above, you risk ostracism, reputational attacks, career termination, banning from public discourse, removal from payment processors, and in the most extreme cases, prosecution.  Why is this happening?  Because there is a 1% in America that wields powerful influence over the rest.

Why This Veteran Worries Wokeness Is Poisoning Our Military.  Jason Beardsley served his country in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Special Forces before taking the helm as executive director of the Association of the United States Navy.  Today, he's speaking out to urge military leaders to focus on their primary mission of defending America — not advancing the left's woke agenda.  Beardsley recently wrote a commentary for The Daily Signal about the challenges of readiness and morale in the U.S. Navy.  "Wokeness is well on its way to poisoning our military, even as it claims the military is moving toward utopia," Beardsley says.  He tells The Daily Signal that his own military experience taught him radical ideas like critical race theory have no place in our armed forces.

In a cancel culture, anonymity must be a civil right.  Anonymity, in ordinary times, is a tough topic to wrestle with.  These days, however, it's easy:  Dissent, and thus democracy, will only survive in today's culture if anonymity is preserved.  That's why the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down California's donor-disclosure law was correct and crucial.  In Americans For Prosperity v. Bonta, the court struck down California's law requiring all charities and other nonprofit organizations to disclose their donors.  California, in defending its law, was in effect trying to demolish the precedent set in NAACP v. Alabama, in which the court barred Alabama from requiring the NAACP to disclose all of its members.  Freedom of association is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.  Supreme Court jurisprudence holds that if a government wants to regulate it, the government needs a compelling interest, and the regulation needs to be narrowly tailored.  California's law clearly didn't meet these standards.

Is It a Conspiracy Theory to Say All This Racial Discord Is Intentional?  What do CRT, the 1619 Project, BLM, and white supremacists have in common?  All promote the depraved idea that some Americans are sufficiently different from others not to have a common interest in a unified country, a melting pot of immigrants of all races and ethnicities connected with the binding force of nationalism.  The left denounces nationalism repeatedly even though it is the sole force that holds an entity like the United States together. [...] Vladimir Putin, the first suspect who comes to mind, grew up in an empire that stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. [...] Putin now looks at the United States to see a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation that is very similar to the former Russian Empire in terms of everything except the binding force of nationalism — the idea that an American is an American regardless of what he looks like or where his ancestors came from.

Will EU Christophobia Drive Hungary Out?  Respect LBGT rights or get out of the EU, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte instructed Hungary's Viktor Orban at last week's gathering of the European Union in Brussels.  According to Reuters, attendees described it as the "most intense personal clash among the bloc's leaders in years."  What caused the clash?  Hungary just passed a law that bans schools from using materials seen as pro-homosexuality.  According to the AP, the new law "prohibits sharing content on homosexuality or sex reassignment to people under 18 in school sex education programs, films or advertisements."  Rutte eagerly related details of his confrontation with Orban:  "It was really forceful, a deep feeling that this could not be.  It was about our values; this is what we stand for."  "I said, 'Stop this; you must withdraw the law, and if you don't like that and really say that the European values are not your values, then you must think about whether to remain in the European Union.'"

Has the Military Lost Middle America?  Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military's greatest defender.  Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets.  When generals, active or retired, became controversial, conservative America usually could be counted on to stick with them.  Flyover country supported marquee officers such as Gen. Michael Hayden, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Gen. David Petraeus and a host of others when the media went after them for alleged unethical conduct, financial improprieties, spats with the Obama administration, or accusations of using undue force or hiding torture.  When Democrats railed in Congress about the "revolving door" of generals and admirals leaving the Pentagon to land lucrative board memberships with corporate defense contractors, Middle America, rightly or wrongly, mostly yawned.  Yet traditional America also assumed its military leaders were largely apolitical and stayed out of politics.

China vs. America.  There can be little doubt the United States is now in a contest with China over which will be the most important country in the world.  In important respects, we are replicating the German challenge to the United Kingdom prior to World War I and the renewed German challenge of the 1930s, or the Soviet challenge for 45 years after World War II.  As China grows stronger and bolder, and especially as the United States fumbles its way through periods of great distraction and internal political strife, the Chinese — like Hitler — become more brazen and provoking.

What does woke heart surgery look like?  As a practicing cardiovascular surgeon for 25 years and member of both organizations, I look with deep regret upon the embrace of woke ideology and obsession with skin color.  It will lead, I suspect, to diminished membership appeal and prestige, a distracted focus and mission, and less respect for surgical heritage, in time, in both organizations.  The elite surgical leaders, working within academia, have ignored the surgical majority in the ACS who do not support this political dogma or identity politics in general.  As a kind of secular religion, woke ideology dictates that a person (in this case, a surgeon or a patient) is considered not as an individual, but rather as a member of a group, a category, based on skin color or sex or both.  Woke ideologues reduce all persons in society, it seems, to the simple binary categories of white and non-white skin color, which are defined further as oppressor and victim groups, respectively.  A person as an individual becomes irrelevant.  The profession of surgery, in my opinion, needs to disregard this harmful ideology, preserve meritocracy, and maintain race and sex neutrality.

Should children be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance?  The United States flag is a symbol for freedom, and freedom is essential to life.  It stands for individual rights, and individual rights are essential in order to pursue happiness.  When I pledge to the flag, in my mind I know that I am pledging to the original ideals put forth by the founding fathers:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Therefore, it is logical to say that you're teaching children about the fidelity that the Pledge represents — the fidelity of the concept of individual rights.  By reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Americans promise to be true to these ideals, not to take freedom for granted, and to remember the countless men, women, and children who have given their lives through the centuries so Americans can live peacefully today.  When children recite the Pledge, they are given the opportunity to think about their roles as citizens, the founding principles of their country, and may be incentivized to think more about the meaning and significance of the Pledge.

America Needs Critical Infrastructure Training.  The United States has 16 key critical infrastructure sectors, each one providing a vital service to the country.  These include the chemical sector, the communications sector, IT and transportation, to name just four.  As the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns, the "incapacitation or destruction" of these sectors "would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof."  Distressingly, the "incapacitation" or "destruction" of at least one of these key pillars looks increasingly likely.  Every 39 seconds, somewhere on the planet, a cyberattack occurs.  The United States is now the most targeted country in the world.  Last year alone, the United States was the victim of 65,000 ransomware attacks; that's more than one every eight minutes.

JoeBamanomics — An Honest Outlook of Inflation and What is Coming.  Despite the deflective talking points by the professional financial pundits this massive spike in inflation is entirely predictable due to Biden economic policy and Biden monetary policy.  Keep in mind the FED has already said in April they would "support inflation" but that's because while they will not say it openly they know there's no way to stop it.  The massive inflation is a direct result of the multinational agenda of the Biden administration; it's a feature not a flaw, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID.  Also keep in mind the first group to admit what is to come are banks, specifically Bank of America, because the monetary policy is the cause.

This item is presented for what it's worth, with a big grain of salt:
County gathering celebrates local law enforcement.  Northeastern Nevada sheriffs were recognized Sunday [6/20/2021] for their special role in government, as a crowd of a few hundred people gathered in Elko City Park to celebrate Elko County becoming part of a "constitutional sheriff" organization. [...] Ramos introduced author and former Marine Corps officer Robert David Steele as the driving force behind Mack's "Arise USA" tour. [...] Steele cited major threats to America as traitors, Wall Street criminals and satanic pedophiles.  "The National Security Agency has every single email, cell call, text, game chat and banking transaction for every traitor, every elite pedophile and every Wall Street criminal and every corrupt government official at the local, state and federal levels," he said to applause from the crowd.  "And I remind you that no army of lawyers are going to be able to stand up to an Army Ranger battalion with fixed bayonets.  We're coming."  "I will tell you with absolute certainty that the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff fear most is not jail, but us releasing their 10 most treasonous phone calls to their own public," he continued.  "They will be torn limb from limb on their own streets."

General Insists Military's Not Woke, Just Wants to Study 'White Rage'.  After claiming to be "personally" offended over accusations the drag queen-loving U.S. military is woke, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley said, "I want to understand white rage, and I'm white."  Oh, okay, because that's not woke at all. [...] Okay, just for starters, only an idiot would see skin color as a factor in the January 6 protest in and around the U.S. Capitol (which was mostly peaceful, per the corporate media's own definition) January 6 protest in and around the U.S. Capitol, but here's a question that should put a chill up everyone's spine:  Why is the U.S. military brainwashing our troops with the openly racist ideas behind Critical Race Theory that push the wild and wicked claim people with white skin are inherently evil and racist oppressors?  I'll tell you what this sounds like to me.  Like the U.S. military is studying up on its next enemy, and not to "understand" this enemy.  No, to dehumanize this enemy in a way that will justify making war against this enemy.  This is exactly what happened at Waco in 1993.

Ingraham: Congress should halt military funds after Gen. Milley's support for 'far-left Marxist ideology'.  On Wednesday [6/23/2021], Laura Ingraham, host of "The Ingraham Angle," blasted General Mark Milley for propagating a "far-left Marxist racist ideology" in the U.S. military over his support of Critical Race Theory.  Milley testified before the House Armed Services Committee and was questioned concerning diversity training and racism within the ranks of the military.  He stated that he found recent attacks on the military over those issues "offensive."  Milley voiced his support for Critical Race Theory and he blamed the Jan. 6 riot on "white rage."  "I do think it's important for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read," stated Milley seemingly insinuating that troops were closed-minded and uneducated.  "The fact is, Milley has made his choice," noted Ingraham."  And he's chosen to indulge the radical whims of Democrats.  He'll do everything they tell him as long as they keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash."

A Terrible Day for the Republic:  Biden and His Top General Strike at America's Foundations.  In testimony before the House Wednesday [6/23/2021], Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about the military's new emphasis on politics and critical race theory.  Milley's testimony is telling in many ways.  He didn't deny the military is pushing CRT and its ideas down the ranks.  How could he, with so many whistleblowers calling his military out on it?  The nation's top general leads in this segment by suggesting that he's merely studying critical race theory and wokeness to understand them as a military leader should study ideas to understand their nature and whether they pose a threat or not.  That would be fine, even commendable, if it was true.  As Sun Tzu wrote, know your enemy.  But then Gen. Milley, America's top soldier, gets within inches of trashing the United States Constitution, which he swore an oath to defend with his life.

What will become of the useful idiots?  As the Marxist revolution oozes forward, I occasionally wonder what will happen to the useful idiots when the commies seize absolute power in this once great Republic.  I believe that most AT readers are familiar with the term, but for those who need a brief refresher, a useful idiot, as defined by Wikipedia, "is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders." In my opinion, this definition can be applied to a majority of the young, brainwashed radicals who have no idea about the true history of Marxism...or the real history of their native land that they're working so hard to destroy.

The DeSantis doctrine.  The term 'Florida man' usually comes loaded with negative connotations, but not if you're talking about Ron DeSantis.  The first-term Republican governor's approval ratings have reached 64 percent; a recent poll had him at 55 percent, still high for an unabashed conservative in a swing state.  Enterprising apparel companies are already selling 'DeSantis 2024' gear — and a Trafalgar poll of likely contenders (excluding Trump) shows DeSantis leading the pack with 35 percent support among Republican voters.  The Florida governor also bested Trump in a straw poll conducted during June's Western Conservative Summit in Denver.

Cancel Amazon Prime.  Today is Prime Day. [...] The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself.  It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. [...] Prime is Amazon's greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.  With 200 million subscribers worldwide, it is the second-most-popular subscription service on Earth, poised to overtake Netflix in the not-so-distant future.  This popularity is both extremely logical and a little perplexing.  When you subscribe to Prime, you're paying to pledge your fealty to a single company's ecosystem — something that consumers once wanted to avoid.  You're paying to have your every purchase cataloged — also something consumers aren't wild about, at least in theory — so that Amazon can use that information to sell you, and people like you, more goods.  You're paying to become part of a system that is purpose-built to keep you paying, forever, and to keep Amazon growing, forever, [...]

Petition to Remove Admiral Michael Gilday as Chief of Naval Operations.  Our military is under attack by "anti-racism" activists whose message is that white America is racist.  "Critical Race Theory" is the academic discipline that is used to justify the attack.  Critical Race Theory is a hateful Marxist fiction that maintains America is evil because the majority of its citizens are white, and that its Constitution is evil because it was written by white people.  The agents of this dogma, including those lecturing at the Naval War College, teach that white people — from the Founding Fathers to the 200 million white people in the country today — are oppressors, who are an internal enemy[.]  Critical Race Theory began by destroying the moral integrity of colleges and corporations.  Now its target is the U.S. Navy.  Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has told the third of a million naval personnel that they should be reading and learning from Ibram X. Kendi, a mediocre, fact-challenged university professor who has become the go-to "anti-racism" expert for America's woke elites.

'Where Are The Admirals?  Where Are The Generals?  Where Are the Veterans?'.  On 17 August 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower prescribed a Code of Conduct for members of the Armed Forces of the United States.  The purpose was to inform each service member in a combat unit about their basic responsibilities when engaged in combat or if they were captured by enemy forces. [...] Given the inherent and undeniable virtues of this colorblind, merit-based system based upon shared values, the Armed Forces of the United States travel a pernicious and destructive path if they embrace Critical Race Theory, with its core belief that America and her citizenry are irredeemably racist, along with the tenets of "white supremacy," "whiteness," "white privilege," "white fragility," and "systemic" or "institutional racism."  Critical Race Theory does not build up, it tears down.  There is nothing aspirational or uplifting about it.  And as a springboard to establishing "diversity" as a goal unto itself, as its own concurrent priority, inculcating those values into troops will not equip the military to succeed at its first, and most important goal, which is to fight and win in armed conflict.

Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum Are Not Who They Pretend to Be.  [Scroll down]  I have said it in my past writings. the Black community is not a monolith; there are many shades and structures of the Black community, just as with any other community.  It is the political Left and Right that wants to reduce the depth and breadth of our contributions to the nation and the world to a monolithic structure.  Just as the Black community is not a monolith, neither is Black conservatism.  I enjoy listening to viewpoints among the various aspects of Black conservatism the same as I do hearing the viewpoints among legacy conservatism and the new young cons.  Why are the differences accepted in one camp, but impossible to conceptualize in another?  What I will focus on is what results from platforming the disingenuous, and we are seeing this disingenuousness in Owens' behavior of late.  What results is a loss of credibility, and a rejection of the concepts on which you are supposed to be an authority.  This is bad not just Blacks in general, but for conservatism specifically.

Woke, Inc:  Why I'm blowing the whistle on how corporate America is poisoning society.  I used to think corporate bureaucracy was bad because it's inefficient.  That's true, but it's not the biggest problem.  Rather, there's a new invisible force at work in the highest ranks of corporate America, one far more nefarious.  It's the defining scam of our time — one that robs you of not only your money, but your voice and your identity. [...] I'm fed up with corporate America's game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money.  It is quietly wreaking havoc on American democracy.  It demands that a small group of investors and CEOs determine what's good for society, rather than our democracy at large.  This new trend has created a major cultural shift in America.  It's not just ruining companies.  It's polarizing our politics.  It's dividing our country to a breaking point.  Worst of all, it's concentrating the power to determine American values in the hands of a small group of capitalists, rather than in the hands of the American citizenry at large, which is where the dialogue about social values belongs.  That's not America, but a distortion of it.

Leftists are a minority... so why do they keep winning?  The truth is, normal, happy, well-adjusted people don't really care about politics — or care only when they are forced to by rioting mobs of looters in their cities.  Normal people of any and all colors don't want to tell you their pronouns, chemically castrate their sons with puberty-blocking drugs, or defund the police.  They're neither oppressors nor oppressed.  They just want to live their lives in peace, attend their kids' soccer or baseball games, and enjoy summer afternoons grilling[.]  Therein lies the problem:  it turns out that, with a very few exceptions, the absolute worst people on the planet — the kind of people who were hall monitors in high school and enjoy creating and enforcing petty regulations on their fellows — go into politics.  These are the entitled few who believe that rules and regulations are for other people, never for themselves — the grifters, tax cheats, and adulterers who run for office instead of working for a living.

Critical Race Theory Will Destroy Our Military.  As a young Marine Corps first lieutenant assigned to an infantry battalion in the late 1980s, I had charge of the unit transport section of operators, mechanics, and supervisors tasked with taking care of our fleet of combat vehicles. [...] Everything just worked and worked well.  Why?  Because they were all Marines, wearing the same uniform, supporting the same combat organization, serving the same country.  They all had been through the same training.  They had to measure up to the same standards.  They had to make the same cutoff scores for promotion.  They humped the same combat loads, ate the same field rations, fired the same qualifications at the rifle range, suffered the same annual refresher training for proper use of gas masks.  They worked the same long hours in hot and sweaty, cold and damp, sunbaked or frigid or windblown field conditions, tolerated the same irritating micromanagement, and enjoyed the same positive leadership interventions from higher headquarters. [...] It was wonderful.  I can't help but wonder what it would have been like if each person in that section had been pitted against each other, assessing his fellow Marine's trustworthiness or reliability or capability based on the color of his skin.

The case for Congressman Trump.  In his article "Will Trump run in 2024? A fascinating clue from Don Jr.," Thomas Lifson sets forth a credible scenario in which Trump is keeping his options open, while a possible presidential successor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, proves his bona fides.  If no messy skeletons jump out from DeSantis's closet, he is a dream presidential candidate: brilliant, patriotic, practical, and empathetic.  Should that come to pass, Trump would give another gift to America.

No Leaders Attended the G7 Summit.  [Scroll down]  And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall.  Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op — nobody would believe these people are world leaders.  Because they aren't.  They aren't running the western world.  They are run by the people who really are running the western world — people whose names we don't know.  The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man's need to see an elected head of state.  They are actors.

Four Ways I Am Preparing For The Dollar's Collapse.  In the era of financial and societal insecurity, I have taken it upon myself to best prepare for the unknown.  Will inflation wipe out my savings?  Will the price of common goods become unaffordable?  Will the effects of Critical Race Theory implode on our shared cultural and societal underpinnings?  These are critical questions with serious repercussions if and when the answers come to fruition via the affirmative.  In the event there is a massive fallout, whether from inflationary pressures or a collapse of civic coexistence among the alleged classes of the oppressed and oppressors, it is better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.  I would prefer I never discharge my firearm, and despite the bland taste, I would much rather dine on soon-to-be-expired cans of beans out of parsimony than out of necessity.  However, if catastrophic changes sweep through the country and those items are vital for either short-term or long-term survival, then it is literally the difference between life or death.

Social Mobility is a Lot Less Mobile Than We Thought.  Inequality is the worst thing in the world.  Even my racist neighbor at the top of the hill with his BLM "Equality Hurts No one" yard sign knows that.  And we have gubmint programs to the tune of 36 percent of GDP per annum working like mad to un-hurt people from the horrors of inequality.  Only, writes Gregory Clark in The Son Also Rises:  Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, all that lovely lucre hasn't made much difference to social inequality.  The scions of the elite pretty much stay in the elite.  Almost everywhere in the world, from way back.

The Coma Before the Storm.  [Scroll down]  Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous "Dr.", wrangles him back into the hapless pack.  You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is "exhaustion."  There's no energy, no drive, no hope.  Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that "nations coming out of the pandemic need to 'build back better' in a 'greener,' 'more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.'"  Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else.  They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.

Once You Realize The US Government Is An Organized Crime Syndicate, Everything Makes Sense.  CDMedia wrote weeks ago that our sources informed us the alleged 'ransomeware' attack on the Colonial Pipeline was not a foreign operation, but likely executed by domestic entities for monetary, or political gain.  Some have entertained the thought of internal strife between U.S. government agencies, essential criminal gangs, reaping the benefits of organized money laundering on a massive scale.  Now we learn the FBI reportedly seized the millions of Bitcoin paid by Colonial pipeline for the alleged ransom.  Was the hack was solved so quickly because there's a power struggle between the FBI and the CIA going on?  In that story, did the CIA hack the pipeline and the FBI decide to punish them?  In Russia this is common.  Different security agencies of the Russian secret services are in regular competition for illicit gains.  The FSB regularly takes over businesses to reap ill-gotten profit.  Corruption is what the Russian system is built upon.  This is what Obama and his minions have brought here.  Think about it, if parts of the U.S. government are in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, looking to rape the American people of trillions of dollars, agriculture, energy, and so on, then the entire Russia!  Russia!  Russia! hoax makes perfect sense.  Blame it all on the rival criminal gang!

Living With the Limits of Our New Clerisy's Knowledge.  [Scroll down]  Unfortunately, the new clergy seem too fallible to take on trust.  They flip-flop on expert advice and one scientist denounces the other on YouTube.  Once things seemed more cut and dried.  Once we were at the End of History.  Science could predict the future more or less and the public hoped with increasing accuracy.  Ever since the 17th century, the expectation was that the scientific revolution would supply the answers. [...] In the coming years, the new clerisy will come forward with even more global solutions, endorsing trillion-dollar multidecade proposals in the fields of climate engineering, genetic alteration, and artificial intelligence.  In each case the public will be asked to trust the science — to put all our eggs in the expert basket.

Why the government cannot answer the UFO question.  The anticipated release of a government report about UFOs (or UAPs) later this month has created a lot of public discussion about what might be included in that report, and perhaps more importantly, what might be excluded.  But in the end, the government does not know, nor can it, what the UAPs really are, or are not, because they are a paradox. [...] That paradox is this:  any nation (or organization) that possesses the technology to do what the UAPs are reported to do would have in its hands such power, such force, such a threat that no one could oppose it.  Yet we see no evidence of any nation wielding such power, an inaction that would be highly implausible were they to have it.  Another paradox is that the development and manufacture of such technology would require enormous scientific infrastructure.

Fighting Woke Capital.  If were trying to define this term and understand what it means, it's rooted in the fact that the biggest businesses, the most powerful institutions, the most powerful banks in this country have aligned themselves against us.  Now that is an obvious fact, you see it in a number of ways.  A couple of years ago Stacey Abrams said, about a Georgia abortion restriction, that this was a bad bill because it was bad for business.  That was the argument of our new corporate, neoliberal class.  And she was right.  This is something that those of us on the right have to accept.  When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children, Stacey Abrams is right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business.

'Woke' Asset Managers Rip You Off — Using Your Money.  If most Americans noticed at all the election of at least two climate-focused dissidents to ExxonMobil's board, they certainly missed the significance.  But they may soon notice as ExxonMobil and other companies knuckle under to climate activists, leading to higher energy prices for American consumers.  Note the little victory dance by three massive asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — in the Wall Street Journal.  Their votes elected dilettante climate activists, who own approximately 0.02% of the oil giant's shares, because "Exxon's yearslong refusal to make board directors available for frank conversations irked investors."  Yeah, right.  Big Finance pulled the rug out from under Big Oil for one simple reason:  To feather its own ample nest, using your money.

Biden's 'Made in America' Tax Plan Destroys Any Incentive for Anything to Be 'Made in America'.  The United States has spent the last decade-plus destroying most of the reasons to create Intellectual Property (IP) in the United States.  This is more than a mite problematic — given we are in the nascent stages of what will increasingly be an Information Economy.  Where more and more of what we do will be digital and thus require more and more IP.  The US has three branches of government.  All three have been actively attacking IP and its creators.

The Great Conservative Migration.  In fact, my wife and I were part of the migration.  We lived for 36 years in American Siberia — otherwise known as Minnesota.  Politics in Minnesota has always been dominated by the Democrats.  However, in recent years it has taken a decidedly radical turn.  When Keith Ellison — former supporter of the Nation of Islam and attorney to cop killers — was elected attorney general, we knew it was time to leave.  This anti-Semite, race baiter, and woman abuser was now the state's top law enforcement official.  What could possibly go wrong?  One year after we left, the George Floyd riots happened.  That's what could go wrong.  We moved to the small town of Star, Idaho.  I call Star the nicest refugee camp in the world.  It's a community of new housing subdivisions, wonderful schools (that don't teach Critical Race Theory), numerous churches, and friendly people.  It has also doubled in population in the last 10 years — almost entirely from west-coast transplants.

The U.S. Military's Love of America:  We need to find a way to get our country back.  Most of our uniformed service members — and most Americans — believe in the fundamental goodness of our great country.  And they want to preserve it.  But fighting for what is right means first understanding the truth about what is happening.  We have the world's most powerful military and it is an all-voluntary force.  We all took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  We believe in the sanctity of that oath.  All of our civilian and military leaders take the same oath.  Today we are confronted with a very serious domestic enemy which, if left unchecked, will threaten our way of life and our ability to remain a beacon of freedom and a leader of the free world.  The threat has been allowed to exist in our educational systems over many years and has gained additional support and momentum with recent left-leaning media which shapes public opinion.

Joe Biden is the last person in America who will criticize China.
Biden must rally the world against an increasingly malevolent China.  "We must pass the history of the Holocaust on to our grandchildren and their grandchildren in order to keep real the promise of 'never again,'" President Joe Biden said in a statement earlier this year marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  "That is how we prevent future genocides."  Today, there is a dark and evil force testing the world's resolve to keep its "never again" promise.  In western China, Xi Jinping's tyranny is showing what a genuinely racist regime does.  Through violence and persecution, he is attempting to eradicate the remnants of a racial minority's culture and religion.  The resemblance to the Nazi genocide extends even to Xi's liberal use of concentration camps, where rape, torture, and indoctrination have been part of daily life for hundreds of thousands of prisoners.  Oh, and then forced labor for the ones who are able to escape.

The Middle East Dispute Is About Religion, Not Land.  If you've seen videos of recent attacks on Jews in New York City, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere, you may have missed a very revealing aspect of those attacks.  They were almost always — as they have been for decades — accompanied by curses such as, "[...] the Jews."  Now, given that the perpetrators are almost always Muslims — whether immigrants or children of immigrants from an Arab or other Muslim country — two questions present themselves:  Why attack American or French or British Jews?  And why curse "the Jews"?  In other words, given that the recent wars have been between Hamas and Israel, why aren't these attacks outside of Israel on Israelis and Israeli institutions?  And why level curses at "the Jews"?  The answer is this:  The Muslims who seek Israel's destruction do so because Israel is Jewish, not because Israel occupies the West Bank or Gaza.

Ridicule is an Important Weapon, Keep Throwing Sand in the Machine.  Ridicule is an important weapon.  The left is overreacting to sunlight because they know the machinations behind their ideological endeavors are based on fraud.  In this brilliant piece of agitprop, the White House situation room looks at the landscape.

The Two Uncle Joes.  [Scroll down]  American military battle readiness, ingenuity, and cunning have been the core of our national defense spanning our entire history, from Steven Decatur and William Tecumseh Sherman to Chester Nimitz and George S. Patton, Jr.  Yet today our own politically driven Uncle Joe, with support from his newly appointed military commissars such as DoD Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, appears far less concerned with training and operational readiness than with mindlessly obsessing over the chimeras of right-wing extremism in the ranks and climate change.  I can assure Secretary Austin that yes, climate change will be a factor if an American city goes up in a mushroom cloud because our commanders were too busy trying to figure out a policy for how trans officers should be addressed or directing servicemen and women to the cause of saving the earth for Gaia.  A million degrees Fahrenheit is most definitely a significant change in climate, Mister Secretary.  You got that right!

Scott Atlas:  The Last Word.  The coronavirus pandemic has been a great tragedy, there can be no doubt about that.  But it has also exposed profound issues in America that now threaten the very principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted.  First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability.  Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific.  This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years:  the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science.  Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States.

Newsmax Reporter:  "Colonial Pipeline "Hacker" Story Doesn't Add Up".  When this "Russsian Hacker" pipeline story first broke, I did a piece on how MANY people online didn't buy it.  They felt like there was a deeper plot afoot.  And now, more folks are saying this — even reporters over at Newsmax.  The reason being is because since this so-called "hack" happened, Biden has now caved to Russia in a big way — as a matter of fact, it's so big, that if Trump ever pulled off a move like this, he'd likely be impeached.  But suddenly, the party of "Russia boogiemen" no longer cares about "Russia boogiemen."

Donald Trump Should Not be the 2024 Republican Candidate.  [Scroll down]  While the manifestly unconstitutional Civil Service Act creates a lot of headaches, there's one thing that can be done immediately.  All "civil servants" who have been employed for longer than, let's say, five years, must be reassigned, preferably to an office at least a thousand miles from their present station.  This "stirring" will lead to a mass exodus of federal employees, most of whom should not be replaced.  This is crucially important in the DC area.  Those people cultivate news and business contacts so they can be enriched when they leave Uncle Sugar's employ.  And, as before, all security clearances must be suspended or revoked upon separation from government service.  Finally, President DeSantis needs to identify which "Republicans" cry loudest.  Their districts, along with those of the most powerful Democrats, should immediately receive "Most Disfavored Nation" status when it comes to government contracts.  This is fully legal and will cut the opposition off at the knees.

Top Retired Officers Are Right:  Biden's Leftism And 'Woke' Military Threaten U.S. Security.  The letter was not couched in military jargon or bureaucratese; it was plain-spoken and blunt in its concern about America's course.  It starts with a call for protecting our free and fair elections, but then turns toward the ominous political and cultural trends of recent years.  No need for a translation:  ["]Aside from the election, the current administration has launched a full-blown assault on our constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing Congress, with more than 50 executive orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous administration's effective policies and regulations.  Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and, most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental rights.  We must support and hold accountable politicians who will act to counter socialism, Marxism, and Progressivism, support our constitutional republic, and insist on fiscally responsible governing while focusing on all Americans, especially the middle class, not special interest or extremist groups which are used to divide us into warring factions.["]

Two Actions [the] US Must Take in [the] Wake of [the] Colonial Pipeline Crisis.  After a group of cybercriminals known as DarkSide succeeded in causing massive disruption in the southeast with its ransomware attack on May 7 — which wasn't resolved until Wednesday evening — it became clear that U.S. infrastructure remains at risk.  The stakes are extremely high.  In our highly interconnected world, cyberattacks against critical infrastructure can leave us highly vulnerable.  As we saw with this DarkSide incident, a ransomware attack can cause immense (but fortunately short-term) economic disruption across a large segment of the country.  But state-based cyberattacks from countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea could lead to loss of property and even life.

This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas.  It is time to put paid once and for all to the evil terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been attacking the heartland of Israel virtually ever since Israel freely gave Gaza to the Palestinians, first to the Palestinian Authority and then to Hamas after they murdered the PA officials in a mini-civil war and took over the territory as a fanatical dictatorship.  Every few years Hamas (and their now-billionaire leadership) seizes on something, some issue on the Temple Mount, a neighborhood where, in their view, too many Jews are moving in, and start a missile barrage, aiming to hit as many innocent civilians as possible and ignite the "Arab street."  The current barrage, thanks largely to Iran, is the biggest ever, with modern weapons that can reach the entire Jewish state with significant payloads.

Biden needs to tell Democrats that Hamas is the bad guy.  "Israel has a right to defend itself," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday [5/13/2021], as America's staunchest Middle East ally faced criticism for its retaliations against rocket attacks by Hamas.  It's an anodyne statement from the Biden administration with two problems.  First, it fails to state clearly that Israel is defending itself against a terrorist instigator.  Second, too many officials in Joe Biden's own party don't actually believe that Hamas is the bad guy here.  Before its recent attack on Israelis, Blinken and Biden seem to have laid out a somewhat reasonable strategy:  Support the more moderate Palestinian Authority and marginalize Hamas.  The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, to be sure.  But it at least does not view its political purpose through the lens of maximal Jewish blood.

Monopoly: An overview of the Great Reset — Follow the Money.  If you've been wondering how the world economy has been hijacked and humanity has been kidnapped by a completely bogus narrative, look no further than this video by Dutch creator, Covid Lie.  What she uncovers is that the stock of the world's largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors.  They all own each other.  This means that "competing" brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren't really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.  This is the case, across all industries.

Clean House in 2025.  When President DeSantis is sworn in at 12:00 pm on January 20, 2025, he should give a short speech and by 12:10 be firing people.  Lots of people.  Okay, it might not be the current Florida governor — we do know it's not going to be Gov. Nikki!  Haley (R - Establishment) or Kristi! Noem (R-NCAA) — but whoever beats Kamala Harris like a drum needs to come into the Oval Office ready to clear-cut the bureaucracy.  Just level it.  Every keen observer understands that Donald Trump's first and foremost failure as president was personnel.  He did not get it right until the end, and then it was far too late.

Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?  Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism.  Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.
  [#1]   There was no escape from ideological indoctrination — anywhere.  A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise or past achievement.  What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.  Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion.  Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.
  [#2]   The Soviets fused their press with the government.  Pravda, or "Truth," was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners.  In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks' coverage of the Trump administration's first 100 days was negative.
  [#3]   The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.  Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments.  The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

The Editor says...
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Federal Reserve turns the dollar into toilet paper.  Toilet paper was much on the mind of Americans Wednesday when Boston Federal Reserve chief Eric Rosengren told MarketWatch that today's higher inflation is as temporary as last year's shortage of paper products.  The toilet paper they were thinking about, though, was the green stuff in their wallets.  Rent asking prices rose an all-time record 17% between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter 2021. Home prices rose 12%, used car prices rose 26% and freight costs rose 17%.  That's the biggest year-on-year jump on record for rent and used cars, and a near-record for homes and freight.  Recent data are even worse; used car prices are up nearly 20% during the first four months of 2021 alone, and gasoline is up 55% during the same period.

It Got Serious In A Hurry.  This exchange of imaginary money supposedly creates wealth effects that have replaced boring old savings, capital investment, and entrepreneurial activity as drivers of the economy.  Asset prices elevate, the government's GDP statistics hum while its inflation statistics slumber, and the rest of the world accepts FDIs for real goods and services.  There's even snake oil peddled by PhDs that blesses all this:  Modern Monetary Theory.  Wealth for all — without boring old work and deferred gratification — is just around the corner.  From the dwindling ranks of the reality-bound come those inevitable objections.  The key word in fiat debt instruments is debt, which carries an obligation to pay it back sometime in the future.  They can't honestly pay back the debt they have now, why are they adding to it?  The key word is honestly.  The plan is to issue so many FDIs that they depreciate the value of existing ones, making them easier to pay back.  None dare call it a swindle.

They Were Promised a Socialist Paradise, and Ended Up in 'Hell'.  On a bright August morning in 1960, after two days of sailing from Japan, hundreds of passengers rushed on deck as someone shouted, "I see the fatherland!"  The ship pulled into Chongjin, a port city in North Korea, where a crowd of people waved paper flowers and sang welcome songs.  But Lee Tae-kyung felt something dreadfully amiss in the "paradise" he had been promised.  "The people gathered were expressionless," Mr. Lee recalled.  "I was only a child of 8, but I knew we were in the wrong place."  Mr. Lee's and his family were among 93,000 people who migrated from Japan to North Korea from 1959 to 1984 under a repatriation program sponsored by both governments and their Red Cross societies.  When they arrived, they saw destitute villages and people living in poverty, but were forced to stay.  Some ended up in prison camps.

Talking the Talk on 'Climate Change'.  What are we to make of an article by William Hague, a former U.K. Foreign Secretary from 2010 to 2014, that predicts Britain's armed forces may one day be sent into action abroad to safeguard the natural environment from such predators as oil companies and loggers? [...] That prediction is startling from several standpoints.  To begin with, it could be read as confirming a frequent left-wing allegation — hitherto hotly denied by the British and other Western governments — that in the two Gulf Wars the West intervened not to prevent Iraqi aggression or to stabilize the Middle East but to get its hands on Arab oil.  I don't think that's true, as a matter of fact, but if it is, it's a big admission and a big news story.  And it was merely the first of several startling predictions.

Our Country Was Founded by Geniuses, but It's Being Run by Idiots.  The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back:  "Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."  I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting.  The principles behind the formation of America's government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as [it can be].  This isn't an extraordinary statement.  Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground.  This phenomenon is apparent anywhere there is power.

Biden Deserves Zero Credit For Booming Economy, COVID Gains.  Take the GDP number.  Far from being in a Great Depression-scale crisis, the economy had been rapidly recovering from the government-mandated (and scientifically unjustified) lockdowns — with GDP leaping 33.4% in the third quarter of last year and another 4.3% in the fourth quarter.  When Biden took office, Q1 of this year was nearly a third over, and he didn't sign his "American Rescue Plan" into law until mid-March, just two weeks before the quarter ended.  So, even though checks started rolling out to people, that rescue plan was too late to have a significant impact on overall growth.  As a matter of fact, the GDPNow forecast for Q1 — which is a running estimate of the economy based on available data as they are released — was much higher before Biden signed his rescue plan than where it ended up.

Power back to the people.  According to conventionofstates.com, which tracks the progress of resolutions, 15 states have approved calling for a convention of the states to reign in what they believe is out-of-control government.  The support of 34 states is needed.  Thirty-eight states are required to ratify any proposed amendments.  The website says seven states have approved a resolution in one of their legislative chambers and 22 state legislatures will consider doing so this year.  The Founders saw state conventions as the ultimate safeguard against government overreach and a necessary workaround should Congress exceed its constitutional authority, which supporters of state conventions believe it has. [...] I have been on the side of the cautious on this issue, but as I see President Biden issuing record numbers of executive orders, bypassing the authority of Congress, and Congress on a spending binge that is driving the debt to record and unsustainable levels, perhaps threatening our very survival, I have come to the conclusion that nothing but a carefully organized and controlled constitutional convention can return power to where the Founders intended it to reside — with the people.  The reason government has become so dysfunctional and unwieldy is that it has for too long exceeded the boundaries originally set for it.

Using Progressive Means to Restore Liberty.  Globalism is the antithesis of nationalism — or should I say, patriotism.  CEOs of major corporations act like oligarchs who can do as they please as long as they have government on their side.  So, they donate hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the party of government and tilt the electoral process toward their friends in high places.  What's more, many of those big corporations have gone woke in an effort to please their Democrat allies.  In the aftermath of the recent intervention by much of corporate America into the controversy about Georgia's election law, many conservatives are awakening to the magnitude of this problem.  Scores of millions of Americans feel helpless in the face of this overwhelming threat posed to our liberty.

If We Lived in a Perfect World... 
  [#1]   CNN would have been pulled from airports and other public places long ago.
  [#2]   There would be no political censorship by Big Tech.
  [#3]   The media would all convey truth instead of agitprop. [...]
  [#7]   Hillary Clinton would be in jail.
  [#8]   Black Americans would realize that the Democrat Party has been abusing and exploiting them continuously since the days of slavery.
  [#9]   The Democrats would admit that "Trump-Russia collusion" was a hoax.
  [#10]   Barack and Michelle Obama would admit that they are racists.
  [#11]   The Lincoln Project would admit that they are not Republicans.
  [#12]   George Soros would be in jail. [...]
  [#14]   Taxpayer funding of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have ended long ago.
  [#15]   Native American reservations would never have been established.
  [#16]   Hollywood would be producing patriotic movies.
  [#17]   The Ten Commandments would never have been pulled from public schools.
  [#18]   Clapper, Comey, and Brennan would be in jail.
  [#19]   Donald Trump would still be in the Oval Office (with no election fraud).
  [#20]   Abortion would still be illegal except for extreme cases. [...]
  [#24]   Barack Obama would produce his original birth certificate.
  [#25]   Lebron James would never again receive another endorsement contract.
  [#26]   Nancy Pelosi would have been voted out of office years ago.
  [#27]   The wall on the southern US border would have been completed decades ago. [...]
  [#30]   All federal forms would be English-only.
  [#31]   The US dollar would be backed by gold, just as it was for most of the country's existence.
  [#32]   All federal funding would be pulled from sanctuary cities and states.
  [#33]   All federal laws would apply equally to members of Congress and the Executive Branch without exception. [...]
  [#37]   All of Obama's records would be unsealed.
  [#38]   Any public school pushing Project 1619, critical race theory, and other cultural Marxist curricula would lose federal and state funding.
  [#39]   Planned Parenthood would never again receive another taxpayer dollar. [...]

Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?  [Scroll down]  What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?  If people of color are treated "as less than human" in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?  What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media's endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?  The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans.  Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America's violent crimes.  Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.

Archbishop Vigano rips Vatican conference with Fauci, says Holy See 'servant of the New World Order'.  Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said an upcoming global health conference at the Vatican — with guests such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deepak Chopra and Chelsea Clinton — constitutes "the umpteenth scandalous confirmation" of Pope Francis leading the Catholic Church astray.  A new op-ed by the Catholic Church's former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. blasts the pope and his allies within the Church for betraying the faithful by cozying up to "representatives of Big Tech ... a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians, and globalists known to the general public."  "The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium," the archbishop wrote Tuesday for LifeSite.  "The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves."

How Much Ruin Do We Have Left?  As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation's well-being hinges on only a few factors.  Its prosperity, freedom, and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability.  A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.  Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system.  Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders.  The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel, and key natural resources ensures a nation's independence and autonomy.  Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt.

How Empires End.  [Scroll down]  Chances are, future leaders will be just as uninterested in learning from history as past leaders.  They will create empires, then destroy them.  Even the most informative histories of empire decline, such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, will not be of interest to the leaders of empires.  They will believe that they are above history and that they, uniquely, will succeed.  If there is any value in learning from the above, it is the understanding that leaders will not be dissuaded from their aspirations.  They will continue to charge ahead, both literally and figuratively, regardless of objections and revolts from the citizenry.

Comedy Is a Dictatorship's First Victim.  Humor has always been one of the first targets of a dictatorship.  It is no surprise that in America, comedians can no longer function because of rampant political correctness.  Thus, according to Mel Brooks, "we have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.  Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks."

Not Dead Yet.  Our nation began with an initial declaration of independence and now every law and executive order from this administration is leading us toward dependence — debtor dependence, energy dependence, and government dependence for the begged permission to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.  The list of grievances and offenses are staggering and too numerous to mention and if one does, they are censored or banned by the government's confederate oligarchs of Big Tech.  It's a depressing situation and the truth of the matter is a sobering one.  The diagnostic is that in the predawn darkness of the morning of November 4, 2020, the American Republic flatlined.  The nefarious and somewhat dubiously defined Deep State does not want it revived.  We've got some work to do.

Every Physical Silver Ounce Has Been Sold Up To 1000x.  The silver price is today half of the January 1980 level.  That was the peak at $50 which silver reached again 31 years later in 2011.  But alas, the bullion banks, aided by the BIS (Bank for International Settlement) and central banks have again managed to push it down again and today silver is only $26.10.  The current silver price has nothing to do with supply and demand.  In a real market the Price of Silver would be substantially higher.  In a fake market, the manipulators have no problem to suppress the price by selling virtually unlimited fake paper silver. [...] If a salesman has a demand for 1,000 items of a product of which he possesses the only one available, he will first rub his hands and then perform a victory dance.  He knows he will achieve an astronomical price.  And that is exactly what would happen in a free silver market.  But since the paper silver issuers know that they are dealing with totally clueless buyers who don't understand that there is no silver, they will continue to stuff the gullible buyers with more fake silver.  That is, until the buyers wake up and ask for delivery to find out that the silver vaults are empty.

Federalism In The Form Of Strong Governors May Be Our Only Hope.  I am not a Constitutional Scholar, but it seems to me that absent the specific granting of authority to the federal government, that the states have legal control.  Here the author is most exercised by the 17th Amendment (direct election of senators), but the trend has been clear since the War of The Rebellion; the accretion of power by the federal government and the creation of a vast regulatory state by exercise of this power.

The Federal Reserve Should Not Finance Insane New Spending.  Since the onset of the pandemic, Congress has been spending more money than ever.  The pandemic hit when it was already projected that in fiscal 2020 the federal budget deficit would once again top $1 trillion.  On October 16, however, USA Facts reported that the 2020 deficit was $3.1 trillion.  That's more than twice as much as the previous record of $1.4T set in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis.  On April 12, the Fiscal Times reported that the deficit for just the first six months of fiscal 2021 was $1.7T:  "In March alone, the deficit came to nearly $660 billion, driven in large part by $339 billion in pandemic-relief payments to individuals."  On top of that, the feds just enacted a $1.9T stimulus bill, and on March 31, Pres. Biden proposed his "infrastructure bill" that will run to $2.3T in new spending, and more new spending is promised.  A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon Americans will be thinking that no one in D.C. cares about the federal deficit anymore, and that the "deficit hawk" is no longer an endangered species but is extinct.

Russia Stuff And Our Corrupt Rulers.  This is all very depressing to see — the utter mendaciousness of our ruling class:  elected representatives of the American people, appointees, the military establishment, the intelligence community, and last but far from least, the media.  The corruption is so sweeping that you're left almost breathless.  And they're utterly feckless, to boot.  Let's start with Gilbert Doctorow [and his article,] Bombast From Washington:  Joe Biden's Russia Sanctions.  Doctorow first explains that nobody who understands the current shape of the world is taking those sanctions seriously.  Putin himself is obviously unfazed.  The DC armchair imperialists have crossed a red line, and Putin has responded — as Doctorow explains in a Postscript to his original article: [...]

Chauvin:  The Case Against the Mob.  One of the main arguments being advanced by Eric Nelson, sole attorney for Derek Chauvin in his trial for the murder of George Floyd, is that the hostile crowd itself prevented the officers from attempting to perform CPR in the last minutes of Floyd's life.  Even the prosecution's "use of force" experts admitted repeatedly on cross-examination that a hostile crowd would justify Chauvin keeping Floyd restrained until an ambulance arrived.  An officer's duty to provide care is overridden by his duty to keep himself, the suspect and the bystanders safe.  As was evident from the videos (and admitted to by the bystander witnesses), they were shouting obscenities at the police, threatening them with bodily harm and, in a few instances, had to be held back from rushing the officers.  And of course, because of the presence of the angry crowd, the EMTs themselves did not stick around to provide care, but did a "load and scoot," heaving Floyd into the back of the ambulance and driving three blocks to get away from the mob on the street.  They didn't even want to work inside an ambulance near this feisty group.  As it becomes increasingly obvious that the belligerent onlookers themselves may have gotten George Floyd killed by creating a dangerous situation for the officers, media commentators leap in to do backup work for the prosecutors by sneering at the idea that the officers might have felt threatened by a few rowdy teenagers.

The Real Reason for Daunte Wright's Death.  Daunte Wright, or at least the life he led, killed Daunte Wright.  He wasn't pulled over because he had air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.  He was pulled over because he had expired tags on his license plate.  Then it was noticed that he had air fresheners hanging from his rear view.  Then it was noticed he had an outstanding warrant.  Then it was noticed he resisted arrest.  Then it was noticed he got back in his car and drove away from the police.  Which he had done before, as it turned out; Wright had fled from officers in June.  The circumstances from which that police encounter arose make for scintillating reading.  He was reported to the police for waving a gun around, and when the cops showed up it turned out Wright didn't have a permit for the gun.  He ran away.  And he was cited and ordered to appear in court.  He didn't, which occasioned the warrant for his arrest.  That's not all that appears on Wright's record.  There was the February arrest for aggravated robbery.  There was a disorderly conduct charge arising from a 2019 incident.  There was the guilty plea in late 2019 to possession and sale of marijuana.  And there was an arrest warrant for armed robbery; [...] In other words, this is someone who chose to be a penny-ante John Dillinger.  He ended up with the full ante.

Why Does Society Revere Drugged Up Black Criminals?  Breonna Taylor.  Dijon Kizzee.  Jacob Blake.  Daniel Prude.  Rayshard Brooks.  George Floyd.  Each name is or has been a rallying cry for both Black Lives Matter and every believer of the manufactured narrative that blacks are oppressed by a white supremacist system and then killed by racist police.  Had any of the aforementioned names been born of European descent and followed the same life trajectory, they would have immediately been discarded into oblivion after their unremarkable demise.  They would be lucky to even have garnered a footnote in the annals of police interactions.  It's not hard to see why.  Drugs, violence, and chaos are not the recipe for emulation.  However, our culture has chosen to make the deceased, black "victims" our focal point of idolatry, grievance, and remembrance.  What other culture has ever sunk to such depths?

Understanding How 'Critical Events' Lead to People Getting Killed by Police.  Most people would consider the death of George Floyd or Daunte Wright to be a critical incident.  They would make that rash assumption because they are "critical" to our political environment.  Many pundits and businesses are piling on because the same faulty assumption is applied to voter integrity laws passed in Georgia and under consideration in other states.  No one should be rash enough to discount the importance of these events.  But the term "critical incident" refers to a completely different concept — one that can inform how we address and prevent such public events.  The process of "critical incident analysis" is a method of examining a series of events to identify where a single critical intervention or altered critical choice would have brought the whole "chain of events" to a different conclusion.  Daunte Wright's death cries out for such an analysis.

How not to get killed when stopped by a cop.  I'd like to take a rational look at the confrontations among cops, motorists, and pedestrians.  When we see incidents of cops shooting blacks (which are the only shootings the media cover), one thing becomes clear:  resisting arrest often ends up with a loss of life.  Something else is obvious:  when a cop is the one losing his life, it's practically overlooked by the media.  When a police officer, whether during a traffic stop or a street stop, is making an arrest, the person being arrested has no right to resist.  If that person believes it's an unlawful arrest, he can make that argument at the station house or in a courtroom.  However, let's be clear about this:  the cop has the legal authority to make the arrest, simply based on the penal law.  Moreover, once the officer has uttered the words "you're under arrest," the only right that person has, under the law, is to submit to said arrest.

Is A Cultural Revolution Brewing In America?  There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what's left of common ground in America.  Though there are many systemic differences between China and the U.S., humans in every nation are all still running Wetware 1.0 and so it is instructive to consider what can be learned from China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1976.  China's Cultural Revolution was remarkably different from the Party's military-political victory of 1949.  Where the political revolution was managed by the centralized hierarchy of the Communist Party (CCP), the Cultural Revolution quickly morphed from a movement launched by Mao into a decentralized mass movement against all elites, including Party and state elites which had been sacrosanct and untouchable.  The Cultural Revolution is not an approved topic in China today, and that alerts us to its importance.  Although ostensibly launched by Mao (as part of his 1966 purge of Party rivals), the Cultural Revolution very quickly devolved into a decentralized, semi-chaotic movement of Red Guards, students and other groups who shared ideas and programs but who acted quite independent of the Party's central leadership.

It's Time to Call the Bluff of These Woke Corporations, Here's How to Make Them Pay.  Yesterday, news broke that somewhere around 100 companies joined a private conference call to discuss how to combat red states that dare have reasonable regulations around voting.  This is, of course, all stemming from the lies surrounding Georgia's recent election reform law. [...] Well, let's give them their wish.  Mitch McConnell should call up Joe Biden and say he's got a deal on raising the corporate tax rate as long as it's only on the Fortune 500.  Leave the small and moderate-sized businesses that are currently being squeezed by these monopolistic behemoths out of it.  Let the woke, virtue-signaling among us see what it's really like to live under unfettered, Democrat rule.

From American Dream to American Nightmare.  Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist. [...] The real questions are why did the American dream turn into an American nightmare and is there a pathway back to the kind of country our forefathers created?  There are numerous reasons why the country has fallen far from its original conception as a proud defiant Republic to its current state as a dying empire of depravity, decay, debt, and decadence.  The conspiratorial creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a Federal income tax in 1913 marked a true destructive turning point for America.  These two choices, implemented by greedy bankers and sleazy politicians, put the country on a road to perdition.  They centralized the power of money printing and confiscation of our wages at the point of a gun.

Guns of April and Global War.  In the thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has squandered much of its time as the world's sole superpower.  Rather than winding down NATO's mission in a post-Soviet world, the West redirected and revitalized the alliance after 9/11 into a global military engagement against "extremism," with the U.S. fortifying its role as the world's policeman.  And rather than using the end of the Cold War to balance budgets and fix America's unstable financial footing, the U.S. aggressively burdened itself with new and unsustainable levels of debt.  In effect, the U.S. rejected the possibility of multipolar peace, assumed the role of global hegemon, and never saved up for a rainy day.

The Left Doesn't Want You to Believe in DeSantis Claus.  Is the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination already over?  "60 Minutes" seems to think so.  They did a dishonest hatchet job on one governor, leaving all the others jealous that the media doesn't think enough of them to try and destroy them before they become Joe Biden's nemesis.  That governor is Ron DeSantis of Florida.  "60 Minutes" didn't attack Greg Abbott of Texas.  They didn't attack Kristi Noem of South Dakota.  They didn't attack Doug Ducey of Arizona, or even Brian Kemp of Georgia. "60 Minutes" admitted which Republican fuels its nightmares by attacking Florida Man Ron DeSantis.  Governor Ron DeSantis is just 42 years old.  He may only be 5-feet-9-inches, but Florida's 46th governor is currently America's wise giant.  He's the most popular and the most successful governor in the land.  DeSantis is the governor who is calling the shots for all the others. [...] The state's media have been trying to hit him just about every day.  They're not targeting him because he's bad.  They're targeting him because he's right and he terrifies them and the Democrats.

The Hard Road.  The current regime in D.C. has some issues, to put it mildly, and its handlers are busy working to shore up its power.  Creating a faux internal enemy with the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, H.R. 1 election rigging, gun control, lawless immigration, Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood initiatives and a rash of executive orders are all part of a plan to give the Left unassailable political dominance and implement permanent one-party control.  The regime is moving fast, aware that traditional America is disorganized.  They realize that this sleeping giant will eventually awake, and they are racing to put in place the cage to contain it before it does.  History doesn't always repeat itself, but you can make it rhyme if you try.  In 2010, the Tea Party grassroots movement halted the Obama Administration's overt agenda to radically transform America.  It wasn't the GOP establishment, the RNC leadership, or the politicians who made the Tea Party the destroyer of utopian fantasies — it was the people.  More specifically, it was the little people — the grassroots.  The working class, the independent-minded conservatives, and the rowdy not-in-my-house Americans took back the House of Representatives and staved off the Democrats' planned transformation of America in a 2010 version of the spectacle we are seeing today.  We need to take the lessons learned from that grassroots Tea Party effort and make them rhyme in the present.

The End of an Era, or the Return to an Earlier One?  [Scroll down]  Now, one of the key factors on everyone's mind with last year's lockdowns, particularly for the kids, is their total isolation with respect to school and after-school activities.  These constraints are bubbles within bubbles that utterly inhibit all exposure to the natural world as well as direct personal interactions.  Part of that is enforced by an ever-increasing sense of danger in the urban environment where crime and degradation are expanding.  Flashing back to mid-20th century and before, kids could be 'feral' without any serious consequences as Mother Nature was steadily upgrading their sense of what being truly alive is all about.  If true, I believe there will be a steady shift to more conservative thinking as the autonomy and liberty of those new locations quietly enhances what was once a common denominator across this vast country.

The Kind of Leaders Needed to Save America.  First and foremost, the movement needs leaders who follow the True North principles of conservatism — principles based on the genius of America's founding and on the many lessons we've learned since; principles that have made this nation exceptional for nearly 250 years.  They include the idea that the federal government was created to protect fundamental freedoms and rights such as life, property ownership, freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, and the right to be treated equally under the law.  They encompass the concept that the government works for the people, not the other way around, and that taxes should raise the minimum revenue necessary to fund only the constitutionally appropriate functions of government.  They also include the notion that the greatest driver of prosperity for all citizens is the free enterprise system.

America Must Go Beyond Wishful Thinking About China.  Ever since President Richard Nixon's infamous 1972 trip to China, the West has deceived itself into believing that being nice to Red China is a win-win proposition.  The policy's underlying reasoning was that opening China up would expose the communist nation to freedom, which would induce its dictators to change and do what is best for the Chinese people.  Alas, how wrong the West has been.  The wishful thinking revolved around several myths about China.  The first myth is that by introducing a free market system into the country, the leadership would gradually adopt a capitalist-like scheme that would be communist in name only.  The West has long asserted that the Chinese have abandoned Marxist ideology and embraced world markets.  However, the Chinese have never stopped insisting that they are genuinely communist.  The more the West claims that China is not communist, the more the Chinese openly say they are.  The recent hardline developments of the Xi dictatorship have dashed the hopes of Western optimists.  Hong Kong and the persecution of the Catholic Church now offer bitter testimony that nothing has changed.

The Fed vs. the Real World.  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has made some interesting statements in recent weeks about the Fed's view of inflation.  In summary, Chairman Powell has stated that overall inflation remains below the Fed's 2% long-term objective, and that while reopening of the economy could produce price increases later in the year, inflationary pressures from rising prices are likely to be neither large nor persistent.  Given the transient nature of these effects, and a long history of deflationary pressures in the U.S. and around the world, Chairman Powell believes that inflation isn't something to worry about.  And in any event, Chairman Powell reassures us that the Fed "has the tools to deal with that [inflation]" should it rise above long-term target levels.  These statements stand in increasingly sharp contrast to the real world in which ordinary Americans live.

How 'It's Covered by Insurance' Wrecks Health Care.  A 58-year-old patient came to see me one Monday morning not long ago.  He was like so many in his age group — he had spent the weekend getting in a week's worth of exercise.  His left knee was sore, and he wanted an MRI.  He was not a professional athlete with a huge stake in his physical well-being, and he had not fallen on it or twisted it; it was simply sore from his three-mile jog on Sunday morning.  "It's covered by insurance," he told me.  Never mind that there was no medical indication to qualify this particular hurt for an MRI.  Never mind, too, that he has a $5,000.00 deductible on that policy.  Never mind, also, that his knee would very likely heal quickly with the simple intervention of rest, ice, and maybe some physical therapy.

Woke Wars:  Say the Magic Word!  Do you think that last week was Peak Woke?  What with Delta's genius CEO Ed Bastian falling into line to criticize Georgia's new election laws, What with MLB pulling the all-star game from Democratic Atlanta, What with Amazon joining in the fun.  And then there is the ticklish question of The Dam Busters movie.  I probably saw the movie, way back.  But did you know that the pilots of 617 Squadron had a black labrador, and its name was... unmentionable?  Tell me:  is the Woke Capital thing due to Big Business getting bullied around by lefty activist groups threatening to make trouble?  Is it CEOs getting a quiet word from Our Nance and Chuck E. Schumer?  Is it the wokey ladies in HR?  Or is it just Big Business trying to stay out of trouble?  The world would really like to know.

Where There Is Chaos.  We have been diligently working on film production efforts in the midst of an industry meltdown.  But that's actually good for a company such as 12 Round Productions.  The days of super blockbusters are not economically feasible in a theater industry decimated by Covid restrictions.  It is a time of scrambling in the film industry to produce and distribute films with Covid restrictions.  Now is the time to get our message out to the masses.  This environment forces productions to seek out low and ultra-low budget films for the streaming services.  The sort of films that can be made for $500,000 to $5,000,000.  The box office for the last week I saw was $28 million across all films for the entire week.  Two of those that were moneymakers were legacy animated films.  The message to be concluded from that, is that people were taking their children to see films now that the theaters are opening to a greater degree.

Who Killed George Floyd?  In the death of George Floyd, the State of Minnesota has charged former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin with second-degree murder and former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao with aiding and abetting that murder.  But, as will be shown in detail below, the physical, scientific, and electronically recorded evidence in the case overwhelmingly and conclusively proves that these defendants are not guilty of the charges and, in fact, played no material role in bringing about Floyd's death.  Instead, the evidence proves that, when he first encountered the police, George Floyd was well on his way to dying from a self-administered drug overdose.  Moreover, far from publicly, brazenly, and against their own self-interest slowly and sadistically killing Floyd in broad daylight before civilian witnesses with video cameras, the evidence proves that the defendants exhibited concern for Floyd's condition and twice called for emergency medical services to render aid to him.  Strange behavior, indeed, for supposedly brutal law officers allegedly intent on causing him harm.

There's No Way to Disprove That George Floyd Died of a Drug Overdose.  George Floyd, a violent criminal who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, and a drug addict, is dead.  That much is clear.  What is also clear is that George Floyd's death was exploited to incite the massive BLM race riots that killed and wounded many people, destroyed lives, wrecked communities, tore apart a nation, and helped the Democrats take power.  The show trial now comes down to a very simple question, a few really, but one of the basic ones is what actually killed George Floyd.

How Stupid are American Voters? Very!  Perhaps stupid is not the right word.  Gullible is not right either.  It's really hard to pinpoint the main reason behind the disastrous state of our country but the cold hard fact is that many Americans have fallen for two of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated by the left, the media and corrupt politicians.  It's too simple to blame the voters of any particular party when the main culprits are the individuals who just can't be bothered with politics.  They don't want to get involved so they don't vote yet they complain when their taxes go up or their civil rights are taken away.  American voters have rarely come out in huge numbers on Election Day.  But last year for the first time in many decades, millions of people whose eyes had been opened to the hoaxes of covid-19 and global warming went to the polls but the damage had already been done.  The left had been planning a coup many years ago because they had control of the mainstream media to spew the politics of fear and envy and of course the stay at home voters allowed the Manchurian candidates to seize the legislatures, city councils and school boards.

Pence "Laying Groundwork" For a 2024 Presidential Bid?  Two media reports [Here and Here] about former VP Mike Pence considering a potential run for President in 2024 present the most laughable political hypothetical in recent memory.  Particularly, and specifically, because even President Trump would likely not include Pence in a short list of people for endorsement.

The Editor says...
Really.  Mike Pence is the least inspirational politician since Spiro Agnew.  Have a nice long retirement, Mr.&Nbsp;Pence.

As We Look For Others.  South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's recent self-disqualification as a potential leader bids us recall that the public will follow only those who actually lead them by personally defying the oligarchy.  Focusing on themselves is the worst thing that they can do.  Noem had seemed to be such a leader. [...] When the test came, she failed it.  A bill passed overwhelmingly by her legislature would have prohibited biological males from competing on girls' and women's teams.  She declared eagerness to sign it.  Then, the usual corporate executives threatened South Dakota business with boycotts, and the Chamber of Commerce transmitted the pressure.  Her claim to have followed the advice of unnamed "legal experts, legal scholars," was standard responsibility-shifting.

The Trump-Hate Coalition Is Crumbling.  It is remarkable to see how quickly the unified opinion against former President Trump and for the alleged necessity of removing him from the White House has cracked apart since that goal was achieved.  Following the inauguration, there were endless purposeful assurances that the former president would be pursued to the ends of the earth for his iniquity.  Even hard-bitten Fox News commentators like Brit Hume felt compelled to toe the line and denounce claims that the election had been rigged as discredited bunkum.  Questioning the integrity of the election result was considered tantamount to an attempt to continue the quest for insurrection, and questioning whether Trump had attempted to generate an insurrection was itself a racist offense.  The president-elect assured us that the January 6 assault on the Capitol was a white supremacist attack bungled by white supremacist Capitol police.  Racism, like treason with Russia four years before, was everywhere.

The Real Five Laws of American Politics.  To summarize:
  •   The next time a Democrat accuses a Republican of a scandal, start an investigation — of the Democrat.
  •   When Republicans say they'll work together if we just give them a chance — start identifying primary challengers.
  •   Never give up God-given liberties in the name of science — which is never really settled.
  •   When the government says, "we're here to help," ask them to help by leaving.
  •   Finally, the next time a politician "invests" your money, recognize that it's state-sponsored robbery — you're not getting anything back.

The Seventh Crisis and the Millennials.  Over the course of recent decades our country has endured an assault on its institutions, its traditions, and its good and decent people.  This relentless assault has driven the country into a grave crisis, causing it to pass through a great gate of history.  This crisis will be momentous, consequential, and we will be profoundly changed by it.  Our nation has experienced similar existential crises before in the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression/World War II.  Each of these crucibles brought about wide-ranging transformations.  As events have accelerated in the past several years, there appears to be little doubt the nation has entered another such crisis.

Women should not deliberately be sent into combat.  I know I will upset many readers with this column, but I speak from experience.  Women should not be combat soldiers on purpose and should not have combat commands, either.  This has suddenly become a pressing matter because Biden just nominated women to those positions.  I used the phrase "on purpose" because we can't always predict where fighting will occur.  Women in the military must, therefore, be trained and equipped to fight as effectively as possible.  However, we must not throw them into harm's way as a matter of course.

The Nature of Chinese Contempt for Us.  Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.  Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides.  Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism — highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa — the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China's racist policies.  Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Cold War Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.  China's defiant provocations are not just verbal.  Nor are they aimed only at our high officials.

Whenever You Disagree with Liberals, You're a Conspiracy Theorist.  The fact is that, unlike Jimmy Carter, Reagan and his advisers, including the formidable Jeane Kirkpatrick, knew who our friends were — and who were our enemies — and he backed this knowledge up with a willingness to use force.  That is the only basis for a foreign policy that will ever work.  Now, with Joe Biden, we have another Carter-style president who doesn't know friend from enemy and who wouldn't act if he had to.  That's just the kind of policy that brings on a confrontation, and one is coming because our enemies, sensing weakness, will press Biden as far as they can.

On China, Biden Is an Empty Suit.  The Biden administration continues to show itself to be an empty suit on foreign policy.  In the wake of the crisis, er, challenges on the southern border, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez called Biden "the migrant president."  After President Biden confirmed in an interview that yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a "killer," Putin wished Biden good health and challenged Biden to a "basically live ... open, direct discussion."  Add China to the list of countries making us a laughingstock.  The opening remarks of last week's meeting between the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan with China's foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi in Alaska clearly reveal that the Biden administration lacks a credible, substantive China policy.  There were several key takeaways from that meeting. [...]

Taming the Chinese Rare-Earth Tiger.  Synonyms for REE include rare-earth metals (REM), rare-earth oxides (REO), and lanthanides.  Unless writing technical papers, distinguishing among the various synonyms isn't worth the effort.  In general, REE are 17 elements that are critical in our high-tech world.  REE are not rare but are typically not found in significant concentrations anywhere in the world.  For example, large ore deposits with concentrations above 6% are virtually unknown outside South Africa's closed Steenkampskraal mine.  Refining REEs presents its own problems, since the refining process often produces significant amounts of toxic and radioactive waste, like thorium and uranium.  The takeaways are (1) feasible mining concentrations of REEs are scarce and (2) refining REEs imposes environmental risks.

Don't investigate this.  The Washington Post reports that "momentum is stalling amid congressional efforts to swiftly investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol."  Good.  The Democrats want to use the riot for political purposes.  They hope, with assistance from the always-obliging media, to present it as the tip of an insurrectionary iceberg spearheaded by hardcore Trump supporters.  To this end, Nancy Pelosi favors a 9/11 style commission.  She would like this small riot, in which only a handful of people died, to live in infamy the way the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in which thousands of American perished, does.  But comparing Jan. 6 and 9/11 is absurd on many levels.  For purposes of determining the need for a a commission, a key difference is this:  It was clear after 9/11 that the U.S. needed to overhaul its approach to combatting the persistent threat of international terrorism.  We even created a new cabinet level department for this purpose.

Hooray! The Government is Handing out Free Money.  If you and your spouse had income of $150,000 or less last year, you are about to receive another windfall from the Federal government.  It will be $5,600, counting the free money for your two kids, your wife and you.  It doesn't matter that you didn't suffer any income loss this past year.  The money is there for you to spend as you please. [...] In addition to the free money, for those that were hurt by being laid off from their job, last May the Federal Government added up to $600 per week on top of the state unemployment compensation.  That meant about two thirds of the unemployed Americans were bringing in more money not working than if they were working. [...] You may wonder where the government is getting all this money?  It comes from two places:  either they borrow it directly from the public with no intention of ever repaying it, or they simply print the money. [...] For more logical and rational citizens something doesn't seem quite right.

America can only count on freedom.  Watching the childish glee of turn around orders being signed for the sole purpose of reversing successful economic policies is not lost on a now economically educated populace.  They see through the foolish names of these vengeful immature policies.  Unity be damned in the name of toxic revenge.  No mother would let her 5-year-old get away with this slow-motion tantrum we are seeing on the evening news.  The information explosion that has driven the world economy to new heights has also filled the air with debris that has clouded our understanding of what brought us to this level of prosperity. [...] Government is damaging our economy as it doles out trillions in the name of help.  It is not helping anyone except those having their votes bought with government redistribution of the taxes we pay out of our earnings.  We must be reminded that calling this abuse by other names does not change its deadening economic effect.  We are not helped by spending tax dollars and labeling them economic help when in truth they are doing economic harm.  We saw this for eight years of slow growth using this same shell game.  We then saw it reversed for four years when we stopped doing it.  These numbers cannot be denied, but they are by our new political masters and their media peanut gallery.

Prepping for a Two Week Power Outage.  If you're new to preparedness, you may be reading some of the excellent and informative websites out there and feeling quite quite overwhelmed.  While many sites recommend a one year supply of food, manual tools, and a bug out lodge in the forest, it's vital to realize that is a long-term goal, not a starting point.  A great starting point for someone who is just getting started on a preparedness journey is prepping specifically for a two-week power outage.  If you can comfortably survive for two weeks without electricity, you will be in a far better position than most of the people in North America.

Our National Destruction Is a Failure of Boundaries.  Why do the feds usurp authority from the states, and why do the states demand of the feds, and why do people trespass on someone's right to speak?  Why does the Executive Branch make law when the Congress is constitutionally assigned that responsibility?  Why are so many boundaries being invaded, and why is trespassing no longer a crime?  The answer is obvious.  We no longer respect boundaries.  We have become that tribal human animal before religion awoke us to the necessity of morality.  The whole concept of existentialism rides on the concept of organized and lawful conduct.  Some say "social contract."  Pick your terminology; say it how you like.  The ends are the same.  This society is fracturing at an alarming rate.  Nothing can turn the tide until boundaries are once again recognized and respected.  There is no moral code without them.

Time to End the Clock-Changing Madness.  The dreaded time has come for Americans to lose one hour of sleep as we "spring forward" to daylight saving time (DST) and move forward our clocks.  This adds another nuisance, as it is already difficult for Americans to sleep enough with the constant stress of COVID-19, economic woes, and societal unrest throughout the country.  One easy way to improve our sleep is to end this ridiculous ritual, which creates needless headaches and causes the unnecessary aggravation of changing our clocks twice a year.  It may have been a good idea when it was implemented in 1918; however, over one century later, it has lost its usefulness.  In November, it will be time to "fall back" an hour to standard time.  All this clock-changing leads to increased accidents, a higher incidence of heart attacks, a loss of productivity, and pointless confusion for the American people.

Is daylight savings time a health hazard?  Daylight savings time is upon us.  Sunday, March 14 is when we are to turn the clock ahead in order to 'save the daylight.'  No need to go into the genesis of this.  It suffices to say that what may have been useful way back when has dubious value today.  To most people, this fiddling around with the clocks is an inconvenience and an annoyance and leads to a degree of confusion for a day or so.  But did you know that a credible case can be made that it is also a health hazard?  So says Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and director of its Center of Human Sleep Science.

Stop Standard Time Madness:  We Should Be Saving Daylight All Year Long.  It's almost our favorite day of the year:  the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, when we can fast-forward our clocks, stop the winter darkness that descends by mid-afternoon, and crawl out of our stuffy homes after dinner into the evening light.  Amid Biden's "dark winter" of COVID hell, the act of "springing forward" out of Standard Time is especially welcomed this year.  That's why a glorious piece of legislation popping up in the Senate is a bright spot this week — not only because it's bipartisan, but also because it would literally grant daylight to weary Americans.  The Sunshine Protection Act would make Daylight Savings Time permanent across the country, putting to bed the absurd practice we continue year after year of switching our clocks around — or not, and accidentally sleeping through church.

The Current Balance Sheet of American Democracy.  [Scroll down]  Now, 85 percent of Americans do not believe their media on political subjects, over 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the performance of the Congress, and approximately 50 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.  Many of the more vocal spokespeople for the current narrow majority in government purport to believe that President Trump's and his supporters' allegations of the questionable integrity of last presidential election constitute part of an attempt to overthrow the government unlawfully; that this attempt exploded in the invasion and vandalization of the Capitol on January 6, and that it continues.  The fact that there are some worrisome irregularities in the voting and counting of votes in a number of the swing states is simply denied.  The fact that the Supreme Court in declining to hear a case from the attorney general of Texas and supported by 16 other states that the swing states in question failed to discharge their constitutional duty to assure a fair presidential election, abdicated the coequal status of the judiciary with the legislative and executive branches of government, is ignored.  National political media uniformly refer to questions of the integrity of the last presidential election as discredited and debunked.  At least 95 percent of the national political media and 100 percent of the social media platforms are opposed to the Republicans, who control most of the states and have half of the Senators and are only a few votes short of half of the Members of the House of Representatives.

Kristi Noem for President?  Not So Fast.  Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem made headlines in 2020 for keeping her state open during the COVID-19 outbreak and opposing Faucian dictates about masks, stay-at-home orders, and church closures.  To this, conservatives applauded — and rightly so.  But does holding the line during a pandemic in a state with less than 900 thousand people — about the size of Charlotte, North Carolina — now warrant the frenetic swell of support for Noem among conservatives to be the next vice president or even president?  Absolutely not — especially at time when the fight for constitutional conservative values is more important than ever.

I Haven't Used Amazon For Almost 3 Months And I Don't Miss It One Bit.  My husband and I have been Amazon users for about 15 years.  In college, I used it to buy and sell books, rolling the cost of last semester's books I didn't plan to keep into the next semester's set.  We became Prime members in July 2017 and delighted in two- and even one-day shipping of everything from diapers to canned goods to dry erase markers to work boots, eliminating the annoyance of running to the store over one or two items. [...] It seemed fun, easy, and exciting.  And then it wasn't fun, easy, and exciting any more, because Amazon became evil — and I learned how evil they had really been all along.  Using it to indulge my own greed and materialism was one problem.  Amazon's use of its market power is another.  Both are a big deal.

Leftists Start a Pillow Fight with Mike Lindell.  Is there an American who doesn't know Lindell?  A college dropout and serial entrepreneur, he became addicted to crack cocaine.  He lost his home and was divorced.  He credits his sobriety to his Christian faith.  He's passionate about it, as anyone should be after escaping the talons of the devil.  There but for the grace of God goes any of us.  He invented his revolutionary pillow in 2004.  My pillow is a MyPillow.  It costs a lot, but [it does] exactly what it claims.  The typical box-store pillow is shot after a year at most.  MyPillow soldiers on.  Lindell's son is running the company now, though Dad's familiar face still sells the products on TV.  His new ambition is politics. [...] With his highly visible support of the Orange Man, the benevolent bedding-peddler with the cross around his neck quickly earned a place on the Public Enemies List of the mainstream media and the radical left.

The U.S. Economy Is Rigged.  The economy's "rigging" has developed gradually over time and often from the best of intentions.  When politicians, corporate executives, pundits, journalists, academics and activists alike propose ways to make society more just or efficient or globally competitive, they invariably call for some kind of government-corporate cooperation.  Such calls always seem to offer an answer for the public good, but in practice these arrangements inevitably drift into a self-serving collusion among those charged to cooperate.  Economic and financial history over the past few decades offers ample evidence of this building trend.

Is Mulberry Street racist?  You decide.  People of my generation learned to read with Dr. Seuss.  Sure, there were some child-like hijinks in the doctor's prescriptions but to many toddlers the rhyme and rhythm were music to the ears, tonic to the souls and tutors to the unschooled.  Mostly, they were exactly what Dr. Seuss intended them to be — entertaining, mischievous children's literature.  Dr. Seuss succeeded for nearly a century.  In that time, millions of children learned to read and Dr. Seuss was awarded numerous prizes.  President Barack Obama lauded him in 2016:  "March 2 is also the birthday of one of America's revered wordsmiths.  Theodor Seuss Geisel — or Dr. Seuss — used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear."  Dr. Seuss is the Left's latest victim.  They cancelled him.  eBay has banned many of his books including "And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street."  (While continuing to sell Mein Kampf).  The company that survives him, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, grovels that, "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

What We Know And Don't Know About The Events Of January 6th.  It takes three days after any event to find out what happened, and 30 days to find out what really happened.  The dust storm of information and misinformation takes a while to settle in the perpetually-online United States.  The truth lodges in fewer places now.  Emigres from the 1970's Soviet Union advised us that the only real information in Pravda lay between the lines.  So it is with the bulk of U.S. media, which doesn't even try to hide its role as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party anymore.  After 60 days, what do we, and don't we, know about the events of January 6th?  What we don't know concerns me.  When information that ought to be public isn't, there's a reason.  It's seldom good.

Mike Pence Discovers the Need for Election Integrity, Jumps into MAGA Ship Before it leaves DeceptiCon Dock.  In an article written by Mike Pence and published today [3/3/2021], the former Vice-President has suddenly found a need to focus on election integrity.  After the timeframe has passed for his actions to bear any significant sunlight upon the 2020 election, Pence now expresses some concerns.

Amazon's Banned Book:  The Full List.  Hate is a one-way street at Amazon, and the class of people protected from it are the self-Chosen.  Hatred toward goyim is not grounds for a ban, obviously.  None of the volumes on the list below are hateful.  They may be right; they may be wrong.  But your right to read them should not be obstructed by the world's largest online book distributor.  These revisionist books are attempts at offering scientific, technical and historical skepticism toward the Holy Writ that is supposed to be the secular history of World War II; that Writ however, is far more sacred than Jesus Christ.  His resurrection can be denied; Bezos is fine with that.  The homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz cannot be denied.

Coke Goes Woke and Broke.  "Get woke, go broke", is a conservative meme about the cost of political correctness that has it the wrong way around.  Brands don't go broke because they get woke, they go woke because they're going broke, and don't know how to stop the slow but steady collapse of their business.  The big brands that go woke infuriate conservatives because, like Coke, Gillette, or Nike, they have a storied name that seems entwined with America and the success of capitalism.  But it's those old, familiar brands that go woke because their products and business models are dated.  Virtue signaling is their way of adapting to a changing market without really innovating.  Behind every big woke brand is a company slowly going broke and with no clue what to do about it.  The wokeness vocabulary joins the thesaurus of corporate buzzwords used by executives trying to hide from their investors that they don't know what they're doing.  Making headlines for their wokeness changes the conversation from their business model to their politics.

The Federal Reserve Is Taking Us into Uncharted and Deadly Waters.  At the Federal Reserve semi-annual testimony before Congress this week, Chair Jerome Powell should have been asked whether the Fed has become the national Reddit.  The Reddit stock frenzy created a pool of motivated buyers, irrespective of the value of the underlying company.  For more complicated reasons, the federal government is the biggest Redditer of all, Reddit on crack cocaine.  Instead of billions, the government plays in the trillions.  Instead of a handful of small cap stocks, it has hijacked the entire stock market.  But the mechanism is the same.  Flood the market with funds, and for good measure force interest rates to zero, eliminating alternative investments.  The recent congressional Reddit hearings are parody in comparison to the government's role in driving market prices, in particular the Fed.

Is the U.S. Arming an Adversary, China, Intent on Overpowering Us?  China's greatest financial weakness remains its continued dependence on Western capital markets, crucial for a growing economy that, if official statistics are to be believed, is trying to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic's toll.  To grow, China depends on massive inflows of capital that surge through the capital markets based in the U.S. The Trump administration made several moves during its term to delist Chinese companies that are not forthcoming about who really owns them and what businesses they are really engaged in.  In addition, since 2013, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SEOs) have enjoyed exemptions from Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory requirements that also force greater transparency from these companies.  They were the only ones granted these exemptions while still being listed on New York stock markets.  What if those exemptions were removed?

A short primer on the importance of our Second Amendment rights.  There is no greater killer in the world than the government. [...] In 1915 alone, the Turks slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians.  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets murdered around 7 million Ukrainian farmers who resisted socialism, as well as killing another 7 to 20 million people in its various purges.  In the 1960s and 1970s, with its Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, China is estimated to have killed 23 to 50 million people.  Over 12 years, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, 250,000 gypsies, 220,000 homosexuals, and up to 10 million Slavic people.  Those deaths were just a small part of a world war that is estimated to have led to the deaths of somewhere between 70 million and 85 million people.  In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot killed 1.2 to 2.2 million people out of a population of 8 million.  In America, that would have been equivalent to our government killing 66 to 85 million people.

After Action Review:  Texas Winter Storm 2021.  You've now seen our grid under stress.  Cold snaps in 2011, 2018 and the worst cold on record in 2021, along with the boil water order of 2018, provide real world examples of what the local grid will do when it's stressed.  You are now on notice of the grid's limitations.  What if the next emergency isn't in the cold, but in the 105 degree heat of a Texas summer?  And what if the power is off for a week or more?  What if the failure is caused by a cyber attack which not only shuts off the power but causes physical damage to the grid?

Trump Versus Big Tech.  Remember IBM?  Sure, you do.  Are you aware that they lost $95 billion in valuation in the last decade?  Scale does not matter when the ground changes under you.  Actually, scale becomes its own burden, keeping you from adapting to the agile, flexible new entrants who eat your lunch.  IBM missed the PC or failed at it; it also missed the phone, the tablet, the cloud, and it is sure to miss the edge, a new technology being deployed right now.  Just look at that $95 billion haircut.  IBM is not done.  This will continue unless it finds a way to get out of supporting and selling the obsolete current tech stack.  Let's not pick on IBM.  Add Hewlett Packard, Dell, and scores of other formerly high-flyers that are in life-sustain mode rather than hair fluttering growth.  There is no technology behind Twitter or Facebook.  They were simply there first, built the audience, went public, and continued building the audience.

The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast.  [Thread reader]  ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on).  In my experience some of the smartest people I've ever met work there.  Wish I could name some of them because they're absolutely brilliant.  Transmission and Distribution is regulated.  They get a guaranteed rate of return ~10% for every dollar of capital they spend to keep the system reliable.  So they always want to build new projects.  Distribution is where most outages are because 1) there's so much of it and 2) they're smaller lines and substations.  So trees, squirrels, and snakes can cause an outage.  Transmission is 69kV and up.  Generators in Texas and any market since FERC order 888 are independent power producers.  Every plant is its own company.  So a single gas plant is looking at its own profit and loss statement and has its own financiers.  This means that upgrades are paid by the specific owner.

Our Descent Into Collective Madness.  It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing.  But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon.  Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy.  Cabin-feverish Americans are poised to get out of their homes to travel, eat out and socialize as never before.  Meanwhile, the United States will have to start paying down nearly $30 trillion in debt.  But we seem more fixated on raising rather than reducing that astronomical obligation.

What Role Are Big Government Federal Regulations Playing In Texas Freezing In The Dark?  Defenders of green energy and fossil fuels are pointing fingers at each other for the failures that led to dangerous blackouts in Texas — but could both sides be missing the bigger picture?  How big a role did regulations sent from the desk of some faraway bureaucrat play in this catastrophic failure?  Much has already been written about the failure of wind turbines to deliver an adequate load — and whether they should have been winterized.  About failures of natural gas delivery, and even sensors in the nuclear power stations.  Not much has been said about the role federal pollution standards have played on Texas failing to get ahead of the problem by ramping up supply.  Yes, Federal pollution standards.

Rush Limbaugh:  A Tribute to a Master of Words.  Rush Limbaugh, a longtime friend of The Heritage Foundation, was the great popularizer of conservative ideas.  He revolutionized talk radio in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan deregulated AM radio, with his unique blend of shrewd analysis and often biting humor.  No progressive idea was safe when Rush took it on.  For more than 30 years, he was No. 1 in the ratings — with 15 to 20 million listeners per week.  No one could talk or think faster than he — for three hours every afternoon five days a week.  He spent hours reading and studying for his program — no one was better prepared than he.  He loved to mock the hypocrisies of the left, like the moralizing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, the "Hero of Chappaquiddick," who savaged Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert Bork on the Senate floor, where he couldn't be sued for libel.  Rush was a deeply rooted conservative whose favorite magazine growing up was National Review. [...] Rush appealed to conservatives of all kinds.  When The Heritage Foundation published Bill Bennett's monograph "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," Rush made it a bestseller with one broadcast — 73,000 people contacted Heritage for a copy.

The post-Limbaugh era will be awesome.  President Reagan created Rush Limbaugh.  To be sure, Limbaugh did have talent on loan from God, but he did not have a national audience.  By repealing the Fairness Doctrine, which silenced conservatives, Reagan made Limbaugh's success possible.  And Limbaugh availed himself of that opportunity.  His show created a network of radio stations, mainly in the ghetto of AM radio.  He made money and saved many a radio station.  Before Reagan's action, the conservative side nationally was limited to William F. Buckley's Firing Line and Paul Harvey's daily radio commentary.  Limbaugh's commercial success gave the opportunity to other conservative radio hosts to be aired nationally because station owners saw that conservative radio made money.  Mark Steyn, Sean Hannity, and other radio hosts will carry on the work Limbaugh began.

Limbaugh's finest hour.  My memories of Limbaugh as a broadcaster are limited to his speech to CPAC on February 28, 2009.  His performance was so outstanding that Saturday afternoon that it defined him and the two generations his national radio show spanned.  By the way, he saved AM radio by giving hundreds of stations on that dying medium a 12 pm to 3 pm (Eastern) tentpole whose ads covered the station's expenses.  He closed that CPAC convention in the miserable days of the nascent Obama regime.  Conservatives were devastated by the failure of McCain to keep the Reagan dream alive.  Into this depression, Limbaugh waltzed.  His stirring, extemporaneous speech was his finest hour.  Being Limbaugh, it lasted 90 minutes.  C-Span archived the video.  Real Clear Politics posted a transcript.  Memory recalls how uplifting Limbaugh was that day.  He turned despair into hope.

The 20 Greatest Quotes From Rush Limbaugh.  Rush Limbaugh was one of the greatest figures of the last half-century and he could personally take credit for millions of people becoming conservative.  He was a legend, an icon and he will be missed.  In honor of a great man, here are Rush's 20 greatest quotes. [...] [For example,] [#7] "End results that work that don't involve government threaten liberals."  [#8] "No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity."

The Indispensable Man.  Usually, in this line of work, if you're lucky, you get a moment — a year or two when you're the in-thing — and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement.  Rush [Limbaugh] did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio.  Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920:  The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today — for a third of the entire history of the medium.  And throughout all those decades Rush and his show stayed exactly the same: a forensic breakdown of the day's news, punctuated by musical parodies, satirical sketches, and Rush's own optimism and good humor, even through this last terrible year.

Sen. Manchin holds key to Biden's progressive agenda.  U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin's position as a moderate Democrat in the red state of West Virginia has propped him up to be a powerful man in Washington these days.  Even though Manchin has signaled support with Republicans on several issues, the Biden administration is wooing him in order to push progressive ticket items in its economic stimulus package.  Yet, West Virginians are holding out hope that the senator stands firm on opposing items that could be detrimental to some of the state's most important industries and small businesses.

West Virginia's Joe Manchin will keep Senate's 'Byrd rule' flying.  In a Zoom interview from his district office in Charleston, West Virginia, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Mountain State Democrat, said his deference to the decision of the Senate parliamentarian is no different than his position on the filibuster.  "The Byrd rule and the filibuster are one in the same," the former governor said of the sometimes complicated rule that restricts nonbudgetary provisions from being included in reconciliation legislation in the Senate.  In short, the Byrd rule makes certain no extraneous provisions are snuck into a bill.  The Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is the nonpartisan official whose position is to interpret which policies comply with the Byrd rule.  The rule was named for West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, whom Manchin replaced in a special election when the longest-serving senator in history died at the age of 92 in 2010.  "The Byrd rule makes sure that legislation stays within its guardrails or its lanes, which is basically budget-related," Manchin said in a 44-minute interview with the Washington Examiner.

Who Is In Charge, Anyway?  Finally, the most important question to be raised concerning the Capitol riots on January 6 received a hearing in the New York Times:  "What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked."  The three-quarter page exposé canvassed meticulously all that President Trump was doing, save the single most important thing.  The essay by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin relates details of conversations with officeholders and White House officials, with a timeline of decisions and nondecisions, all to demonstrate that Trump sat on his hands while the riot unfolded.  It failed, however, to ask the obvious follow-up questions the answers to which reveal the likelier truth.  Where was Trump's national security team, and what counsel did they provide?  The gravity of this obvious lacuna should instantly appear to anyone who considers this was a national security event of the greatest significance, equivalent to the firing upon Fort Sumter or the raid on Harpers Ferry more than 150 years ago or the bombing of Pearl Harbor 80 years ago.  That it was a national security event is apparent from the immediate and since daily repeated descriptions of the riot as an attempted "insurrection" or "coup."  It is also apparent what protocols prevail in such an event:  a national security team exists precisely to appraise and respond to such threats.

Given How Flawed Human Nature Is, America Has Been Remarkable Moral Achievement.  Those who acknowledge how flawed human nature is compare America to reality.  Those who do not, compare America to some utopian image:  a country free of inequality, prejudices, intolerance, sexual misbehavior, greed, etc.  This divide helps explain why those who hold a biblical worldview — usually religious Jews and Christians — are more likely to appreciate America than those who do not.  It is fundamental to Judaism and Christianity that "the will of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21).  I offer a partial list of bad traits inherent to human nature.  When perusing it, one can only marvel at how good a country America became.

How Your Government Really Works.  Some of the harshest critics of government corruption are thoroughly corrupt — and everyone in the upper reaches of government is complicit due to their silence.  I spent over 40 years in government service.  I don't consider myself an expert on the subject but after 40 years you cannot avoid acquiring a more than basic knowledge of a subject.  One of the lessons I learned is that knowledge is power.  There are people in government who keep their ears to the ground in order to gain as much knowledge as possible.  I was not one of them, but I could not avoid learning who was sleeping with whom and other supposedly private matters.

Gina Carano Was Fired by Disney Because Her Popularity Extended the Reach of Conservatism.  Between 10 and 15 million voters in this country decide the outcome of Presidential elections and the partisan makeup of the Congress.  These are the voters who "swing" from one party to the other during election cycles.  Capturing the majority of these voters is the path to winning control of the government. [...] The Presidential election now is won through prevailing by narrow margins in several closely contested states, while each side has significant majorities among the remaining states.  Issues and messages that swing voters in the middle in one direction, and then back in the other direction, are where the keys to victory are found. [...] Hollywood and popular culture have always been a "one-way street" for liberal political views to be force-fed to the broader population, including swing voters.  This goes back to World War II — and before — when there really were Communists in prominent positions in Hollywood working to popularize communist ideology through film and later TV.

Bad week for Democrats of all stripes.  Shouldn't the Democrats be in the catbird seat?  After all, they've "won" the election, including the House, the Senate and the White House.  Apparently, the country was just itching to become another California.  And the courts, the big state, Hollywood, and the press are all on their side.  But somehow, even with President Trump silenced, impeached, and out of power, things aren't going so good for Democrats.  Impeachment is failing.  The verdict will likely come today.  Their aim was "political vengeance" as Trump's attorney said Friday, and the bid fell flat.  Their spin, and lies, and low-grade informercial for themselves in this Senate impeachment trial persuaded no one.  And their bigger aim, which was keeping President Trump from running for office, same as third-world dictators do to their opponents, backfired. [...] It gets worse.  Now two of their fairest-haired boys, their pride and joy, the governors billed as the future of their party, are both going down like the Titanic.

The Icons of the Left Collapse.  You would have to look far and wide to find a person more celebrated by progressives and most of the national media in 2020 than Andrew Cuomo.  You would have to look far and wide to find a political group more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than the Lincoln Project.  And you would have to look far and wide to find a place more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than California.  And in the last 24 hours, all three fell from their high pedestals and landed with a hard "thud."

Firing Actors for Being Conservative Is Another Hollywood Blacklist.  If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism.  While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists.  Dalton Trumbo — a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston — followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era.  When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.  Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.  "This is the beginning of the American concentration camp," he warned.  (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Carano's, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)

The China model has come to America.  Far too few Americans grasp the implications of such a view taking root among their own elite.  Though more and more Americans are awakening to the challenges inherent in China's growing economic, technological, and military capabilities, few understand the threat that China's governing philosophy and structures pose to the US.  As David Goldman has explained, though the CPC is nominally Communist, China is what it has been for millennia:  an empire run by oligarchic mandarins.  The appeal to an American elite that sees itself as a worthy meritocracy enamored of governance by bureaucratic experts is obvious.  Americans need to understand that beyond mere appeal and envy, there is a growing convergence of interests between China's entrenched communist oligarchs and America's emerging progressive oligarchs.  Today's China, like all imperial powers, seeks to exploit the resources of anyone and anything outside its central oligarchy to enhance the prosperity, prestige, and power of that center.

China's War With the World.  Americans get to elect their presidents.  Not so in China.  We may have moved from the 45th commander in chief to the 46th, and the attendant changes already are legion, given the dozens of executive orders issued by President Joe Biden.  But our relationship with China, and the man who recently made himself leader for life, hasn't.  Chinese President Xi Jinping is now the functional emperor of the world's largest dictatorship, one we must understand is at war with any nation that has a representative government, or which refuses to kneel before it.  Just ask the residents of Hong Kong.  As such, we should understand the threat that Xi's communist regime comprises.  As the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu teaches us:  "Know thy enemy."  Well, here are the essentials all Americans should know. [...]

Stop Calling It an 'Insurrection'.  What happened on Capitol Hill was a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops while a few hundred other dudes took selfies in the Rotunda.  We were in the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, the first combat arms unit on the street during the LA Riot, a riot brought to you by Maxine Waters and other idiots, by the way.  There was burning and looting and dozens we can say with absolute certainty were murdered by the LA rioters, unlike at the Capitol.  It lasted for days.  You wouldn't know it from Rep. Stolen Cower, who seems to claim she suffered PTSD from being at the far end of the same ZIP code as the bruhaha, but what happened on January 6 was no "insurrection," and Republicans need to stop playing along with the Establishment talking point that it was.

If You Think You Can Just be Silent and Obedient and They Will Leave You Alone, You Best Think Again.  The world is laughing at us Americans.  Here we are, armed to the teeth, larger than any army in the world, and we have allowed our country to be stolen from us.  We have allowed the Communist to just do as they please.  And all we do is sit and stew in silence.  People keep asking, "What can we do?  Is there a plan?"  I don't know the answer to those questions.  I would have never imagined that we would have allowed things to get as bad as they are.  It seems as though the real enemy of liberty is the average American.  Our complacency and attitude of just wanting to be left alone has gotten us into this situation we find ourselves in.

What Jeff Bezos Hath Wrought.  If I had to guess who inspired Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, to kick himself upstairs and appoint Andy Jassy, a deputy, as his successor as chief executive, I might wager that at least part of the blame can be laid on Lucy McBath, the freshman Georgia congresswoman, and her understated grilling of one of the world's richest men at a July hearing held by the House antitrust subcommittee.  At the hearing, widely regarded as a watershed moment for America's tech giants, most of the subcommittee members — and all the Democrats — had coalesced around a consensus:  The business models of the four biggest tech companies depend on cementing and exploiting their statuses as gatekeepers to the internet, and scheming to bring down anyone who threatens their power to exact ever higher tolls on every minute we spend on the internet.  Only Mr. Bezos, however, had explicitly set out to become a ubiquitous "middleman" of all internet commerce.

The United States Should Follow North Dakota and Florida in Dealing with Unconstitutional Executive Orders and Social Media Censorship.  Florida and North Dakota take the lead in dealing with Joe Biden's unconstitutional executive orders and Big Tech's anti-free speech censorship.  The rest of the states who cherish our Constitution should follow.  The Biden administration, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma, the DOJ, the FBI and the courts joined forces to steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.  Now they continue their illegal and unconstitutional actions with unconstitutional executive orders and continued censorship of Americans on social media.  Florida and North Dakota have come up with excellent ideas in how to deal with these unconstitutional orders and Big Tech censorship.

Will a Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?  The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.  The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring '20s were followed by the bleak, dour and impoverished years of the Great Depression.  The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, as "carefree hippies" turned into careerist "yuppies."  So social, cultural, economic and political extremism prompt reactions — and sometimes counterreactions.  The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state.  Trump and his "Make America Great Again" agenda were its pushback.  The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset — or Trump himself — is as of yet unsure.

How Socialism Wiped Out Venezuela's Spectacular Oil Wealth.  Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves and yet the country has run out of gasoline.  The socialist government has lost the capacity to extract oil from the ground or refine it into a usable form.  The industry's gradual deterioration was 18 years in the making, tracing back to then-President Hugo Chávez's 2003 decision to fire the oil industry's most experienced engineers in an act of petty political retribution.  The near-total collapse in the nation's oil output in the ensuing years is a stark reminder that the most valuable commodity isn't a natural resource, but the human expertise to put it to productive use.  "At this moment Venezuela is living through its worst nightmare," said Luis Pedro España, a professor of sociology at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, who has studied the nation's economic collapse.  "We are witnessing the end of Venezuela as a petro-state."  Gasoline shortages have crippled the economy, made travel within the country prohibitively expensive, and it has increased prices at grocery stores.  Shortages and price restrictions have given rise to a vibrant black market.

The 'Tells' of the Deep State Poker Players.  I've never been much of a poker player, but I understand that expert players can read the "tell" on their opponents' faces. [...] Why would President Biden shovel out a boatload of executive orders in the first week of his presidency advancing climate change and fighting systemic racism?  Why would the Deep State sic the FBI on candidate and then President Trump, and then let Kevin Clinesmith, the guy that falsified a document, off with a tap on the wrist?  Why would the rulers nod and wink through a summer of riots that caused death and destruction in many American cities, and then build fences and call out the National Guard to protect them against a few "far-right" LARPers?  And if that isn't enough, mount an impeachment against a president who has already left office?  Oh, and by the way, How come it was Vice President Pence that ordered up the National Guard to Washington D.C.?  Why not Trump, the commander-in-chief?  Inquiring minds would like to know.  What is going on here?  These "tells" show that the ruling class, for all its power and its domination and hegemony, is terrified by the barbarians at the gates.

Are We In The Winter of America?  Will There Be A Spring?  Civilizations do not last forever.  They go through cycles.  Even in Classical Greek times, historians such as Polybius had noticed this.  As German philosopher Oswald Spengler more recently put it, civilizations experience a Spring; a Summer, marked by youthful vigour and exploration, an Autumn, in which they achieve great things but also start to decay, and a Winter.  Fascinatingly, the turning point — when you know that the civilization is definitely past its best — is when the legislature is invaded by a mob.  This shows that democracy, and the trust and high intelligence that have been shown to be central to it, have broken down.  The good news (sort of):  it's not necessarily the end.

When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance.  In 2008, "dissent" went from being the "highest form of patriotism", a quote by Communist revisionist historian Howard Zinn that Democrats falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, to treason when George W. Bush made way for Barack H. Obama.  The old bumper stickers about the patriotic value of dissent were swiftly replaced with others touting the value of change.  In 2020, resistance just as quickly turned into sedition once the political tables were turned.  In one month, questioning a presidential election went from a commonplace proposition to a shocking attack on our democracy.  And we all know that if President Trump had been inaugurated for a second term, there would be no censorship or censure of the Democrat politicians and pundits claiming that he was only reelected because of Russia or UFOs.  Nor would we be hearing any talk of "sedition" and "insurrection" as if they were bad things.

The Non-Incitement & The Instigators.  In this posting I'll be providing links to video of the event I attended along with a link to the full text of Trump's speech.  It is long, not that exciting, and very much lacking in any "incitement".  Toward the end, many folks were leaving early due to the cold and the lack of anything really exciting.  I'd guess about 10% were sneaking out.  We'd been there from the very start.  About 3 hours before first speaker.  All told, we stood in a cold wind for about 8 hours straight.  At the end, pretty much NOBODY had anything on their mind other than finding a bathroom, getting out of the cold, and finding a place to sit with back support.

The River of Forgetfulness.  Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives.  They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration.  We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not.  Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump's supporters deserved blame for the violence.  That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of "deprogramming," "de-Baathification," "re-educating," and "reprogramming" half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on — the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later.

The Editor says...
On January 6, there was a Trump rally in Washington, DC.  Way down the street, there was a riotous break-in at the U.S. Capitol.  The half-million people (more or less) at the Trump rally had nothing to do with the break-in, but now all Trump supporters are getting the blame, thanks to the pernicious news media.  From where I'm sitting, it appears there were no "riotous rogue Trump supporters."

Eviction moratorium is sure to backfire.  On her first day in her role as the new CDC director, Rochelle Walensky announced that the Biden administration would extend Trump's moratorium on evictions through the end of March and perhaps beyond.  To justify this decision, Walensky said, "[Coronavirus] has also triggered a housing affordability crisis that disproportionately affects some communities."  But the real housing crisis is looming just around the corner.  It will come not in spite of this moratorium but because of it.  Eviction bans are decimating small landlords and causing an even larger bubble that will inevitably pop.  Roughly half of rental units in the United States are owned by "mom-and-pop" landlords.  These small landlords typically own only a handful of units, if they even own more than one.  While wealthy real estate firms are getting heaping sums from stimulus packages such as the CARES Act, mom-and-pop landlords get almost nothing.  On top of this, they are now being deprived of one of their main sources of income.

About That Guy Who Can't Access His Bitcoins.  [Scroll down]  Bitcoins are also scarce.  Not just because the underlying protocol is programmed to eventually stop making new ones, but because the ones that are already out there can be lost or stolen.  Bitcoin is the first scarce digital asset in history.  That's really important.  Lack of digital scarcity has ruined the internet.  Just ask any musician whose music streams online.  Since Bitcoins are scarce, and you can't just call Satoshi Inc. to get a replacement if you lose access to yours, then owning them is risky — as it should be.  You can hire someone to help you protect your coins or access them through an intermediary like PayPal, but it's important that someone along the ownership chain is taking the risk of loss or theft.  Without that risk there'd be no value. [...] Bitcoins can be lost or stolen, and that loss hurts, because the coins can't be replaced.  So Bitcoins are scarce, like diamonds, physical cash and vinyl records.  That means Bitcoins are valuable.

The Ominous Meaning of the Keystone Diktat.  We are continuously told by our betters that high voter turnout is to be celebrated because it is a measure of the civic engagement of our citizens.  I hold the opposite view:  high turnout is an indicator of serious civic breakdown.  High turnout in other struggling democracies is usually a sign of things going very wrong.  The point is:  you get high turnouts when people believe everything is at stake in the results of the election.  Middling voter turnout in American elections is a sign of the relative health of our political order, because it means that much of the population doesn't think everything important is up for grabs in the result.  Elections are supposed to determine who rules, and we take turns in ruling and being ruled.  Our presidents are supposed to run the government, not every aspect of our lives.  I've long thought it overwrought to hear people on both sides of the spectrum say, as has become typical over the last couple decades, that the current presidential election is "the most important election of our lifetime."  If every election is now a life-or-death matter for the republic, then the republic is already lost.

What Happened to 'the Storm'?  Despite the hype and expectations for "a storm," Jan. 20 marked another relatively peaceful transition of power, from one presidential administration to the next. [...] Federal prosecutors quietly closed the General Flynn leak investigation, finding no wrongdoing.  This sounds familiar, just like the 2020 presidential election, where former Attorney General Bill Barr found nothing amiss.  This was echoed by state and federal legislators as well as a slew of courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.  The kraken remained as elusive as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and JFK Jr, the latter rumored to magically appear as Trump's running mate before the November election.  There were white hats and black hats, although in reality most wore one of the fifty shades of gray, some days looking like good guys, other days like bad guys.  Who really knows?  None have been indicted and none are heading to prison.

Actually, Bojo, There Is EVERYTHING Wrong with Being Woke.  Woke means statues being torn down by historically illiterate mobs; the race-baiting divisiveness of Black Lives Matter and the physical aggression of Antifa; the dumbing down of universities and the indoctrination of college kids with anti-intellectual drivel like 'decolonising the curriculum'; men who have designated themselves female being put in prison with women — and then raping them; turning a blind eye to organised Muslim rape gangs for fear of being racist or Islamophobic.  Almost everything wrong with the world today can be laid at the door of the 'woke' ideology — which is essentially just an updated version of Marxism.  That's why Margaret Thatcher would never have argued — even when caught on the hop by a difficult questioner — that there was 'nothing wrong' with being woke.

After the Fall.  [Scroll down]  As it stands, roughly half the country thinks the election was rigged and that future elections are going to be rigged.  It is pretty much impossible to sell the whole democracy thing when half the voters do not trust the voting process.  Lost in all the excitement is the fact that Congress has an approval rating of just 15%.  The fact that the "people's house" now sits behind layers of razor wire and is patrolled by the army does not help their image, either.  One way the ruling class could rebuild their reputation is to find a way to turn down the temperature in public discourse.  The best way to do that is the old bread-and-circuses approach, mastered by the Romans.  Get people out having fun instead of engaged in politics and things will calm down a notch or two.  Of course, that means people must be able to go outside, and they must have the wherewithal to go have fun.  That is going to mean winding back the Covid panic.

What's Next?  Great Awakening or Great Reset?  While most of the country happily checks their social media feeds and watches TikTok videos, an epic battle is playing out in the nation's capital, one that future historians, if they are allowed to discuss it, will describe as the turning point of western civilization.  On the one hand, we have been promised a great awakening, showing the people the crimes and corruption of the ruling class, as described by Trump before he was elected in 2016 in a little known but epic speech.  Those claiming to be in the know or able to read the stitches on the fast ball, promised "The Storm" and "The Kraken".  Yet so far, it's only a light breeze.  On the other hand, Washington, DC is locked down tighter than post 9/11, with checkpoints in and out of the city, almost like under martial law, all for a mostly virtual Biden inauguration.  That doesn't make sense.  Crimes against humanity were to be revealed and the guilty would not be able to walk down the street.  Except they can and are.

Suppose They Gave an Inauguration and Nobody Came?  The increasingly fascistic American left is setting a trap for the rest of their fellow citizens — often termed "deplorables," but more appropriately dubbed "normals" by Kurt Schlichter — by warning that we intend violence all over the country during Joe Biden's inauguration.  This is nonsense, of course, but any kind of demonstration can be declared violent by a complaisant media or, more ominously, manipulated in that direction by provocateurs, with the slightest incident magnified beyond recognition.  Part of their intent is clearly to undermine the Second Amendment — actually to disarm us.  Another part is to justify yet more censorship and "canceling," furthering their assault on the No. 1 principle that makes America America:  freedom of speech.  Do not fall for it.  There is a much better way to protest the inauguration.  Don't show up!

Autonomous County Project.  The Constitution was written for an overwhelmingly rural people, not considering that at some point the number of people in the cities would outnumber those in the whole rest of the state. [...] The thing to think about in the Autonomous County project is that there are 3,142 counties in the United States of which Joe Biden won either 477 or 504 depending on your source.  We are quickly becoming a republic that functions as a democracy in that the dense population centers in a few counties control everything about state and national politics.  The people in these cities do not have the same concerns as the wider population, but because they have many of the same concerns with others in the dense population centers, they control all legislation.  But, that leaves residents of some 2600 plus counties without a voice, never having their concerns addressed at either the state or national level and many state and national laws override county ordinances.  But, it doesn't have to be that way, because until they actually burn and eradicate the Constitution, it still says what it says and even though a bloated Supreme Court might rule against it in every decision, it still says what it says.  If they choose to do away with it all together, then they can no longer claim its authority and that is the crucial part of the moment.  The minute they disavow the Constitution, they become a body of individuals with no rights and no protections.  Oddly, this is exactly what happened when the Constitution was written to replace the Articles of Confederation and why it was largely done in secret.  So, don't think they won't try something similar.

What Now?  And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands.  State legislatures, ditto.  Even the justices he'd named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn't have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.  Trump's supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted.  When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump's back.  Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building.  And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage — at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons — caused minor damage.  Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched.  The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking.

The "Crisis" is Corporate Liberal Authoritarianism.  The mob that barged into the Capitol Building on Wednesday accomplished a few things. [...] It was clear within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the deliberately-stoked over-reaction.  The bipartisan political and media class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast conviction that this was something like a "MAGA Terrorist Insurrection" — which is literally how it's being described on CNN.  Under such allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is going to be demanded.  Few entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably than the tech companies.  Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern history.  Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise purged.  Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube.  Trump and his supporters are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of bonafide "threat" to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate for revenge.

Know Justice, Know Peace.  Violence against the U.S. Capital is a crime so heinous that a sitting U.S. President, in 2001, commuted the sentences of two people convicted for it.

An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies.  The best show on television right now features a major city, the capital of an unsteady government, that is gradually being pulled apart by two competing political parties.  The center can't hold; it's being steadily overwhelmed by a pair of rival Socialist groups who don't hesitate to take their conflicts into the streets as they sweep away their country's past and head into a glorious future.  Meanwhile, the citizens of this increasingly fractured metropolis take refuge in a variety of vices, including transvestitism, casual sex of all permutations, part-time prostitution, blackmail, drug addiction, financial speculation and, when necessary, murder — and these are just the cops trying their best to hold the Republic together.  Meanwhile, outside the elegant halls of authority, armed gangs roam the streets, setting upon each other with abandon in the ultimate game of thrones.  Washington, D.C., in 2021?  No, Berlin in the late 1920s.  "Babylon Berlin," now in its third season on Netflix, isn't only brilliant storytelling for grownups, but a cautionary tale for our times.

I try to avoid posting conspiracy theories, but this one caught my attention.  Because it comes from Lt. General Thomas McInerney:  Following the storming of the Capitol building on Wednesday by what appears to be mostly Antifa members, apparently, there were also some others mingled in with them that General Thomas McInerney claims were Special Forces who seized several laptops from offices of politicians who are engaged in treason against the United States.  [Video clip]

General Thomas McInerney:  Special Forces Grabbed Traitors' Laptops.  [F]ollowing the storming of the Capitol building on Wednesday by what appears to be Antifa members, apparently, there were also some others mingled in with them that General Thomas McInerney claims were special forces who seized several laptops from offices of politicians who are engaged in treason against the United States.  [Video clip]

Gen. McInerny Says Special Ops Got Pelosi's Laptop:  "This is high treason!"  I've been telling you the next 10 days will be unlike anything you have ever witnessed in America.  And now it's not just me telling you.  How about a three star general?  General McInerny just released several videos where he breaks down everything that happened at the Capitol.  And it's NOT what you think!  There were several Special Operations being ran all at the same time.  The guys with heavy military gear that you've heard about?  Those were the white hats.  They went in and seized multiple pieces of evidence, including Nancy Pelosi's laptop.  [Video clip]

Political Amnesia:  Look at All the Democrats Who Boycotted Trump's Inauguration.  Donald Trump announced he will not attend Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, becoming the fourth American president to choose not to witness his successor taking office.  Joe Biden calls it "a good thing" and said the president was "an embarrassment," which is pretty rich coming from The Big Guy.  It's also rich when you look back at the reaction by Democrats to President Trump four short years ago. [...] Four years ago, Joe Biden didn't call those ditching the inauguration "an embarrassment."  Hardly.  The Democrats boycotting were feted in the media for standing up for their belief that Trump was not really the legitimate president.  Maxine Waters was made Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year for promising that "by the time I'm done with him he'll wish he had been impeached."  A nationwide effort to "boycott Trump" began.

It's not over yet.  [Scroll down]  So, what comes next? I don't have the particulars but I can give you milestones to watch for as the coming days unfold:
  [#1]   Expect the emergency broadcast system to be activated.  The FCC just recently released a memorandum speaking to the requirements under Federal law to send messages from the president to the public.
  [#2]   Expect confusion.  We are in a battle for our republic against elites that are attempting the very coup that they are accusing Trump of doing.  In battle, there will be disinformation but know that plans are being fulfilled.
  [#3]   Expect high profile arrests to take place over the next 12 days and at any time.  You may wake one morning to find someone in high office is no longer there.
  [#4]   Expect this to be a bumpy ride to the very end.  This is not a television show where things are resolved in 45 minutes.
  [#5]   Expect more bombshell evidence to be released between now and Jan. 20th.
  [#6]   Expect some sort of internet blackout or outage:  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail are likely going to be affected.  If you don't have alternate forms of communication established now, it would be a good idea to start forming them even if it's just checking on your nextdoor neighbors.
  [#7]   Expect Trump to be inaugurated on Jan 20th!
  [#8]   Expect the executive order from 2018 and/or the Insurrection Act to be enacted.  This DOES NOT mean martial law.  Remember that we have been under a state of emergency since 2018 which gives the president many powers to act.

The Editor says...
The article above means one of two things:  Either there is about to be a tremendous upheaval in this country and a lot of chickens will come home to roost unexpectedly, or there are some prolific and talented fiction writers at work, making baseless yet plausible predictions about the events of the next few weeks.  I would like to see President Trump spring his trap at long last, if indeed it exists.  Maybe there is some basis for all the predictions after all.  Nancy Pelosi, in particular, seems to think the President is holding three aces, judging by the way she's acting:  She's frantically pushing for a last-minute impeachment, and/or removal of the President via the 25th Amendment.  If she thought she was in no danger, she would just keep quiet and let the clock run out.

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted "Coup".  At no point yesterday was the American government at risk of being "overthrown," as members of Congress have laughably suggested.  Per usual, our guardians of consensus can't bring themselves to describe what unfolded with any degree of dispassion or calm.  Instead we're told by the incoming Senate Majority Leader, for example, that January 6, 2021 will now "live in infamy" right alongside December 7, 1941.  Elected officials issued emotional notices that they were "okay," like they had just narrowly avoided being crushed in an earthquake, or escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11.  This is made all the more odd because the only person upon whom lethal force was committed appears to have been a Trump-supporting woman who was shot point-blank in the throat by a Capitol Hill police officer.  She's now dead.  Congress was temporarily inconvenienced.  Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they'd abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds.  "Domestic terrorism," "insurrection," and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of "making sure something like this never happens again."  Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail.

The Left Finds Time for One More Big Lie Against Trump.  Donald Trump believes he was robbed.  So do many of his followers.  Indeed, not only the vast majority of Republican voters in America — some 70 percent or more of his 75 million voters, comprising more than 50 million Americans at least — but also between 10 percent and 30 percent of Democrats believe the election was stolen; either figure is remarkably high.  So Trump urged his supporters to come to Washington in the frigid cold of a January Washington winter to demonstrate their support for him and for his insistence.  And they came out.  It was a demonstration — to demonstrate widespread massive support for his insistence that the election was stolen.  There was no Madonna intimating blowing up the White House.  As can happen, and sometimes does — witness the Left's anti-Kavanaugh demonstrations that included confronting and badgering Senators in the Halls of Congress and attempting to bang down the Supreme Court's front doors — the January 6 rally got out of hand and became a riot.  Some of the more-intense people, after a year of watching Antifa and Black Lives Matter gatherings devolve into riots, decided on their own that their turn had come to storm the building that was the object of their scorn and anger.  An important lesson is learned once again: what goes around comes around.  When the Left condones unacceptable behavior from its corner, it often will find that one day it will rue that decision when copied by its adversaries.

The breach of the Capitol was an obvious set-up.  What happened at the Capitol building on Wednesday [1/6/2021] obviously was a stratagem to destroy the President's popularity and support and overshadow the challenges to the Electoral College vote, to my eyes.  The building was breached at the beginning of that process and, of course, riveted the media news feeds.  Members of Congress were evacuated with hoods over their heads as if they were in grave danger.  As a group of protesters approached the building, a policeman removed the barricade and appeared to invite them in.  That group entered the rotunda peacefully and stayed behind the rope line.  Those who observed this noted that there were several instigators embedded among the crowd.  They were using bullhorns to agitate and move people.  A couple of them set off flash bangs.  We now know that several known Antifa activists were among the agitators.  As they broke windows, Trump supporters tried to stop them.  But the distraction worked, frightened the pathetically spineless Republicans who were set to challenge the stolen election.  They quickly capitulated and Biden was certified.  The Republicans, even the ones we thought had grit, got rolled.

A Time for Choosing:  A Test for Our Souls.  The political crisis the United States is now facing brings into the open a contest for the soul of our country.  As important as this recent election is, the stakes transcend particular political arrangements — they go to fundamental issues, about which each of us must make a choice and take a stand.  A peculiarity of our current situation is this:  While every American is intricately familiar with the pandemic and the effect it has had on our lives, this is not the case for voter fraud, despite the evidence being overwhelming.  Some Americans are ignorant of these facts because they have been misinformed by a media that willfully withholds information.  The reason for this might surprise you.  There has been a force quietly at work in our country, in plain sight, that has gradually taken over ideological control of most of our institutions, businesses, and media, and even our culture.  This force is Marxism and communism.  For those who have been following this story, there is no surprise here.  For those who have never heard of this, it may sound far-fetched and unbelievable.

A Capitol Offense.  [Scroll down]  "We're going walk down to the Capitol," Trump said, "and we're going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women.  We're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you'll never take back our country with weakness.  You have to show strength, and you have to be strong."  What happened next should cause heads to roll among those responsible for securing the Capitol and its grounds.  How on earth, in a city that sees protests every day, could there not have been sufficient security there?  After all, it wasn't as if the event hadn't been planned for weeks.  As Power Line's John Hinderaker writes, "It is outrageous that security was so lax that rioters were allowed to occupy the Senate chamber, sending senators and Vice President Pence, as I understand it, fleeing.  Armed guards should never allow such a thing to happen — that is why they are armed.  The entire country has been embarrassed today, not just Republicans."  As Fox News's Chad Pergram noted, it was the first time that the Capitol building had been breached in such a way since the British, fresh off their victory at the Battle of Bladensburg, did so in 1814.

The tech monopolies have sprung into action.  On Wednesday [1/6/2021], more than half a million peaceful people showed up in D.C. to support President Trump.  A minute percentage of that group ended up in the Capitol and the police killed an unarmed Air Force veteran.  (Defund the Police has been silent about this killing.)  Debate will rage about whether Trump supporters were set up.  For the purposes of this post, the only thing that matters is that it was the justification the tech monopolies needed to start a purge.  The tech companies contend that Trump instigated violence and his supporters can no longer be trusted.  And no, it doesn't matter that for much of 2020, Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioted, burned, looted, and threatened, beat, and murdered people.  Not only did they stay on social media, but they were also lionized on social media and mainstream media for their thrilling, empowering exploits.  Trump did not instigate violence.  The tech tyrants have systematically deleted Trump's words and the search engines will not help you find them, but you can, with difficulty, discover what he said on January 6:  ["]We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.  I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.["]

Left's Hypocrisy On Full Display After D.C. 'Insurrection'.  The angry election fraud protest that led to the temporary takeover of the U.S. Capitol Wednesday perfectly illuminates the hypocrisy of the Democratic far left when it comes to political violence.  Republican officials and rank-and-file GOP conservatives immediately and forcefully condemned the pro-Trump rioters.  Nothing unusual about that:  During this riot-torn year, Republicans have consistently, loudly and frequently denounced violence, no matter who did it.  What about the Democrats and their extreme-left supporters?  Tragically, for them, violence is always acceptable when it's in service to their cause.  That's especially true since the riots and mass protests began in late May following the death of George Floyd.  But, as usual, congressional Democrats, the legacy press and social media giants have misreported, distorted and twisted facts to suit their own leftist agenda and inflame public opinion.  Republicans, however, have taken a mature and responsible path.

Capitol Breach 'Stole From The Hundreds Of Thousands' Of Peaceful Protesters Concerned About Election Integrity.  The Federalist Senior Editors Mollie Hemingway and Christopher Bedford, who were on the ground in Washington D.C. on Wednesday during the Capitol breach, told Fox News's Laura Ingraham on Wednesday that, while the destruction of the Capitol was sad and wrong, it also showcased the hypocrisy of the left and in corporate media.  "Over the last year, political violence has been completely condoned.  This has been allowed," Bedford said.  "Groups that attacked police officers and [perpetrated] riots and burned buildings have their own park named after them right in front of the White House.  There was a chorus from media critics and politicians saying that this is justified, that it is in the service of good," he continued.  Both Hemingway and Bedford also noted that while the rallies for President Donald Trump were "massive," many people were simply there to protest, not prepared to riot.

Kamala Harris Called Riots 'a Movement' Last Summer, Said 'They Should Not' Stop.  Violence is never the answer to resolving conflict, but it's hard not to see the hypocrisy of the left when they act surprised or condemn what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday [1/6/2021].  In June 2020, in the aftermath of the nationwide rioting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Kamala Harris even gleefully predicted that the rioting wouldn't end, telling Stephen Colbert, host of "The Late Show," that they shouldn't end.  "They're not going to stop.  They're not going to stop," she told him.  "This is a movement, I'm telling you.  They're not gonna stop.  And everyone beware because they're not gonna stop.  They're not gonna stop before Election Day and they're not going to stop after Election Day.  And everyone should take note of that.  They're not gonna let up and they should not."
[Emphasis in original.]

Congress Is the Real Threat, Not Protests.  Somewhat lost in the chaos of the DC protests was the fact that Democrats won both Georgia Senate runoff races.  That effectively gives the Democrats control of both houses of Congress.  In his podcast, Peter Schiff made the case that Congress is the real threat to America, not the protesters who broke into the Capitol building.  Peter said he thinks that Trump's threat to veto the spending bill unless Congress upped the stimulus checks to $2,000 was a key reason the Democrats won. [...] The bottom line is now the Democrats are going to be able to get a lot of things done that they wouldn't have been able to do had the Senate stayed in Republican hands.  You can almost certainly count on tax increases on corporations and "the rich," and more regulations.  As Peter put it, "Democrats will keep their promises when it comes to making government bigger and more expensive."  None of this is good for the market.

Dan Scavino Relays a Message From President Donald Trump.  Almost everyone around the MAGA community has clear-eyes on the strategies deployed against our assembly.  We are, quite simply, not naive to years of institutional manipulation and gaslighting. [...] President Trump is a non-politician and a risk to the GOP wing of the UniParty congress.  The republican establishment never supported President Trump; he was always adverse to their UniParty interests.  The GOPe needed a cover position now to hide and justify their baseline contempt.  The scripted and coordinated events of the last 24 hours gave them that justification.  However, despite their insufferable attempts to justify their current attacks we are never going back to that time when we did not see the strings on the political marionettes.  President Trump has created a movement and collected the largest factual constituency of voters in the nation.  The indefatigable leader of the MAGA movement gathered 74 million votes for his re-election.  That is the monster vote.

Welcome to a Wilderness of Lies.  [Scroll down]  he structures and institutions of American society have all been in place with little real change for nearing a century.  Nothing lasts forever though, particularly when they are run by grifty idiots.  The disruption caused by the tech revolution has helped speed up inevitable processes of change — you know, the creative destruction we hear about in unwoke economics courses.  The institutions we relied on — our churches, the NFL, the political parties — are now focused entirely upon preventing that inevitable change.  The lackluster losers who inherited their sinecures in these institutions (not literally but by being adopted into the establishment by going to the right schools) want to maintain a status quo that is great for them and poison for the rest of us.

This Is a Coup.  Why Were Experts So Reluctant to See It Coming?  Wednesday morning [1/6/2021], like most mornings, I woke up to the usual round of politics news sites and newsletters:  Politico Playbook, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.  Most of the day's news concerned Tuesday's runoff elections in Georgia, which apparently delivered control of the Senate to Democrats; other articles concerned the ongoing pandemic and the future of commuting in the post-pandemic world.  One article caught my eye:  a Washington Post article by David Nakamura about whether the protests and petitions against the counting of Electoral College votes added up to a coup attempt.  The piece quoted several liberal commentators and historians as saying that it obviously was, but the thesis was that what we were seeing as of Tuesday did "not yet meet the formal academic definition of an attempted coup."

Are Sen. Josh Hawley, Republicans really a threat to democracy for questioning election?  [Scroll down]  Moreover, the last time some Democrats in Congress didn't officially contest a Republican presidential victory was way back in 1988.  That would be three Republican presidential wins in a row now that have been objected to in Congress (George W. Bush's two wins, and Trump's).  We've somehow managed to make it this far without having our democracy toppled.  And is 2016 such a distant memory?  Where was the left's angst about destroying democracy when there was open talk in their ranks and in the media hoping that electors would switch their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton — despite no legitimate concerns about voter fraud?  In contrast to the hyperventilating going on today about Republicans not voting to certify some states' electoral results, USA Today ran an objective and dispassionate look at calls to deny Trump his 2016 win.  It's not so academic a question now, for some reason.

Explaining the Twelfth Amendment for Those in the Media Who Seem to Be Reading Impaired.  The Twelfth Amendment was adopted in June 1804 — ahead of the Presidential election of 1804 — and replaced the provision regarding the function of the Electoral College that was set forth in Art. II, Sec. 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution as originally drafted.  The purpose of the Amendment was to address the extraordinarily close outcomes of the Presidential election in 1796 and 1800.  The process set forth in the Constitution had resulted in the election of a President and Vice President from different political parties in 1796 — which turned out to be problematic since the one-party was pro-British and the other was pro-French in the armed hostilities between the two countries at the time.  In 1800, a tie in the Electoral College vote led to 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before it finally elected Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr — both from the Democrat-Republican Party.  Both had received the same number of Electoral Votes since under the original system each elector cast 2 votes without distinguishing between a vote for President and a vote for Vice President.

A Time For Choosing:  A Test For Our Souls.  There has been a force quietly at work in our country, in plain sight, that has gradually taken over ideological control of most of our institutions, businesses, media, and even our culture.  This force is Marxism and communism.  For those who have been following this story, there is no surprise here.  For those who have never heard of this, it sounds far-fetched and unbelievable.  This decades-long communist subversion of our nation came to a head in the 2020 election.  While before our major political parties didn't differ that much on a fundamental level, gradually one of the parties was subverted by communist groups.  During past elections, both parties would wave the American flag and sing the national anthem, but now one side genuinely believes America is a fundamentally flawed nation.  Over the summer, Marxist groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), which was founded by self-proclaimed Marxists who have hijacked genuine concerns over racism for political purposes, and the far-left Antifa group, were behind riots and violence.  These groups have direct ties to communist groups connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Some Hard Truths We Face as Patriotic Americans as We Near January 6th:  Americans have absorbed the truth that the institutions long depended upon for redress are compromised.  For years we had always suspected this, but in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election this has been confirmed with much dismay and sadness. [...] Here are 25 hard truths Americans can no longer rationalize away:
  [#1]    A presidential election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump in the most brazen and in your face way possible.
  [#2]    The government elites in all three branches, and in both parties, appear to be in on or complicit in the steal either by omission or commission.
  [#3]    The strings of our government are being pulled by China and other global interests that have no qualms about tearing down our time-honored values of freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
  [#4]    The Supreme Court, except for Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito has allowed partisanship, virtue signaling and cowardice to influence the merits of the cases they have deigned to accept or reject.
  [#5]    There is no Democrat and Republican Party, only a UniParty.  Both parties are merely two sides of the same coin, dedicated to selling out the country to China for power and enrichment.
  [#6]    News is not what the corporate media delivers, only leftist/globalist propaganda that rarely speaks ill of China or George Soros.
  [#7]    China has invaded America without firing a shot, first by exploiting the moral weaknesses of people in the upper echelons of the political, educational, corporate, and entertainment world and second by using the Wuhan Virus as a bioweapon to psychologically place America under siege without an overt military effort.
  [#8]    If Joe Biden is sworn in as president, he will make a mockery of American ideals of honesty, integrity, and fair play.
  [#9]    The police in blue cities have lost the trust of patriotic Americans due to their willingness to blindly follow orders of mayors and governors even if those diktats infringed upon the constitutional rights of the citizenry. [...]
  [#12]   America is becoming a nation of free states and communist satellite states.
  [#13]   The Democrat party has thrown out the constitutional rule of law in favor of socialism/communism.
  [#14]   Unless liberty is vigorously taught and fought for, it will devolve into tyranny. [...]
  [#17]   Our public schools are not dedicated to teaching our children, but to indoctrinating them to leftist ideas.
  [#18]   The Wuhan Virus lockdown demonstrated the eagerness of far too many Americans to surrender liberty for safety.
  [#19]   The Republican elites destroyed the Tea Party and wish to do the same to Trump supporters.  They are doing so by willfully ignoring election fraud evidence and declaring Joe Biden as the president-elect by saying "the electoral college has spoken." [...]

The timing is perfect to decentralize DC.  Much has been written about the pandemic-driven favorable aspects, promise, and implications of virtual working compared to traditional in-person interfaces. [...] Much less has been written about virtual management's implications for decentralizing the federal government and putting the decision-makers physically among the decision-affected — real instead of virtual reality.  How about considering the following departmental tectonic shifts:  Interior to Wyoming, Utah, or Colorado; Agriculture to Iowa, Nebraska, or South Dakota; and Commerce to Florida or Louisiana?  Regulators of the environment could literally step out their back doors and visit a forest, see a farm, soybean, cornfield, or cow; or visit a vibrant multicultural economy on the hemisphere's doorsteps.  Relocating individuals could cash in on D.C.'s inflated housing prices and boost their quality of life with bigger homes and maybe even a back 40, or at least a backyard.

The Etiology of Executive Order 13848.  The fate of Western Civilization, some three thousand years in the making, now hangs by a slender thread.  That thread is Executive Order 13848.  So what is in that Executive Order? [...] It relies heavily on the Attorney General.  The hapless Jeff Sessions was in that role when Executive Order 13848 was signed.  He was replaced on 14th February, 2019, by Bill Barr.  Barr seemed reliable but achieved nothing.  The reason he slow-walked everything, couldn't see corruption in the Hunter Biden laptop etc. became apparent when he recently referred to President Trump as a "deposed king ranting."  Barr outed himself as a Deep State operative too soon, and leaves his position on 23rd December and so won't be involved in drafting the remedies report in response to the report by the Director of National Intelligence.  The fate of Western Civilization hangs on such small matters.

On January 6, we learn whether our Constitution will hold and whether congressional Republicans care.  The 2020 presidential election was, in several targeted battleground states, an unconstitutional electoral exercise.  Even putting aside evidence of significant fraud, virtually none of which received a hearing by our courts, events leading up to and including the November national election constituted a radical and grave departure from the federal electoral system adopted by the framers of the Constitution and the state ratification conventions.  Now, let's be clear:  None of this matters to the Democrat Party, since it and its surrogates perpetrated these unconstitutional acts, as I shall soon explain.  Nor does it matter to the media, which is utterly illiterate on the subject and unequivocally supports the supposed outcome in any event.  But it should be of great moment and concern to the people of this country and especially to congressional Republicans in both Houses, for if the latter do not at least confront and challenge this lawlessness on January 6, when Congress meets to count the electors, it will be the GOP's undoing and, simultaneously, the undoing of our presidential electoral system.  Ultimately, it will be the people of the United States who love our republic who will be the losers.

A Perfect Storm Seeks Destruction of the US.  As 2021 dawns, the war on our culture moves into high gear.  The opportunistic intersection of the resistance to the Trump presidency, the rise of the monopolistic tech giants, the spurious panic over the psychologically weaponized CCP virus in the form of COVID-19 and its concomitant loss of personal freedom, the neo-Marxist hijacking and worsening of race relations, and the legalistic undermining of U.S. laws and institutions have all evolved into a perfect storm of destruction that not only threatens the future of the United States, but actively seeks its destruction.

Is Nothing Happening?  Or is Trump is Channeling Sun Tzu?  I'm impatient, as I expect most American Thinker readers are as well.  We have been promised a coming storm that will be biblical, or a Kraken released on Deep State conspirators. [...] As of yet, there has been no storm, no Kraken.  Trump has followed the Constitution, making legal arguments up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.  What Vice President Pence does when it is time to again follow the Constitution and certify the Electoral College votes is to be determined.  Will a massive declassification of criminal and seditious activities subdue the Democrats?  Will Trump win without a bloody battle?  Time will tell.  At this point, it's a binary choice.  Either Trump is in over his head and will be dragged out of office.  Or he is executing his plan, on his terms and timing, as he has done since his famous escalator ride at Trump Tower in 2015.  Trump knows the stakes for himself, his family, and America if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden get the keys to the kingdom and promptly hand them over to China.  Want to bet against Trump?  How has that worked out in the past?

It's for Mike Pence to Judge whether a Presidential Election Was Held at All.  On January 6, a joint session of Congress will open with Vice President Pence presiding as president of the Senate.  His power will be plenary and unappealable.  You heard that right.  As president of the Senate, every objection comes directly to him, and he can rule any objection "out of order" or "denied."  His task will be to fulfill his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to ensure that the laws be faithfully executed.  This is a high standard of performance, and V.P. Pence will have two choices.  He can roll over on "certified" electors, or he can uphold the law.

How Congress Can Give Americans $2K Relief Checks and Cut Omnibus Pork to Pay for It.  President Donald Trump has urged Congress to increase the amount of the direct relief payments to Americans to $2,000 by cutting out the unrelated pork in the coronavirus rescue package and government spending bill.  Breitbart News has calculated how much that increase would cost and what could be cut from the 5,593-page omnibus bill to offset it.  The House and Senate passed the combined $900 billion coronavirus relief package and $1.4 trillion government spending bill on Monday night [12/21/2020], but the massive 5,593-page omnibus bill immediately drew criticism for sending billions of dollars of aid to foreign countries while only allotting $600 relief checks for Americans.

The Editor says...
The voting-age population of the U.S. is approximately 255,200,000.  $1.4 trillion divided equally among us would be $5,485 per capita.  But the money would come from the national debt, so we would all be undertaking an unsecured loan from our grandchildren.  Either that, or the government would be printing money, which would result in inflation.  (And buying votes.)  Either way, it seems nice in the short term, but it's destructive in the long term.  About 90 percent of the omnibus spending is unnecessary, in my opinion.

A Midwestern Explanation of the 2020 Election.  At the start of this year there was not much question President Trump would breeze onto a second term.  The country was on a roll — low gas prices, fat 401k accounts, low unemployment, real minority economic gains and a relatively peaceful planet.  No masks, no shutdown, no worries.  Even Lil' Rocketman had become quiescent and the Arabs started cooperating with Israel.  Then we were infected with it, the Wuhan virus.  We were politically, immunologically, and socially naive to this new Chinese viral monster that lurked on the horizon and was designed to keep on giving.  We shut down the economy and Democrats never shut up blaming management failure of this unique, novel disease on the political party controlling the White House — despite their state governments being responsible for their own brand of deadly mismanagement.  As the economy ground to a halt, the left (including the deprecating mainstream media, academe, virtue-signaling corporate America and the deep state) saw an opportunity to steal the election by putting in place their steal-the-election "Square Dance Initiative."

The Senate:  Throw Them (Almost) All Out.  Every single member of the U.S. Senate deserves to be fired, vilified and run out on the proverbial rail except — alphabetically — Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.).  They were the only ones with the honor, the basic morality, not to vote for a wretched, pork-dripping from its mouth, "America-hating" (as Roger Kimball accurately called it on Parler), miserable excuse for a "COVID relief bill" that sends twenty-five million taxpayer dollars to Pakistan for something called "gender programs," millions more for every liberal arts and humanities boondoggle imaginable (most of them shut anyway), but a miserly six hundred bucks to the terminally-masked citizens of this country who have been locked in their houses since the Paleolithic Age.  And while we're riding people out on a rail, we should build a special one of titanium or whatever metal is most permanent for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and send them back respectively to the feces and syringe-laden streets of San Francisco and the rat-infested walk-ups of Hunt's Point and East New York.  These same supposed public servants, who have been around since before the aforementioned Paleolithic Age, suddenly — as if discovering shame for the first time in their lives — agreed with Donald Trump that the paltry six hundred should be bumped up to an at least palatable two thousand.

McConnell & Pelosi Jumped the Shark.  If ever two people embodied the idea of Swamp Supremacy, it would be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Stated another way, McConnell and Pelosi are the ruling class, personified.  And though their political philosophies may be marginally different, they are 100% joined at the hip in their desire to rid the world of President Donald Trump.  The so-called covid relief bill they slammed through both houses of Congress in about 12 hours, following closely on the heels of their oh-so-certain pronouncement that "President-elect Joe Biden" is to be honored and accepted, may have just assured the re-election of President Trump to a second term.  'Tone-deaf' doesn't begin to capture the out-of-touchness' represented by the re-enactment in December 2020 of the dead-of-night, backroom dealing, 'pass it to find out what's in it' arrogance that brought Obamacare into the world, against the will of the American people.

Mike Pence is being held out as the potential savior of a fair election.  For the most part, Americans assume that the Vice President lacks power.  The President may assign him responsibilities, but the Constitution does not.  Instead, he's the understudy, there just in case something happens to the president.  Except that, in this strange year of 2020, we may learn that the Vice President is the most powerful man in America.  Ivan Raiklin, a constitutional lawyer, claims that the Constitution grants Mike Pence the power to overturn a manifestly fraudulent election.  On December 22, Raiklin sent out a tweet urging Pence to inform the Secretaries of State in those six contested states that, despite overwhelming evidence of fraud, certified Electors, that he cannot accept those certifications because the electors were not legally appointed.  The tweet has attached a memorandum for President Trump that purports to come from the White House itself, for it's written on what appears to be official White House letterhead.

Concede only that Trump won.  President Trump stands tall amid calls to concede from his enemies and those who want to destroy our constitutional republic and replace it with a banana republic.  Those enemies of America include Mitt Romney and anyone who has defended as free trade Red China's devastation of our economy. [...] Concede nothing to these people who oppose 3.5% unemployment and the 15% increase in household incomes in the first 3 years of the Trump presidency.  The[y] do not want to Make America Great Again.  And that includes all those corporations running pro-BLM ads.  None of them ran MAGA ads because the companies sold out to Red China.  Apple makes most of its junk in Red China, not America.  Ditto Nike and on and on.  These companies also promote covid 19 as if it were the Black Plague.  After nearly a year, 1 in 1,000 Americans have died of it — fewer than die of cancer or heart disease.

Don't Let Biden Kill Trump's Post-COVID Economic Boom.  After growing at a blistering 33.1% pace in the third quarter, the economy is poised for another double-digit leap in Q4.  Now there's talk of a roaring '20s-style revival on the way as two new vaccines start making the rounds and the nation gets back to normal.  None of this was supposed to happen — at least not in this time frame.  And none of it will continue if Democrats gain control of the Senate.  Let's rewind the clocks a few months to understand why.  Once the economy came to a screeching halt amid what turn out to be reckless and largely pointless lockdowns, mainstream economists started predicting another slow recovery, while bashing President Donald Trump for saying otherwise.

Congresswoman-elect: Lawmakers Who Think Elector Challenge Is Futile Should Resign.  Incoming freshman House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Republican senators convinced about the futility of the plan to challenge electors in Congress on Jan. 6 should resign.  "It is absolutely not futile," Taylor Greene told The Epoch Times on Dec. 22.  "Anyone holding office who doesn't think they can give the effort to stop our country from plunging into socialism with a stolen election should really resign.  They shouldn't hold office if they don't think this effort is worth trying."  The congresswoman-elect made the remarks in response to a question about some of the rationale floated by Republican senators who oppose the idea of challenging the electors.  Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told Newsmax on Dec. 21 that the challenge will go down like a "shot dog."  "The thing they've got to remember is, it's just not going anywhere.  I mean, in the Senate it would go down like a shot dog," Thune told reporters.  "And I just don't think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be."

Face It, Nordic Countries Aren't Socialist.  One of the most common fallacies of the new populists is to say that their model is the "Nordic" one and that those countries are successful examples of how "socialism works".  When I mentioned it to the Finnish Finance Minister Petteri Orpo at a recent ECR dinner, he could not believe it.  Expropriations, massive tax increases, appropriation of savings and subordinating the growth model to political control is what populists defend.  The same as Venezuela, which all of them praised — from Bernie Sanders to Owen Jones or Corbyn and Chomsky — until it collapsed.  Then they moved on to the fallacy of "the Nordic model".  Do you know what interventionists forget about the Nordic nations?  They are leaders in the economic freedom index (Heritage) and ease of doing business according to the World Bank.

Trump as a One-Term President Would Become DC's Nightmare.  What it failed to accomplish through four years of Deep State sabotage and bipartisan efforts at thwarting the MAGA agenda, the D.C. Club may have finally succeeded through good old-fashioned vote fraud.  The District of Corruption is salivating over the possibility of freeing itself from a foe who has singlehandedly damaged the Swamp forever.  No victory could be more pyrrhic.  Forcing Donald Trump from the presidency while half of all likely voters believe the election was stolen from him (including a stunning one-third of Democrats) would backfire on Washington spectacularly.  Trump is too ferocious a competitor and too powerful a cultural force to ever disappear into a retirement not of his choosing.  At least 75 million Americans voted for the president because, among other reasons, he is seen as an "outsider."  Now Washington insists on making him a martyr, as well.  What will happen if President Trump leaves office in January?  He will instantly become the most consequential and powerful ex-president Americans have seen.

It's time for the 'Deplorables' to become the Unconquerables.  Democrats won the election, but they don't seem very happy about it.  And with reason:  The election failed in its main purpose, which was to shut down the Deplorables.  The Deplorables, in Hillary Clinton's infamous term, are working- and middle-class people who haven't bought into the progressive agenda.  They're people who don't see the rise of the tech oligarchy as a plus, who don't think "woke" politics makes sense, who have jobs that produce tangible outputs.  They're nearly half the country.  This election was supposed to demoralize them, crushing President Trump and his supporters in a double-digit landslide that would give the Democrats solid control of the White House and Congress — and, with a little judicious court-packing, of the judicial branch, too.  The Deplorables would be made to realize that they aren't in charge, that if they want to ride, they'll have to (in Barack Obama's famous words) ride in the back.

Fighting back against government-imposed victimhood.  Conservatives in Democrat enclaves tend to feel especially helpless.  We spin our wheels and don't complain too loudly because somebody might shut us down.  Our neighborhoods still spout Biden signs on lawns but we keep the "Stop the Steal" signs in a closet for fear that, if they show up on our lawns, our houses could be firebombed.  Moreover, when you're surrounded by leftists celebrating a stolen election (thanks, often, to help from a weak and corrupt local GOP), it's hard to imagine that anything you do could make a difference.  Everyone around you hates Trump and what he represents:  The individual, freedom, hope, patriotism.

Gaming Out a MAGA Party.  The modern Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.  Its first nominee, Abraham Lincoln, managed to thread the needle through a hopelessly split Democratic Party to win the Presidency in 1860.  Some of these conditions are present today.  Both of our major parties are splitting into factions, as the Democrats had in 1860.  And there is a candidate available to lead a new party who not only came close to winning, but has served as the President of the United States.  President Trump must have at least toyed with the idea of forming a new party.  Although the Republican Party's voters nominated Trump in 2016 and elected him President, the party's establishment figures never accepted Trump, or his agenda.

Georgia Rep. Vernon Jones Says Election Allegations Have 'Awakened a Sleeping Giant'.  Like tens of thousands of other supporters of President Donald Trump, Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones was in Washington, D.C., this weekend showing support for him amid swirling allegations of vote fraud and election irregularities.  And he also had a warning of sorts for the president's political (and real?) enemies:  You have just stepped in it big time.

After SCOTUS's knife in the back, what Trump must do now.  [Scroll down]  The question now is, will he muster the energy to do the right thing?  The right thing is to somehow swallow this absurd and evil election result and soldier on to Georgia once again to try to salvage the Republic by supporting two Republican senators hardly worthy of mention.  Donald Trump deserves better.  We all deserve better.  And it is the fact that we all deserve better, and the fact that Trump seems to care about such things, that gives me hope.  As we know, 50 thousand Trump voters can fill a stadium or a huge field — whereas Biden can't draw a baker's dozen with free ice cream.  However, 400 thousand Biden voters can fit in a small mail truck, or perhaps an even smaller thumb drive.  It is this unsettling knowledge that threatens the upcoming Georgia Senate races, and with it, the future of the Republic.  There's no doubt that Georgia conservatives would defeat the Dems probably 60-40 in a fair fight.  But what are the odds of that?

China's leaders understand all too well from their own historical experience how to control America: use compradors.  There is a very large, rich, and influential class of Americans who owe their wealth and standing to China, having mightily prospered through business ties to the Middle Kingdom.  Every educated person in China understands the way such ties linking a wealthy elite beholden to foreign interests can be used to bring down even the mightiest of nations.  The word "comprador", referring to the Chinese businessmen that allied themselves with Western imperialists, becoming wealthy, and, in the view of the Chinese Communist Party betraying the nation, is a curse word among Communists.

Republicans Are Blowing It in Georgia, and We May All Pay the Price.  It's not alarmist to state that the future of our country could be defined by the two Georgia Senate races. [...] Regardless of the merits leading to this perceived case of injustice, it's a fact that many Democrats are out for revenge.  If they have the White House, the House and the Senate, the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden to enact a pretty extreme agenda is going to be immense.  Will Biden have the strength to push back against this?  Will he even want to push back?  The games he played during the campaign on the question of packing the Supreme Court and the fact that his own vice president is all for a more radical agenda do not bode well for those hoping Biden will stand in the way of the radical elements who have all the energy in his party today.  A Democratic Senate looking to change America would start by killing the Senate filibuster so they no longer need 60 votes to pass a bill.  They don't need any Republican votes to do that, and once it's done, the Republicans won't be able to stop anything.

Joe Biden, the Manchurian President.  [Scroll down]  China, not Russia, clearly interfered with the 2020 elections.  The only question about this interference is whether the release of COVID-19 was accidental or on purpose.  Before the pandemic crippled the U.S., Trump was headed to reelection by a historic landslide.  The economy was roaring, and a record number Americans were enjoying prosperity and freedom.  In spite of Democrat efforts to remove Trump from office by impeachment and the economic shutdown because of the virus, the president still earned ten million more votes than 2016 and in any other election would have crushed his political opponent.  The virus not only had a horrific detrimental impact on our economy, it was used as an excuse for making substantive changes to the electoral process through unprecedented millions of mail-in votes.  Even if it was an accidental release from a Wuhan lab, the Chinese are responsible for the criminally negligent deaths of U.S. citizens and the economic damage caused by the virus.  If the virus was deliberately released, it was an act of war.  So, are we at war with China?

George Orwell, Our Contemporary — Almost.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell divides the world into two conflicting superpowers perpetually at war with one another.  Much of the action of the novel takes place in Oceania, whose capital is London.  Authority is exercised by the Ministry of Truth, which instructs people what to think and also invents most of the country's art; the Ministry of Peace, which runs the military; the Ministry of Plenty, which runs the economy; and the Ministry of Love, which runs the prisons.  Endless wars keep the people busy and focussed, and the thought police aggressively pursue people who commit, or are alleged to commit, thought crimes.  In Oceania, words lose their conventional meanings, or rather, they assume their opposite meanings.  For example, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.  A faceless enemy is constantly held up for repudiation.  Periodically the regime orders two minutes of hate, or even a hate week.  Nowadays, we have more up to date perversions of the truth, such as, for example, the alleged non-existence of sexual differences or the inversion of racial superiority.  Still, the similarities are too obvious not to strike a responsive chord.

One Thing That Astoundingly Got Twice as Good During the Titanically Stupid Government Lockdowns?  [Scroll down]  US ISPs were met with orders-of-magnitude more demand for their services.  Not only did our Internet networks not collapse in a smoldering heap — the speeds thereon almost doubled.  This is an astounding private sector success.  The result of less government from the Trump Administration — allowing for more investment and thus more expansion of the private sector networks.  To not just handle the lockdowns — but to manhandle them.  Thanks to anti-Status Quo Government President Trump.

Woke Corps Lobby D.C. to Keep Their Slaves.  When most people think of Nike, they think of Colin Kaepernick, the disgraced racist ex-NFL player advocating for a cop killer who became the public face of the company, but a more accurate picture would be one of its lobbyists like Michael McSwain or Jesse McCollum.  McSwain worked as Obama's Senior Associate Director of Scheduling before joining Nike and is now its manager of Government and Public Affairs, which is to say, top lobbyist.  These days he divides his time between cheering Democrats and booing Republicans on Twitter, while denouncing tariffs on Communist China, but also his quieter work behind the scenes for Nike.  Slave labor is the lifeblood of Nike.  And it's not only tariffs, but human rights legislation, that threaten its survival.  Even while Nike spends millions lecturing Americans about racism, it's desperately fighting to keep its slaves working on their plastic plantations in Communist China.  It's one of the reasons why the sportswear company spends over $1 million a year on lobbyists.

Time to take steps to preserve our history.  Last Thursday night, I watched President Trump deliver an astonishing speech concerning the 2020 election and the fraudulent activities of the Democrats in the key swing states.  After the speech ended, I had the thought to download the YouTube video of Trump's speech onto a thumb drive so it would be preserved for my four-month-old grandchild.  Yes, preserved.  If Biden prevails, all pre-January 20, 2021 downloadable internet videos and news broadcasts about the Trump administration successes will not so slowly disappear, or worse, they will be edited by the new Ministry of Truth.  No socialist nation has ever allowed the free flow of information, history, and national culture.  A Harris/Biden administration will surely be no exception.  So, thinking forward a bit more, I'd like to suggest to all those reading this article that we begin to preserve our internet history, in fact our entire cultural history for future generations.

Our approach to election fraud is lunacy.  Tens of millions of Americans feel with good reason that the election is tainted.  There are hundreds of well documented anomalies including over a thousand affidavits stating under the penalty of perjury that significant irregularities occurred.  But we are relying on a skeleton crew of privately funded lawyers to try to get to the bottom of what by all accounts appears to be a massive fraud.  Why is this all-important effort left to a few brave souls and not the main focus of our government's efforts?  Where is the Justice Department?  The FBI?  Why doesn't the Defense Department do a review of military mail-in ballots that inexplicably went 100% for Joe Biden?  How about a forensic analysis of the tens of thousands of Biden-only mail-in ballots that weren't folded and appeared to be on different paper?  Who rented the P.O. boxes used for tens of thousands of illegal voters in Georgia and other states?  Where is the investigation of postal officials who ordered carriers to throw away Trump mailings?  Why aren't the poll workers who sent observers home and then illegally continued counting in the dark of the night arrested and charged?

Is Lin Wood trying to destroy Republican control over the Senate?  Lin Wood, who seems to support Trump, is beginning to show all the signs of a loose cannon or even a spoiler.  I'm really not sure what's going on, so I thought I'd just give you a brief history of the man and what he's been saying recently, so you can draw your own conclusions. [...] More recently, Wood became well known to conservatives when he represented Nick Sandmann, whom the media horribly slandered for smiling at a threatening drummer.  We don't know how much money CNN and The Washington Post agreed to pay Sandmann, but most people are reasonably sure that it was a lot.  According to Breitbart, though, Wood has been a longtime Democrat voter and a consistent Democrat donor.

The Supreme Court and the Electoral Coup.  [Scroll down]  And today, it's quite obvious — for Supreme Court justices and all Americans to see — that we are in the last stage of the takedown and final usurpation of the Constitution of the United States.  With distrust, division, and corruption being so prevalent in the big cities and lower courts of many of the contested states — as to nullify the seriousness of over 400 affidavits documenting vote fraud and polling place irregularities, documenting that there were more votes cast than registered voters in quite a number of jurisdictions, and overwhelming evidence of massive computer driven vote manipulation associated with key states' use of Dominion Voting Systems, and pay-to-play corruption at the highest level of Republican Party-led Georgia government to contract with Dominion to use their voting machines — the Supreme Court is compelled to adjudicate. [...] The Supreme Court needs to do its job of adjudication and protect and save the Constitution at this critical time.

To Vote or Not to Vote, in Georgia.  I am going to say something that seems extreme, but only three times in my fairly long life have I seen political figures who absolutely exude charisma — one was Bobby Kennedy, whom I watched address a crowd of Chicanos in East Los Angeles two days before he was shot, the second is Donald Trump, whom I have seen speak more than a dozen times from Anaheim, Calif. to Manchester, N.H. while covering the 2016 campaign, and Sidney Powell on Dec. 2, 2020 in Alpharetta, Georgia.  The crowd was shouting "We love you" in the same way they do with Trump and it seemed equally heartfelt.  This was both moving and slightly unnerving, but it was real.  Sidney has a way of just standing straight up and speaking truths in simple declarative sentences that has immense impact.

Is the Democrats' Election Heist 'Too Big to Fail'?  President Trump and Fox News enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship, until, loyalty already fraying, Fox betrayed Trump on election evening by prematurely calling Arizona for Biden.  Only stalwart reporters such as Mark Levin, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity remain by Trump's side.  Republican elected officials who retained power are mostly mute.  Although the predicted Blue Wave never materialized as Republicans flipped House seats and Senate control is so close it will only be decided after the results of a Georgia runoff election are known, feckless state governors and attorneys general overseeing election preparations stood idly by as Democrats set up the apparatus for the big election steal.  Republicans in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania were the exception.  Resisting the illegal power grab the Democrats had implemented by a massive mail-in-ballot scheme and extending, by three days, the deadline to vote, Republican state officials appealed to the Supreme Court.

Yes, They Cheat.  We Have to Win Georgia Anyway.  The good news is, Republicans are finally talking about vote fraud!  Going forward, the GOP's sole objectives should be:  1) End mail-in ballots;  2) End early voting;  3) Ensure that the Democrats don't steal the two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021.

Confused About the Election?  You're Not Alone.  What exactly happened on Nov. 3 may never be determined.  There is zero appetite on either side to really figure this election out for many reasons.  First off, putting doubts in American's heads about a fair election is incredibly poisonous to society.  Second, if our elections look shady, imagine what happens to our standing in the world, and the world's comfort levels with respect to investing in our country.  Third, most traditional politicians on both sides are happy to get Donald Trump out of Washington, and get back to the good old days.  And fourth, the media got the outcome it wanted, Biden won.  For these reasons, anyone who thinks this election was suspicious is labeled a psychopathic, conspiracy-theorist MAGA hillbilly.  So at least we know who we are.

Why traditional masculine attributes still matter on the battlefield.  [Scroll down]  Indeed, just 70 years ago this week, the First Marine Division fought its way into the pages of history with their gallant stand at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.  In temperatures as low as minus-30 degrees, the Marines held off some 100,000 Chinese attackers and fought their way in hellish conditions back to the allied lines.  Today, however, we live in a decidedly unheroic age, one in which the traditional masculine attributes of courage, physical strength, and moral fortitude have been disparaged by feminists and soy boys nearly into oblivion.  Dismissed as outdated and derided as "toxic," masculinity and the martial virtues so vital to the maintenance of society and social order have been stuffed into the cultural closet in favor of wishful thinking, politically correct fantasy, and dangerous good intentions.  It seems we're too rational, too sophisticated, too civilized for definitive brutality anymore.

Seven Quotes to Lay Out a Totalitarian America.  [Scroll down]  We have lived through the decades of gradual transition of socialist sentiments and actions in our country, becoming more socialist every day through the transition.  We have seen universities, K-12 school systems, the media, large companies, philanthropic organizations, and other entities transition from idealistic to socialist, largely unnoticed — until now.  Would Biden's administration be a massive socialist revolution into a totalitarian state?  No.  But given what has happened already, it could be the straw that breaks democracy's back.  Our transformation to a totalitarian state must be resisted.  Buckle up and stand tall.  Do not fear Black Lives Matter, Antifa, social media, the press, your school's curricula, your employer, or any of these forces.

The Cunning Plot to Kill Kennedy.  [Scroll down]  The assassination itself had all the earmarks of a classic military ambush, one in which shooters were firing from both the front and back of the president.  It is a virtual certainty that responsibility for the ambush lay with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been waging a vicious war against Kennedy practically since the time he assumed office.  While the JCS were experts at preparing military-style ambushes, they lacked the intellectual capability of devising the overall plot and cover-up, given its high level of cunning and sophistication.  That responsibility undoubtedly lay with the CIA, whose top officials were brilliant graduates of Ivy League Schools.  Moreover, practically from its inception the CIA was specializing in the art of state-sponsored assassinations and in how to conceal the CIA's role in them.  To ensure that the role of the Pentagon and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination would be kept secret, they had to figure out a way to shut down the investigation from the start.

Multilateral Dreamin'.  The American people strongly approve of President Trump's emphasis on an "America First" foreign policy, and will not look kindly on re-subordinating America to the establishment's hobby horses.  Trump was elected to end pointless military adventures abroad.  Whatever the establishment might prefer, nobody now is going to send U.S. troops to fight overseas, especially not in the Middle East.  He was elected to be "tough on China."  Returning to business as usual with China is the establishment's top international priority.  But public opinion has so shifted that candidate Biden promised to be even tougher on China.  His administration will have to pretend.

3 things to prepare for when President Trump is declared the winner.  As more evidence floods in that the 2020 elections were rife with an obvious mountain of voter fraud, it's becoming increasingly clear that President Trump is going to be reelected.  The last two weeks we've seen patriots losing hope and progressives celebrating, but we've witnessed many turns of events as momentum now appears to be siding with the President, his legal team, independent attorneys, and the mounting evidence.  There are three things we need to prepare for when President Trump is announced the winner.  That's not to say we need to take it for granted or get complacent, but if we believe truth will prevail, then we know President Trump will prevail.

Republican Business Interests Separate From Sidney Powell.  Within the business part of the GOP there are massive territorial fights amid those who live on the donations from within political campaigns.  The Trump MAGA file is being exploited like a bloody carcass dropped into a pool of piranha.  Once you know how the business end works, then a lot of other stuff makes sense. [...] This is all about who is getting paid by the campaign and RNC.  The Trump campaign isn't going to reimburse Sidney Powell for any expenses, nor is she allowed to make offers of financial payment from the GOP or Trump campaign.  The vultures assembling and protecting their paychecks do not want Powell getting paid, nor do they want any financial liability.  That's all this statement is.  This statement by the Trump Campaign has nothing to do with Donald Trump, it is directly related to those interests who derive financial benefit from the Trump campaign.

'Very strange': Devin Nunes says Democrats lack confidence in Biden victory.  There is something "very strange" about the way Democrats are treating the 2020 election, according to Rep. Devin Nunes.  The California Republican, who is the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said even President-elect Joe Biden and his team are not acting like winners, although they are putting up "a facade" of victory.  "There's a false media narrative that's been created to move us past the election that started essentially election night," he said to the Epoch Times in a recent interview, insisting that House and local races would not have been called if they were so close.

Q Was Right.  After exhaustive meetings with sources in Ukraine, who provided reams of documentary evidence for hours, CDMedia has been exposed to a massive international criminal conspiracy which spans continents and decades.  Q was right.  Our wold is run by a criminal syndicate unlike mankind has ever known.  Global financiers are involved.  Former Presidents of the United States are involved, on both sides of the political aisle.  The uni-party exists.  Media titans are involved.  Silicon Valley is involved.  Our security agencies and most politicians are compromised. [...] This is what President Trump and the Deplorables are up against.  The cabal pulled out all the stops to unseat the Trump presidency which was the only thing standing in the way of their complete power.

Cucker Tarlson sells out.  [Scroll down]  According to Carlson, the country won't heal unless Sidney Powell goes on his show.  [Indeed], even Bill O'Reilly at his zenith was not this insufferable. [...] Powell has better things to do, such as prepare a Supreme Court case.  This is why people give press conferences: so they don't have to explain the same thing over and over again in 10 different interviews.  Carlson knows this.  He is using this refusal to answer His Summons as an excuse to distance himself from the president and his supporters.  You know what would be refreshing?  Having Democrats come on Carlson's show where he would grill them about the living dead voters and 3 AM dumps of 100,000 ballots all marked for Biden.  But booking a Democrat on his show would be difficult because Democrats prefer to work behind the scenes at Fox.  And face it, he is scared.  If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson.  Which explains why Carlson who stood up to the Conservative Establishment 4 years ago has hopped off the Trump Train.

What the Fake News Media Still Hides About Lee Harvey Oswald.  [Scroll down]  For 34 years Markus Wolf was the chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, a branch of the STASI with many contacts and operations in Castro's Cuba.  It was the STASI rather than the KGB that undertook the training of Castro's police and intelligence services.  Wolf's autobiography is titled, "Man Without a Face" and subtitled, "The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster."  Most intelligence experts agree that the subtitle fits.  Wolf was once asked about the Kennedy assassination and quickly replied.  "Don't ask me — ask Fidel Castro."

Shamalot.  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what the Kennedys ever did for your country.  Bring the monkey's paw of being telegenic into politics?  Of all the things that the American political system needed, this was the last.  And whatever it was that the Kennedys did, they did most of it a long time ago.  The assassination of John F. Kennedy is almost as distant in time as the assassination of William McKinley was when Kennedy took office.  McKinley, by the way, also had great personal popularity.  And greater political support, having won reelection in 1900 by a margin of almost a million votes out of some 14 million cast.  McKinley's murder by anarchist Leon Czolgosz grieved and shocked the nation (and gave rise to conspiracy theories) the same way Kennedy's murder did.  And yet we didn't endure six subsequent decades of public figures deemed "McKinleyesque."

2020 Election Fraud vs. 2016 Russia Collusion.  [Scroll down]  Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion or criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.  The special counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign "coordinated," a much lower standard defined as an "agreement, tacit or express," with Russian election interference activities.  They did not.  Everything — everything — else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls, depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods, propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment, simple bull, or, in the best light, hasty conclusions.  Undeterred by the facts, many in the media — and thus, many like-minded Americans — still insist that Trump-Russia collusion was a real thing.

The Biblical Book of Esther Playing Out Again Today.  [Scroll down]  America is at a crossroads.  Sidney Powell has rightly characterized the next two months as the most important in the history of America.  The context of Queen Esther's "trial" of courage was really the age-old but simple struggle between good and evil.  So is this one.  It is the good of preserving the American constitutional structure and heritage of individual freedom and responsibility under God versus the evil of a Deep State ruling class determined to impose godless, tyrannical socialism on America.  Here's to American Esthers everywhere, and to the judges who will hear the cries of the American people that are not really about legal arguments per se; they are about heartfelt anguish as to whether the American rule of law can still stand as a bulwark for preservation of their exceptional nation from the evil that seeks to destroy it.  And they are pleas to see the Hamans of today outed and appropriately dealt with.

Transition marks precarious period for Russia and Hunter Biden probes.  With the conclusion of the election, Washington is now in that precarious period known as the lame duck.  Unlike the wounded waterfowl, lame duck presidents tend to be more active in the waning days of their terms.  From those midnight judicial appointments of John Adams to those last minute executive orders from Barack Obama, presidents often cement policies or officials before the chiming of the constitutional clock.  This year, however, it could be prosecutors who feel the greatest pressure to move.  Months before the election, many Democrats demanded that the Justice Department refrain from bringing additional indictments or releasing new information in either the Russia investigation or the Hunter Biden scandal.  Andrew Weissmann, who worked for special counsel Robert Mueller, told prosecutors not to assist the Justice Department to prevent some harmful disclosures for then candidate Joe Biden.  However, despite pressure from President Trump, the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr did appear to hold the line before the election as is tradition.

Pardon My Perplexity, But Why Should We Be Gracious?  It is for me truly mind-boggling that after the Democrats and their allies behaved maliciously to undermine Trump's presidency, his devotees are expected to act like kindly losers.  I've heard from Republican leaders that Trump should "graciously concede," although in the meantime, he may be allowed to investigate the election results with his lawyers pro forma.  One might also infer that Trump lost in what is imagined to have been a fraud-free election.  Somehow the fact that until now not nearly enough patently false ballots have turned up to change the election results means that the electoral process was entirely on the up and up.  Unfortunately, too many irregularities occurred, which this website has documented, to permit such confidence.  Perhaps our congratulators are scared that the new administration will follow Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's exhortation, quickly seconded by neoconservative columnist Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, that those who openly supported Trump should be ridiculed and professionally isolated.  In Germany, such a fate awaits anyone in public life who is known to have voted for the Alternative für Deutschland, the only significant non-leftist party in the German parliamentary spectrum.

Republicans, You Better Be Ready For What's Coming In Georgia.  The left has a history of attacking Republicans, but just because President Donald J. Trump may not win re-election doesn't mean the lies about the GOP are going to stop.  Republican leaders around the nation, especially in Georgia, need to step up to the plate, stand up to defend the GOP from Democrat shenanigans, and stand for the integrity of U.S. elections.  The upcoming Senate runoffs between incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue and his challenger Democrat Jon Ossoff, as well as GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock in Georgia, are critical to the GOP's ability to keep the Senate majority.  Democrats are coming for them, with every trick in the book and a whole lot of campaign cash.  Millions of dollars were already poured into the Democrat candidates' campaigns to challenge the Republican incumbents for Georgia's two Senate seats.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already signaled Democrats' intentions to use these challengers in Georgia to "change the world" with their leftist policies.

Why Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame And I Say Trump Wins This Thing - Bigly.  [Scroll down]  The 290 Electoral vote total includes 20 from Pennsylvania.  There is a ton of fraud in that state and you are seeing all kinds of reports of ballots coming in at 4:00 AM and all that.  Skip it.  That does not matter.  Focus people on the Justice Alito Supreme Court Order.  Justice Alito, not a man with whom to trifle, is in charge of day-to-day activities for a group of states and Pennsylvania is one of them.  The Justice told Pennsylvania to "segregate" any vote that came in after 8:00 PM on election night.  You will recall, DJ was winning bigly (a Scott Adams word) at that point.  Around midnight, Texas time, the Pennsylvania vote counters stopped counting.  Then the truckloads of new ballots came in, reportedly voting for Biden and no other candidate for any lower office.  The Supreme Court ruled, sort of, in this case already.  They said, with 4 Justices led by Justice Alito that ONLY the Pennsylvania legislature can make or modify voting rules.  Read the opinions — this thing is NOT going to go to Biden.

Does Anyone Care about the Truth Anymore?  Ferreting out political and historical truth from the welter of partisan voices and official disinformation, so far as this is possible, is no easy task.  Not many of us are capable or desirous of doing so.  This is perhaps the major debit in a prosperous democratic polity, many of whose citizens, like pampered children, have grown spoiled and lazy.  Common sense is needed, along with moral fortitude and the willingness to dig for documentary sources and artifacts that are not easily falsified.  One cannot allow the media to do one's homework for one but must instead subject what one is told to believe to hard scrutiny and diligent research.  This process is not only an epistemic necessity but also a moral demand.

12 Ways For Trump To Bomb The Battlefield While Biden Claims The Presidency.  President Trump is right to refuse to concede the 2020 election until every legal vote has been counted and allegations of significant fraud have been fairly investigated.  His voters deserve and need to know if we were beaten fair and square.  Otherwise, Democrats are poisoning the nation's political well and ensuring Republicans never wield power at the federal level again after having established that Republicans will not fight fraud.  Since the president's team has begun releasing increasingly good evidence of large-scale voter fraud in key states, the tide may yet turn again.  At the same time, the same media-Democrat complex whose lies have been running the country for four years — think Russian collusion, impeachment, and now endless COVID lockdowns unhinged from science and prudence — typically prevail through their well-amplified echo chamber of lies that operates key institutions Republicans have conceded for the last century.

American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened?  Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the [David] Talbot and [James W.] Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot.  Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise.  With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot.  Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.  Many others may have suffered a similar fate. [...] Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career.  Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.

Fox News pays the price for betraying its viewership.  Under Roger Ailes, Fox News was reliably conservative.  When he left, and when Rupert Murdoch handed the reins over to his sons James and Lachlan, things started getting shaky.  James, the fiery leftist, only left Fox this July.  Now Lachlan, who is married to a fiery leftist, is at the helm, helped by Paul Ryan, the RINO rodent, among others on the Board.  With this leadership, while voters have rightly suspected creeping NeverTrumperism in the newsroom for some time now, it all came to a head with this election.  Things went pretty sour for viewers when Chris Wallace turned the first presidential debate into a three-way affair, with Wallace siding with Biden.  Nevertheless, viewers were willing to give Fox another chance on election night.  Fox failed that test.  The kill switch for many viewers was that Fox News hired a hard leftist to run its election desk on Election Night.  Predictably, Arnon Mishkin called the race in ways only a leftist could love.  With hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding, he called Arizona for Biden.  Meanwhile, he refused to call obviously pro-Trump states such as Texas and Alaska.  Things have gotten worse since then.

The collapse of American progressivism.  Had it not been for the polls predicting a landslide, Joe Biden's victory would look very respectable — both in terms of the popular vote and Electoral College margin.  At the start of the year, when the economy was strong and Trump's favorability was rising, most Democratic strategists would have bitten their hand off for such a result.  They view their results in Congress, however, as a great disappointment.  Countless Democratic incumbents fell in the House where they had expected to gain seats and the party may only make a net gain of one seat in the Senate.  Biden's victory on a centrist platform and his refusal to accept the more extreme parts of the progressive agenda has left organizations like Justice Democrats in a bind.  Many had predicted that only the likes of Bernie Sanders could mobilize enough voters to achieve victory.

SD Gov. Noem: 'We Gave Al Gore 37 Days to Run the Process' — Trump Voter Deserve Same Consideration.  Governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) noted Sunday [11/8/2020] on ABC's "This Week" that during the 2000 election, former Vice President Al Gore was given 37 days to run the process of legal challenges to the election.  Therefore, she said we should "afford the 70.6 million Americans that voted for President Trump the same consideration."  [Video clip]

Meet the New Consensus Coalition That Wants to Rule Your Life.  What will life be like when Trump, that bright orange "Sun King" around which all social and cultural commentary revolves, finally goes out?  His legacy will be examined by historians, and for all the talk of hyperpolarization and harsh rhetoric surrounding him, perhaps he ought to be best remembered as a unifier — unifying his most loyal partisans, certainly, but also bringing together a motley anti-Trump coalition comprising the FBI, the CIA, Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Google, China, nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations and their Bill Gates-tier sugar daddies, the NBA, Bill Kristol and fellow Bush-adjacent NeverTrump Republicans, and every other company or public figure looking to set aside their differences to #Resist Trump.  Talk about strange bedfellows!  Even if one can't stomach Trump, the alternative entails aligning oneself alongside these variegated, surplus value-appropriating creatures of neoliberal capitalism.

Lincoln Project's delusional Never-Trumpers think they can lead the GOP in post-Trump resurrection.  It was highly predictable that the Never-Trump grifters at the Lincoln Project would look to come back into the fold should President Trump be defeated, though they may have miscalculated how conservatives would respond to members who sold out to cash in on the left's quest for Trump-hating Republicans.  That assessment taking the huge leap to assume they had principles to begin with.  Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who was quick to turn on the party and the president after vacating his seat, said in an appearance on MSNBC that the Lincoln Project "and other Republicans and former Republicans out there will continue the work of trying to resolve internally and resurrect the party in a way that it can become a governing majority in the future."

How Far Should the Republican Senate Go in Supporting Biden's Agenda?  The calls for Donald Trump to accept his election defeat grow louder with each passing hour.  But Trump still has some legal cards to play and we shouldn't expect him to concede until every pathway to victory has been blocked — no matter how dubious his claims.  But there are calls for Republicans to submit on all fronts — bow to Biden's triumph and, "for the good of the country," swear fealty to the new president by giving him what he wants in Congress.  Biden will have no trouble getting most of his agenda items through the House, but what about the Senate?  Republicans probably won't know if they've maintained their Senate majority until the two Senate races in Georgia that are headed to a January 5 runoff have been decided.

The Editor says...
That's soon enough, since Biden won't be the POTUS until January 20 — if he is sworn in at all.

The Presidential Election, Corruption, and Deception.  We are living in an unprecedented season in American history, one of massive consequence for the nation as a whole and for conservative Christians in particular.  (All the more does this hold true for charismatic Christians, as I'll explain shortly.)  Please allow me to lay out the stark, contrasting possibilities.  I've written about this briefly in the last few days, but I'll expand on things more fully here.  On the natural, non-spiritual side, either Donald Trump has pulled off the political feat of a lifetime, convincing tens of millions of Americans to reject the results of a fairly contested election.  Or Trump is the victim of the most massive electoral fraud in our history, the exposing of which will shake our nation to its foundations.  On the spiritual side, either a multitude of prophetic voices have been jointly misled, prophesying in total unison that Trump will serve a second term.  Or the words of these prophetic voices will prove true, shocking the nation with the reality of God.  Are these not very high stakes?

The Last Bush Betrayal.  Republicans fought Gore's attempt to steal an election by supporting this drunk brain-damaged cokehead.  How does he repay us?  By calling Biden "President-elect" and congratulating him.  No Bush can be permitted to ever win office again.

This Isn't Just the Theft of an Election, This Is a Message to All of Us.  Over the past week, we've witnessed the theft of an election.  Not merely the sneaking theft of an election that is the stock-in-trade of the Democrat party.  The kind of election that we are used to seeing in Democrat strongholds where there just "happens" to be more votes cast in a precinct than there are registered voters.  Or the "finding" of missing votes that propels a mouth-breathing, room-temperature-IQ has-been performer into the Senate.  Or the underhanded spreading about of cash that carried a key jurisdiction in a presidential race; here what we've witnessed is a blatant, above-board, in-your-face theft of an election.  It is cheating that is designed to be seen.  It is cheating that is intended to send a message.  What purpose would this serve, you ask.  Why would anyone openly cheat?  Isn't the purpose of cheating to win but let the other rube think you did so legitimately?  Easy.  They want to show you that they can make you do what they want, based upon arguments they don't even believe, and there is [nothing] you can do about it.

Deplorables Don't Riot.  For months, the media has warned us that a narrow Joe Biden victory in the presidential election could lead to civil war.  President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the result and his supporters would resort to violence.  Well, the first part seems right; Trump is clinging on to the bitterest of ends.  The second part, however, is wrong — so far, at least.  There have been no outbreaks of Trumpist violence.  The Proud Boys are not marauding the suburbs and 'pivot counties' with AR-15s.  Buildings are not being set on fire.  Yes, there have been entirely (not just 'largely') peaceful protests.  In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a 'Stop the Steal' rally was held to demand an 'audit' of the vote.  'We're not asking for much,' Rep. Scott Perry told the crowd.  'We want the ballots and the votes that are counted to be legal, to be valid.  We want to have a postmark on them either on or before election, not after Election Day.'

Went to Bed in America, Woke Up in a Banana Republic.  On November 3, we all went to bed looking at those red-or-blue maps of the states, more or less secure in the knowledge that President Trump was on course to win a historic victory.  A massive Republican wave was giving Trump a 3.6 point lead in Florida — by Florida standards, a landslide.  Other states were coming along — could Trump really do much worse in Arizona, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan?  And so, on Tuesday night, we fell asleep in America.  The next morning, we woke up in a banana republic.  Take it from someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, and who knows what democracy is and isn't.  Watching democracy shrivel and die right in front of our eyes is a surreal experience.

Election post-mortem.  First, most of the media and pollsters are both biased and incompetent.  This is a very serious problem.  If people don't trust the media, and they don't, for good reasons, where are they supposed to get the news?  If they don't get the news, on what basis are they supposed to vote?  Second, assuming the current results hold after court challenges, Joe Biden will be a weak president because he's a weak man.  He's incompetent, unprincipled, inane, slightly senile, spineless and pretty shady. [...] Fourth, in the same vein, censoring, silencing and cancelling people for political incorrectness is not persuasive.  It instead illustrates the weakness of your position.  Fifth, street violence also isn't persuasive.  It may feel good to vent your anger, but recognize that the cost is to discredit your position.  "Burn it all down" is not a political position.

2020: This is Why Truth Matters.  Many have observed the steady deterioration over time of our moral underpinnings.  If we assess the so-called seven cultural mountains, we are not encouraged.  Schools do not teach kids how to think but what to think and chastise those who get out of line.  Our arts and entertainment encourages hedonism over honor, our media chooses propaganda over truth, social media businesses entrusted with promoting our First Amendment rights censor them, and the evidence of government corruption within our agencies to include our FBI and Justice Department is stunning.  It is quite possible [...] that we've slipped below the minimum threshold of integrity to keep our nation intact.  The danger of this is far greater than any virus.  We know in various degrees about the corrupt intent to disrupt this administration.  Attorney General William Barr may be a good man, but his lack of production in addressing this threat may be the greatest failure of our government.  The wheels of justice may move slowly, but not necessarily so.  This cancerous threat of treason has now metastasized.  The integrity of our election is now infected.  There has always been voter fraud, but evidence suggests that it has never been close to this level.  The vital connection between the will of the people and their desired representatives is now in jeopardy.

You've Got to Keep the Faith.  You know, Biden's out there running around talking about he's gonna be president for everybody.  No, he won't.  This is the most partisan political party I have ever seen it constituted as in my lifetime, the Democrat Party.  They are not a party for all the people.  What's happening in these vote recounts, what's happening in the resolution of this election is proof that they are not what they claim and that Biden isn't what he claims.  He will not be president of all the people.  Nancy Pelosi is not Speaker of the House for all people, and they never intend to be.

Trump Wins Re-election! Now, the Hard Part.  At this point in the chaos, we know one thing for sure:  President Trump is still the president, and that he won re-election.  Any number of warnings from Twitter or claims to the contrary from "official sources" in the media can't undermine his claims.  In the final analysis, according to the Constitution, electors in the Electoral College vote for the president.  This fact is critical in the days and weeks ahead.  In short, the president is not elected by Twitter or the media.  He is not even elected by "the people."  He is elected by electors picked by state legislators.  Faced with evidence of election fraud, the states can pick electors who will vote for Trump, the legitimate president and legitimate winner.  None of this is a mystery.  This is the way the system works.

The Party of Russia Hysteria Can Shut Up About 'Delegitimizing' Elections.  The media and Democrats are really, really mad.  I know that's not necessarily unusual, but this time it's because they believe Donald Trump is "delegitimizing" the results of the 2020 election.  Of course, we don't even have all the results, nor do we know that Trump has lost at this point.  Arizona continues to surprise, with the President keeping pace for what he would need to flip the state.  Regardless, seeing the consternation among the pundit class this evening over Trump's most recent presser, where he complained about possible fraud, I was struck by the lack of self-awareness.  I'm old enough to remember, because I'm more than four years old, when the left and their media allies spent the entire Trump first term proclaiming that Russia stole the 2016 election with magical Facebook memes.  If there was ever a group that should sit this discussion out, it's these conspiratorial partisans.

A Defunct Republic.  [James] Burnham defined managerialism as the centralization of society in which the distinction between the state and the economy is eliminated, the separation of ownership and control is effected, and, most importantly, power — real power — rests in the hands of "managers."  If it seems there is little room for republicanism or constitutionalism in this scheme, that's because there isn't.  "America still has a written constitution, but it is nearly impossible, theoretically or politically, to comprehend the distinction between the government and the Constitution," John Marini writes.  "The theoretical foundations of social compact theory have been so undermined as to make constitutionalism obsolete as a political theory."  Demystified, the "managers" of our post-constitutional cruise through the truculent waters at the end of history are business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, journalists, administrators; the whole host of technically trained experts who constitute the credentialed class which produces nothing and owns little but without whom mass society would not function.

Why shouldn't conservatives be enraged by Biden's win?  One big difference from four years ago is that the GOP will probably control the Senate.  The 2016 election left Democrats on the outs in both chambers of Congress.  But the president exercises enormous power even when his party doesn't control the Senate.  He runs foreign policy and can direct important aspects of domestic policy through fiat.  He can populate the executive branch with leftists who will undo the good, conservative work of Trump's appointees and create new left-liberal mischief on a large scale.  I hope and expect the Senate to obstruct the confirmation of many of these nominees, as the Dems did after 2016, even though they lacked a Senate majority.

With Diversity Gains, the Grand Old Party is Becoming the New Face Party.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) visited Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show on Wednesday, praising the gains that have been made by Republicans in the House and the Senate.  Without fanfare, posturing or virtue signaling, the GOP is showing itself to be more diverse and inclusive than the other side.  Here is the list of new additions to the Republican House that have increased our minority, other-abled, and female representation: [...]

What you can do to stop the electoral coup.  It seems that virtually all the battleground states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, have GOP legislatures.  This is a factor that has escaped most other commentators, and certainly seems like a game changer.  These worthies have, up until this point "been sitting on their butts," as Morris puts it.  Most of them are out of session and doing whatever it is politicians do when they aren't busy spending the people's money.  But it seems that this emergency, in which the standard model of the American republic is in danger of being undermined by what amounts to a criminal gang, is the kind of challenge that legislatures exist to deal with, no less than a flood or a hurricane.  Some of them (though not all — PA doesn't) in fact appoint the electors, which may be of crucial importance.  Morris points out that most state legislators get a handful of calls a session, so getting twenty in a single day would have an impact.  And what of a hundred or two in a single day?  This is something that is easily possible, particularly as involves enraged, and determined Trumpers.

A New Correlation of Forces.  The 2016 loss might have been accounted as a lucky punch, but 2020 was a set-piece maximum effort by progressives backed by money, gangs, social censorship, and deep state support on a massive scale; yet it didn't move the needle.  It should have impressed, rather it showed the limits to the power of the American elite.  It was the most anticipated, polled, forecasted, and analyzed U.S. presidential election in history and yet the expensive estimates proved to be worthless, a massive intelligence failure that paralleled Neil Ferguson's ill-fated projections of the coronavirus pandemic.  The limits of elite prescience of over complex phenomena were demonstrated for all to see.  The embarrassing surprise cast doubt over ambitious progressive projects based on social, biological, or climate engineering since the requisite degree of "scientific" certitude simply did not exist to predict even in a mundane election.

Why is anyone surprised at the Democrats cheating on the vote count?  This catastrophe didn't sneak up on us.  Just one example: there were huge red flags on ballot harvesting 2 years ago in California when so many red districts flipped to blue.  Did anyone do anything about that?  Did no one anticipate loosey-goosey rules for voting to enable cheating with a wink and a nod?  No one saw that coming?  Really?  Did anyone do anything to forestall this?  Here's a bulletin: it's easier to prevent cheating and illegality than it is to correct it once the damage is done.  The Supreme Court isn't likely to come to Trump's aid.  Originalist justices, whom we now are blessed with in abundance, will defer to the states when it comes to enforcing laws written by the states.  No ballots are likely to be tossed or added.  It's over, folks.

2020 election is not really about a choice between Trump vs.  Biden.  In traditional presidential campaigns, the two major parties offer contrasting ideas and policies.  The Democratic and Republican candidates barnstorm the nation to make their cases.  Not this year.  Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more or less a virtual candidate, mostly communicating from home via Zoom.  He offers few detailed alternatives to the first four years of the Trump administration.  Instead, Biden is running on the idea that Donald Trump caused the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession, and that he's responsible for violence in the streets.

Election night reveals three disturbing facts.  Election night revealed a few disturbing items that should trouble freedom-loving Americans.  First that the race is even this tight speaks to disturbing number of Americans who are woefully uninformed.  Second, Fox News has gone over to the dark side, or, rather, the left.  And third, the level of coordination to make this race close is stunning.  That the senile and corrupt Joe Biden could finish so strong speaks to either the gullibility or unseriousness of far too many Americans.  Biden obviously has mental acuity issues and has a history of corruption, but that did not seem to be a big deal to the Americans who voted for him.  I guess the probability of more lockdowns are lost on a number of Americans who are more frightened by the Wuhan virus than the probability of America becoming a socialist, if not communist, nation under a Biden presidency.  Speaking of a Biden presidency, if he were to win, odds are he would not finish out his first term.  Vice President Kamala Harris would become president, a person who dropped out of the Democrat primaries before a single vote was cast based on her lack of voter support, and a politician who is one of the most leftist senators.

This Is Not the End.  [Scroll down]  The Trump Administration accomplished many things, but perhaps most importantly it revealed how deep the rabbit hole now goes:  the fight is both within the federal government and without, and a cancerous corruption has penetrated the core of many of our political and cultural institutions.  What we are up against now is not just a 24/7 propaganda machine dedicated to enforcing recondite woke doctrines inside and outside of our hearts and minds.  Our enemies have moved beyond that to visions of a virtualized world in which good jobs, big families, and strong churches are zapped away, where peons crowd into pods and hook up to holograms of censored news and uncensored porn.  We are going to have to resist all that with everything we have, and fast.

Red Mirage?  [Scroll down]  We are aware that Democrats have already cut television ads they are prepared to deploy to further cement the 'Red Mirage' misinformation, seeking to convince people that all Joe Biden would need for victory is more time, extending well beyond Election Day.  At the same time, we fully anticipate that Democrats will be in court arguing to extend deadlines for accepting and counting votes mailed and received well past deadlines enacted by individual state laws.  Americans should remember that Biden has assembled a massive team of lawyers who will try to loosen election integrity so they can steal this election, and also recall that Hillary Clinton advised Biden not to concede defeat 'under any circumstances.'  The last gasp of the Biden campaign will be ugly and it will be ruthless.

October Surprise:  This Race Is Over.  [Scroll down]  In fact, there's no better source of actionable data than a Trump rally, because everyone who wants to attend has to provide contact information to get a free ticket.  The campaign then uses this data to turn every event into a force-multiplier.  First, each rally reaches millions of voters live at the venue, on cable TV, and on YouTube.  Then millions more engage on Facebook and Twitter.  After the rally, a campaign team targets those who attended with digital ads that recipients can retarget to their contacts as look-alike campaigns on social media.  The party also mines the same data for useful insights and information it can convert into turnout.  Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel noted that 45 percent of the attendees at an October New Hampshire rally were not registered Republicans and 20 percent did not vote in 2016.  Who would wait in line for hours to see a Trump rally in October and then not vote for Trump in November?

High Noon in America:  Will You Fight or Hide?  [Scroll down]  President Trump faces the same overwhelming odds.  The political establishment, the Deep State, practically the entire media, academe, unions, minorities, environmentalists, foreign nations, and special interests of all stripes have piled on, outraged that the president would actually stand up for ordinary Americans.  They thought Trump's promise to "drain the swamp" was just words — the usual political rhetoric that would be forgotten as soon as the candidate took office.  That's what Joe Biden — "friend of the working man" — has been doing for 47 years.  But President Trump is not a typical politician, and the establishment hate him for it because he exposes what they are.  The question is whether the American people will back the president by getting out to vote.

America Waking Up to Vaccine Dangers.  The fight to expose the dangers and controversies surrounding vaccines, and to protect health freedom, is being won, HighWire chief Del Bigtree told The New American magazine's Alex Newman at the Red Pill Expo.  The tide of public opinion is shifting dramatically, Bigtree said.  Even the establishment media is reluctantly being forced to admit this.  And the ongoing scandals around the coronavirus COVID19 vaccine are adding even more scrutiny to the industry.  "Now the world is watching the sausage being made," Bigtree said.  [Video clip]

In Pennsylvania, Undecided Voters Are Torn Between Faith And A Party That Was Once A Way Of Life.  It's common for American families to transmit political values from generation to generation, alongside religion, eye color, and heart disease.  In eastern Pennsylvania, it's not that simple.  When working out how to vote, the issues and platform are important, but so is how dad voted, how grandma would have voted.  All of this comes into the booth with the people we spoke to, and for them, the Democratic Party isn't just a choice, it's the working-class, it's the union, it's the grandparents, and until some time recently they can't quite put their fingers on, it was Catholic and it was pro-life.  In 2020, they see full well that something is very wrong.

Liberty is the Key Issue of the US 2020 Election.  Over many decades, the United States has become an oligarchy, a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.  The oligarchy is primarily composed of the Democrat Party, the media, academia, the permanent federal bureaucracy, and the multinational interests that provide its financial support.  Republicans like Mitt Romney are also members of the oligarchy as well as the greedy political operatives, who profit from candidates like him.  Such Republicans falsely claim to be putting "country over party," but are actually putting oligarchy over democracy.  They do so because of their private dislike for Donald Trump or simply for their own power and profit, often both.

Logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected.  Reelection is the only way of restoring the conditions that Trump created that eliminated unemployment prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.  This, coupled to his near-elimination of illegal immigration (against fierce Democratic resistance), generated greater percentage income growth amongst the lowest 20 percent of income-earners than among the top 10 percent — a noteworthy start on addressing the universal income-disparity problem.  Only a Trump victory will ensure retention of the present relatively low personal and corporate income-tax rates and the avoidance of insane, highly damaging, and counterproductive shutdowns in cowardly terror of the coronavirus, which only mortally threatens 1 percent of the population, who can be isolated and protected.

The Justified Shooting of Walter Wallace Jr..  [Scroll down]  "We cannot accept that in this country a mental health crisis ends in death," said the Biden-Harris campaign in a statement.  We disagree, as should any decent citizen who expects law enforcement officers to leave their families every day knowing that they might not come back.  That job, however, mandates only that they accept the risk of death, not that they forfeit the right to defend their lives.  Was Wallace in the throes of a mental health crisis?  Video of the shooting leaves little doubt.  Only a deranged person would charge, knife in hand, at two gun-wielding police officers yelling at him to drop his weapon.  Sane people know what the outcome of such an attack will be: an entirely inevitable and justifiable hail of bullets.  But mental illness is not a defense for violence.  It does not excuse killing police, or beating spouses, or any of the crimes for which presumably mentally ill individuals like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are rightly condemned.  Mental illness may mitigate the sentence for a crime, but this was an exercise in the right to self-defense, not due process.

Please Stop Telling Cops to Shoot Suspects in the Leg.  [Scroll down]  As a matter of law, discharging a firearm is the police's absolute last resort.  Employing a lethal weapon constitutes the use of deadly force, irrespective of outcome or intent.  The only valid reason to do so is when officers reasonably believe there is imminent danger of serious physical injury or death.  Despite Hollywood depictions to the contrary, tactics such as warning shots, vehicle disabling fire, and targeting fleeing subjects who pose no active threat are not an ordinary part of law enforcement's repertoire.

Rush Limbaugh Sends Stirring Appeal to America as Amy Coney Barrett Is Confirmed.  Rush Limbaugh has been delivering a consistent, convincing conservative message to Americans for more than 30 years — but his pitch Monday night was in a class by itself. [...] Every American election boils down to divergent views of the country's future, of course.  That's what living in a democratic republic is all about.  But the 2020 election is different, Limbaugh said.  "We're not going to have the kind of country everybody thinks we're going to have.  This is not the old 'Republicans versus Democrats,' where we all have the same objectives, just different philosophies on how to get there.  "They do not have those objectives anymore.  Their purpose is to erase the Constitution, start over rewriting it, eliminating the concept of 'the citizen has rights which prevail over government.'  "It's serious, and it's scary, and we don't have a choice.  You have to get out there and vote Trump."

Sorry, there will be no return to normalcy under Joe Biden.  As the presidential campaign enters its final phase, one of the messages of the Biden campaign is that putting him, a 47-year veteran of national politics, into the White House will return us to something approaching normal.  With Biden in charge, all the Trump craziness will expire, and things will be safe, sane and familiar.  In fact, there's no chance of this happening.  If Biden wins, things won't go back to "normal."  You probably won't even hear less from Donald Trump.  And in a lot of areas, like foreign policy, it turns out the establishment's version of normal wasn't all that normal anyway.  Many of my lefty friends want Biden to win not so much over policy as because they have a visceral reaction to President Donald Trump.  They hate the sight of his face, the sound of his voice, even the mention of his name.  Electing Biden, they expect, will sweep Trump off the national stage.  But will it?

The Editor says...
Donald Trump won't disappear from the newspapers at the end of his second term.  He will continue to tweet as long as Twitter lets him.  He's good for the news business.  They can't ignore him.

China is America's enemy but Joe Biden's friend.  The China Virus is reported to have killed over 230,000 Americans.  China fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is a major cause of the drug overdose deaths of over 70,000 Americans each year.  Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80 [to] 100 times stronger than morphine.  But Democrats and their media lapdogs do not blame China.  Instead, the Democrats and the media blame President Trump for his efforts to combat the China virus and China fentanyl, and worse, the media protect Joe Biden by refusing to report and cover the New York Post stories that reveal China's payments to the Bidens.  China failed to notify the world in December 2019, and specifically our country, that the coronavirus (China virus), which started in Wuhan, had spread.  China failed to stop travel from Wuhan to Europe and other parts of the world.

Will Changes to American Life Become Permanent?  The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting, and protesting — all in a presidential election year — are radically disrupting American habits and behavior.  Rents, home prices, and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast.  Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office.  Those more fortunate wonder why they should get bogged down with commutes and urban traffic — or navigate city sidewalks amid homelessness, crime, racial tensions, and urban unrest — when they can make as much money while staying distant in quieter landscapes. [...] Why are Amazon and Walmart booming while smaller businesses are going broke?  Largely because home delivery better serves those who are barricaded at home, terrified both of the virus and government reaction to it.

Do the Chinese Own Joe Biden?  Americans will need to come to grips with a mounting, deadly serious crisis.  The Democrat nominee for the presidency appears saturated with corruption, and worse — yes, there's a worse here — he's compromised himself to foreign powers, one of which — the People's Republic of China (PRC) — is rightly regarded as an enemy of the U.S.  Sly Vlad Putin and whoever runs the Ukraine owns Joe Biden, too.  Russia and the Ukraine having the goods on Biden is bad enough, but China is the U.S.'s principal rival for global dominance.  The blackmailing of a President Joe Biden is a chilling prospect.  Biden as president imperils the nation in ways never experienced before.  What does this mean to the Sino-American rivalry?  It means that with Biden blackmailed and in the White House, the Chinese may never fire a shot to gain hegemony over the U.S. — the domination that tyrant Xi Jingping dreams about.

It's starting to look ugly for Democrats.  How long before their candidate goes completely off the wall and is no longer able to be protected by the accommodating media?  Biden has already twice repeatedly claimed to nationwide audiences that he's running for a Senate seat.  His behavior to both fans and interviewers has increasingly shown his mean side.  He's ready to implode under the pressure.  In addition, Trump's almost miraculous recovery from the coronavirus and the massive crowds cheering him on at his open-air rallies indicate another 2016-like disaster for the left.  Leftists know it.  And this frightens them.  Throw in the exposure of Hunter's exploits that have his dad's fingerprints all over the scandals that are slowly leaking out and raising the awareness to those who have yet to cast their ballots.  The laughably rigged "polls" reminiscent of those in 2016 are fading in relevance.

The Libertarian Betrayal.  Back in the day when some of us were uneasy both with GOP preaching on social issues and with Democrat statism, the libertarians seemed to offer a sensible place in between.  I also remember having the impression that, even if you disagreed with them on some issues, at least they were ideologically consistent, which meant that they were principled.  But then I met some libertarians.  I liked and respected a few.  But others proved to be world-class oddballs, misfits, potheads, and crackpots.  If they weren't hatching plans for independent countries built on abandoned oil rigs, they were writing mad, elaborate political manifestos that seemed to have zero to do with liberty.

Trump Is the Integrity Candidate.  It is now clear from intelligence declassifications — now temporarily taking the place of indictments by the special counsel on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation — that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, knew that she was transmitting reports compiled by Russian intelligence agents and transmitted via former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  These were presented to the U.S. intelligence and justice communities and ultimately to the public through the media as hard intelligence evidence of treasonable conduct by her opponent Donald Trump.  The solid evidence of these facts is now in the public domain.  Yet the Trump-hating media dismiss it all as an insane conspiracy theory.  The special prosecutor, John Durham, was supposed to enable the voters to make an informed decision this autumn.  Instead, he is dawdling along at his own pace — enhancing the possibility of the election of a regime that will as a first priority try to sweep the whole ghastly outrage under the rug yet again.  This administration was hobbled for the first 60 percent of its term with an investigation that should never have taken place, [...]

Do you want a Trump or Biden economy?  When you strip away the media noise, the fundamental question is: do you want a Trump or Biden economy in 2021 and beyond?  Thankfully, both men have records in leading the country so the question isn't a speculative one.  Additionally, given that the states are experiencing dramatically different post-pandemic economic recoveries, we can see what a Trump economy is doing under conservative leadership and policies compared to what a Biden economy is doing under progressive leadership and policies.  As the accompanying chart vividly shows, 14 out of the top 16 strongest economic recoveries are occurring in Republican-led states with conservative policies, whereas 12 out of the bottom 16 weakest economic recoveries are occurring in Democratic-led states with progressive policies.

Yelp Cannot Help Itself.  [Scroll down]  It's no secret that Silicon Valley is doing all it can to make sure Donald Trump loses on November 3.  They feel they did not do enough to prevent his victory in 2016, and they won't make the same mistake this time.  It is not only plausible, but nearly a mathematical certainty, that Yelp's BARBA will be abused to accuse any Trump-supporting business owners of being "racist," however this is defined.  Given BLM's close relationship with Antifa, an idea that is somehow capable of burning stuff to the ground, it's not a stretch to see Yelp as another front in the radical Left's war on everything that stands in its way.

Nobel Peace Prize is beyond a joke and now a mark of shame.  This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is a notorious scandal-ridden organization, guilty of heinous crimes for many years.  Instead of recognizing the magnificent achievement of President Trump and Jared Kushner in bringing together leading Arab states and Israel, which is the very obvious thing to do if peace-making is to be recognized, the 5 members of the Nobel peace Prize Committee — Norwegian politicians appointed by that country's parliament, the Storing — have disgraced themselves and killed any remaining credibility and prestige the prize once carried.

Russiagate Hoax Mastermind Must Be Exposed.  In the bureaucratic struggle to declassify Russiagate-related documents before the Nov. 3 elections and help ensure they aren't buried forever, some valuable nuggets have just been partially unearthed by the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe.  Like handwritten notes by then-CIA Director John Brennan.  During the summer of 2016, he briefed President Obama and top advisers that the agency learned of startling intelligence about the Clinton campaign and Russia. [...] Yet many questions remain — such as who was the Russiagate Hoax Mastermind alluded to by Brennan?  Americans need to know.  The smear campaign wasn't just a political dirty trick.  Nor was it proportionate to combat Trump supporters chanting "lock her up."  No, the malicious lie was the acorn from which the mighty oak grew — one that launched the crime wave of the century.  Unprecedented and wrongful surveillance of a presidential campaign.  Then a prolonged stealth coup to overturn the election.  President Trump and over 50 associates were subjected to seemingly limitless investigations, Privacy Act violations, criminal leaks, defamation and ruthlessly pursued by overzealous prosecutors, including numerous Obama and Clinton political donors.

Will America Survive the Democrats' Arrows in Their Quiver?  Events are hurtling towards the election with strange and disturbing developments every day.  Writers are openly discussing the possibility of a violent coup and civil war. 2020 feels like an unprecedented year, and in this context, a recent threat by Nancy Pelosi sounds particularly ominous.  Asked about the possibility of President Trump placing Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, Pelosi replied, "We have arrows in our quiver that I'm not about to discuss right now."  What might those arrows be?  How much damage will they do?  Let's examine some recent events, in light of her remark.

Will Joe Biden Go Peacefully If He Loses?  Democrats and the media have repeatedly raised the question in the last several weeks of whether President Donald Trump would leave office peacefully if he loses the election in November.  Some may actually believe their own propaganda about Trump being a "tyrant" — a point on which they agree with the knuckleheads arrested for a kidnapping plot in Michigan.  Others know they are preparing a justification for pushing Trump out of office if the result is too close to call, if vote-by-mail is as messy as expected.  But the real question ought to be whether Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the media would accept a Trump victory.  They rejected it last time, and spent the last four years spinning bizarre conspiracy theories about Russian "collusion."  Biden himself was involved, to an unknown extent in that effort.

Evidence Surfaces of John Durham Grand Jury.  [Scroll down]  Within the article — which everyone should read — some names are very important.  The article is framed around defending the New Yorker's previous reporting on the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, so the intent of the article is defensive.  However, the events being described in the article, and more importantly the people being outlined in the article, are accurate.  Especially Daniel Jones and his lawyer William Taylor; and the connection of both to Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson.  According to the article there are two parallel efforts underway to untangle the background of how the false Alfa Bank story was originated.  One effort is a set of civil lawsuits by the owners of Alfa bank against those who created the fraudulent story that flowed through Fusion GPS, into Chris Steele's dossier, into the FBI, and ultimately into the Buzzfeed reporting therein.  The owners of the bank are taking all of these entities into court and demanding discovery of sources who framed/created the false impression.

7 Quick Takeaways On The 2020 Vice Presidential Debate.  [#1] Pence's Superpower Is Debating:  Mike Pence, a former congressman and talk radio host, started off strong and just kept getting stronger.  He clearly came prepared for the debate.  He had a ready recall of facts and figures to bolster his points.  He nailed the questions he wanted to answer and deflected on the questions he preferred not to answer.  While he let several zingers fly, he stayed calm and steady, pushing back at what he perceived as unduly false statements but without the constant interruptions of the Trump-Biden debate.  He spoke slowly and left few cards on the table unplayed.  He was nice, firm, decent, and likable.  Pence's weakest points were when he was on defense about the global pandemic gripping the country.  However, he came into the debate prepared to lay out how a Trump-Pence vision for America is better than the one put forth by Biden and Harris and he accomplished that consistently throughout the debate.

Are Americans Tired of Being Called 'Racist' Yet?  [Scroll down]  How is it that America, which twice elected Obama president, has apparently regressed so far so fast as to deserve these repeated denunciations as irrefutably guilty of "systemic" injustice?  Two words:  Hillary lost.  For three years, we were dragged through the "Russian collusion" hoax as a way of explaining what, to Democrats, was the electorate's otherwise inexplicable rejection of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid.  Democrats believe it is always wrong for Republicans to win elections; they had convinced themselves in 2016 that they were "on the right side of history"; and America was poised to take the historic step of electing Mrs. Clinton as the nation's first female president.  When that didn't happen, Democrats immediately denounced Trump's presidency as illegitimate, the product of a Kremlin conspiracy, and declared themselves the "resistance" to this incipient authoritarian regime that had stolen the election.  All of that was a vast pile of lies, or perhaps a hallucinatory delusion insofar as anyone ever believed it.

Chip Roy and Wendy Davis agree that the other's views are dangerous.  Wendy Davis and Chip Roy agreed on one thing at the first and maybe only debate of their marquee congressional contest Tuesday night:  the other candidate holds views that are dangerous.  "As anyone can see from photos from Congressman Roy's own social media feed as recently as yesterday, he refuses to take basic safety precautions, such as consistently wearing a mask and social distancing," said Davis, an Austin Democrat seeking to deprive Roy of a second term representing the 21st Congressional District, which runs from Austin to San Antonio and includes six Hill Country counties.

The Editor says...
Refusal to wear a mask in October, when the virus peaked in July, is a resumé enhancement, in my opinion.  It shows the world that Chip Roy doesn't buy the media hype, and isn't afraid of the germs in the air.  Ordinarily, Wendy Davis, a/k/a Abortion Barbie is a single-issue politician:  Abortion supersedes all other concerns.  At least that's the only thing for which she's famous.

Who targeted the president?  Obviously, I don't have any proof that the recent COVID-19 infections of POTUS and FLOTUS, several Republican senators, and people working on his campaign and in his administration, are truly random events or something planned, but it doesn't pass the "random cluster of infections" smell test.  Come on, admit it.  You are all thinking it, too.  I'm sure like me, you spent the weekend texting friends about your suspicions.  The virus appears to have targeted Republicans only and left Democrats unscathed. [...] It is odd that in a town as small as Washington, D.C., only Republicans took the hit.  The timing is a second factor.  Key Republicans fell ill after the Barrett announcement, the debate, and Comey's flaccid testimony, and now we are full-blown into October — the final leg of the campaign. [...] They've tried to impeach and remove him, force him to resign, discredit him, undermine his accomplishments, embarrass and ridicule him; they've wished him dead umpteen times; they've relentlessly threatened his life; and they've been clear they don't care about his family or his health.  Why not use the virus further to their advantage?

Learning from Breonna Taylor.  Not every police shooting is avoidable.  Sometimes police do everything right and still end up taking a life.  Other times, police shootings are the result of policy failures, individual missteps, and even malevolence.  Into what category should we place Breonna Taylor's death?  Some key factual questions remain in dispute, and not all the relevant evidence is publicly available.

It is worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is about.  Most people think when they vote for a federal politician — a House or Senate representative — they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation.  This is the old-fashioned "schoolhouse rock" perspective based on decades past.  There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws.  In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct.  This simply doesn't happen.  Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body.

Is the United States in the Midst of an Insurgency?  Insurgency is an organized rebellion to overthrow a constituted government by undermining its legitimacy through protest and disinformation, and ultimately through armed conflict. [...] Initially, when the insurgents are still weak, they organize around a group that is actively dissatisfied with political and social conditions and desires ideological or other changes.  In America, who better to target than the poorest and least educated black Americans, for they already believe they have a legitimate grievance?  Insurgents use propaganda and political efforts to exploit this atmosphere, creating more significant discontent that discredits the government. [...] Leftists are adept at vilifying anyone who defends the current system, even if they acknowledge its flaws and signal a willingness to improve it.  After all, who wouldn't support racial justice?  Nonetheless, if you are not absolutely for the cause as presented, leftists will accuse you of being absolutely against it.  Hence, saying "All Lives Matter" is synonymous with "I'm a racist."

Escape from 2020.  [Scroll down]  But if 2020 happened not from bad luck but the result of trends, then 2021 might be even stranger than 2020.  The cherished establishment goal of a "return to normalcy" may prove unattainable.  With the old world gone and the new one disconcertingly strange, one can only do what circumstances permit instead of waiting on a rollback that will never come.  American anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), "examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations, and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics, and complexity theory."  He concludes that civilizations fall when they have too many spinning plates to keep in the air.  At some point, they start to fall.

There's too much gold in the universe.  No one knows where it came from.  Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries.  To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus.  That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction.  But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system.  And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either.  So where's the gold coming from?

The Editor says...
Life is very complicated for those who don't believe the Bible.  Gold is much too complex to have formed and distributed itself, and could not have evolved.  There is no reason for gold to exist at all, except as a gift to mankind from its Creator.  When you hear someone say, "no one knows where it came from," that's a person who doesn't believe in creation and spends his or her life puzzled and confused.

Are You Not Entertained?  I have been trying to wrap my head around why so many people disliked the first presidential debate when I enjoyed it so thoroughly. [...] As the American Mind's Matthew Peterson commented on social media, it was like a scene from "Gladiator."  That's what I wanted.  Maybe that's it.  Other people wanted something else — something like a sophisticated, polite, clear-eyed debate about policy.  That seems silly to me at this point.  It seems obvious we are in the midst of Revolution 2020.  We are not arguing about policy.  War is neither polite nor sophisticated.  You get to the objective any way you can: over, under, or through.  But that won't help explain things to someone who doesn't see this as war.  So why should we embrace the entertainment of a fight and leave behind the hopes for polite political discourse?  Because the debate of our dreams — the reasoned discourse, the lengthy responses, the political decorum — is not the alternative to the combat we saw.  It's either a fight in the open or an assassination.  It was never going to be polite or about policy.

Comey's testimony [was a] 'vivid reminder' election won't hinge only on the issues.  The political elite remain puzzled — and in agony — over how Donald Trump could still be in the race.  A bullying debater!  A purveyor of mistruths!  A would-be autocrat!  How has our country come to this?  The answer sat staring at them on a videolink this Wednesday, in the smug countenance of James Comey.  This obvious truth will be missed by the left and the media, which continue to comfort themselves with the fiction that Trump won in 2016 by preying on the weak and ill-informed.  The opposite is true.

A 45-Gun Salvo in the Battle for America's Past — and Present.  In Rating America's Presidents:  An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Robert Spencer gives us a strong defense of the greatness, and goodness, of America, through an evaluation of each of the 45 presidential administrations based on the simple criteria of Were Americans safer and more prosperous at the end of this administration than they were at its beginning?  It's a simple and common-sense standard, but one that has been lost amid the prevailing bipartisan commitment to a utopian and messianic internationalism that has had the not-so-paradoxical effect of weakening, rather than strengthening, America's position in the world.  Under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, we have been so busy saving the world that we have scarcely noticed that our jobs are flowing out of the country as well as our troops, while our infrastructure is crumbling and our standard of living is progressively declining.  We have scarcely noticed, that is, until the presidency of Donald Trump.  Spencer here makes a compelling case for Trump, even after just three years in office, being ranked with the greatest of Presidents, in large part because he has put the welfare of America and Americans first.

The pundit class really wants the presidential debates to be canceled.  The pundit class really, really hated the first presidential debate of the 2020 election.  They hated it so much, in fact, that many of them don't want to see another one for the remainder of the election cycle. [...] But more information is almost always preferable to less, even if it means watching two septuagenarians scream at each other for a couple of hours.

The Editor says...
As a public service, here is a handy tip: You don't have to watch the debates, unless you work in the news media.  If the most recent debate annoyed you, don't watch another one.  In fact, you don't have to watch television at all.  Ever.  You would probably be better off and live a lot longer if you removed all the televisions from your house.

Actually, The Debate Was About Issues.  A lot of folks are saying the debate was an ugly, insult-filled shouting match that barely got down to cases.  Actually, I thought it was a highly entertaining exchange that helpfully spotlighted the candidates' differences on issues.  An ugly, angry exchange?  Well, at least it looked like America.  If you took all the people who bite their tongues instead of saying what they really think of folks on the other side, put them in a room together and let them loose, this is what we would sound like.  Pretty?  No.  Honest.  Yes.  The debate's decorum was a snapshot of where we are as a country.

Trump-Biden I: Reality Is Reality.  [Scroll down]  Get this: in a single debate, the Democratic candidate told the president of the United States, on national television, to "shut up, man."  Called him a clown and a racist.  And termed him the worst president in history (an especially ludicrous statement given that Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama held the office in this commentator's lifetime).  The moderator's response to such extraordinary breaks in decorum?  Calling the president out for breaking debate rules, when both men were guilty at various times.  [Chris] Wallace let Biden get away not only with disrespect for the office of president and the conventions of political debate, but also with an approach of slipping, sliding, prevaricating and outright running from his record and his party's positions — for example, repeatedly and simply responding "that isn't true" to charges that were in fact well-grounded.

Debate Recap:  Trump Wins, Biden Doesn't Faint, Chris Wallace Goes Down Hard.  President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden went head-to-head on Tuesday night, and moderator Chris Wallace got knocked out.  Wallace seemed to push left-wing talking points to help Trump and hurt Biden, but both candidates talked over him.  Trump and Biden brought out the fisticuffs and both got in a few good hits.  Biden stumbled but he did not come across as a bumbling fool. [...] President Trump got in more good jabs at Biden than the Democrat got in at him, but Biden did not prove the stuttering fool that many on the Right expected.  I would say Trump won the debate, but it was grating to hear three people talk at once so many times.

Two crucial things emerged from the first presidential debate.  The short version of the debate is that Biden did well if one ignored that almost every other statement he made was a lie or fantasy; Trump dominated him, almost too aggressively; and Chris Wallace may have been the worst and most obviously biased moderator since Candy Crowley.  Most significantly, though, Biden and Trump each made a critical point.  Biden's was a tacit admission that, if he is elected president, he will preside over the end of the filibuster, allowing Democrats to pack the courts and add two new Democrat-majority states.  Trump's point was that he's holding damning evidence about the Democrats' coup attempt.

Trump slaughtered Biden in the first debate.  [Video clip]

The Cleveland Brawl:  First Presidential Debate Was a Cage Fight.  Trump needed to defend his record and show strength; he did that.  Biden needed to show that he had the mental ability to make sense and stand up for 90 minutes; he did that.  In that sense, the debate was a draw.  But Trump succeeded in keeping Biden off balance; clearly, Biden got rattled and flustered.  Biden has a reputation for nasty responses when he's challenged.  He certainly cemented that reputation in the first debate. [...] In terms of substance, Biden echoed the old-fashioned political rhetoric full of generalities, empathetic sentiments, and talk about needing to "bring everybody together."  He was well coached and able to repeat the memorized lines.  Trump was a free-wheeling force of nature and was on the offense throughout the whole debate.  His goal seemed to be getting Biden angry and off-script.  He succeeded.

MSM inadvertently declare Trump the winner last night — by urging Biden to boycott next 2 scheduled debates.  It's crystal clear that the media branch of the Democrat party thinks that Joe Biden blew it last night and damaged his electoral prospects in the first of 3 scheduled debates with President Trump.  There seems to be pretty widespread consensus on the left that when it comes to Biden, the less voters know about him by watching him in a presidential spotlight, the better.  Fox News has assembled a large number of calls on Biden to go back to his basement on the next two debate nights, October 15 and 22. [...] My own take is that Biden has almost no enthusiastic supporters.  His support comes from people who hate Trump, many of them because of his abrasive style.  They are not highly motivated, to say the least.  Last night, Biden demonstrated that when it comes to rudeness, he is at least the equal of Donald Trump.  So, if getting rid of rudeness is the motivation, there is no reason to bother voting for Biden.

The Fox News Staged Presidential 'Debate'.  Debate monitor Fox News anchor Chris Wallace is making the pretence of being "invisible"; the Commission on Presidential Debates just like Michelle Obama in her 'When we all Vote," role, full tilt media-described as "non-partisan".  It's a complete setup!  More than anything else, tonight's debate is a complete concession to Covid-19.  [...] "The two candidates and moderator Chris Wallace will not wear masks at Tuesday's debate, per final negotiations between the campaigns.  Since none of the above really wanted to wear a mask anyway, how much negotiation would have been required?

Trump Must Confront Biden on Democrats' Election Interference Plans.  President Trump on Tuesday night [9/29/2020] will confront the leader of the party currently plotting to rig the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and make sure their candidate enters the White House next year, no matter what.  Joe Biden not only is the ultimate victor in the dry run of the post-election civil war Democratic Party leaders and donors plan to launch after November 3, the former vice president is an old hand at thwarting the so-called "peaceful transfer of power" they now insist the president will frustrate.  Hyperventilating by the media and Democrats aside, the fact is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have done more to tarnish the historical precedent of ensuring the smooth transition from one president to another than any other previous administration.

How the 2014 Midterms Wrecked the Democrats' Supreme Court Hopes.  The 2014 midterms saw historically low turnout.  Only about a third of the registered public voted.  Barack Obama couldn't close the enthusiasm gap, despite telling supporters he was on the ballot in all but name.  Democratic voters didn't see the value in keeping the Senate in their hands; the House was then John Boehner territory, with no significant legislation forthcoming.  A year and a half later, that lazy calculation proved shortsighted.  Democrats didn't envision why upper chamber control would matter in a Supreme Court struggle.  They couldn't see beyond the immediacy of Obama's last yawn-filled term.  And the White House and three Supreme Court seats ended up being the price.

Time to take a closer look at AARP.  If AARP has abandoned its original mission in favor of becoming a tax-exempt subsidiary of a major health insurer, Congress, the IRS, and the people should probably be told.  Someone in a position of authority ought to ask.

Republicans are knocking it out of the park with political ads and memes.  It was already obvious comparing the two conventions:  Even though the Democrats own the actors, they don't own the true creative talent in Hollywood.  That all seems to have crossed to the Republican side of the aisle.  The Democrat convention was drab and oppressive; the Republican convention was bright and open.  It's the same thing with ads and memes.  As far as I know, there are no incredible, knock-it-out of the park Democrat videos.  The Republicans, though, are killing it.  Here are four of the best.

Nothing is Off the Table.  [Scroll down]  McConnell is a man about to meet a big moment.  He's about to lead Senate Republicans in a vote that probably forecloses Democrat thievery as a route to a Biden victory.  On such a moment history pivots.  Democrats get it.  A reelected Donald Trump is a scourge.  They know that this lame duck has no intention of golfing his way through the next four years.  Trump will not only push a bolder agenda but move to right wrongs.  He and Bill Barr have begun laying the groundwork.  The Durham investigation has yet to disclose its findings, meaning, more than one indictment.  If indictments come, they promise to bring justice, redressing an unprecedented conspiracy to destroy a president.  A conspiracy hatched by Hillary Clinton and first orchestrated inside the Obama White House, and then, most notably, continued in the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice. [...] 2020 is a bad year for Democrats, and it's about to get worse.

Lefties at The Nation discover that (non-FBI) feds have been tracing the puppet masters behind Antifa and BLM.  I have been saying for years that President Trump understands better than anyone else that in this age, politics is a reality TV show for most people and that a three-act structure has the greatest impact.  Well, we are in Act Three, folks, when questions and conflicts raised in Acts One and Two are answered and dramatic conflicts start to be resolved.  To put it differently, Rush Limbaugh correctly predicted some weeks ago that the real issues that would affect the election were not yet on the table.  The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the media obsession with her successor may be considered the first of such issues and the beginning of Act Three.  The activities of John Durham and the other federal prosecutors may also figure in the act.  But if the activities of the DHS and U.S. Marshals Service lead to indictments or at least the exposure of the ties behind the rioters, that could provide even more factual basis for voters to reconsider assumptions that the media have foisted on the public.

China is Spying on Millions of People.  And They Aren't in China.  After years of constant media fear-mongering, a sizeable number of Americans continue to believe in the disproven "Russiagate" conspiracy theory.  Putin, the story goes, owns Donald Trump and engaged in a massive propaganda campaign via social media, hacking elections, and other collusion forms to ensure that Trump was elected.  Now, Putin sits like Cobra Commander in the Kremlin, directed Trump's actions, and Trump does what he is told.  Yet these same Americans harbor little fear of China, the nation to which America's economy was sold decades ago (and the one who threatened to withhold all medical exports during a pandemic) and the only real aggressive empire (though admittedly the Russian bear is beginning to wake up) outside of the United States.

Knowing what's at stake, Trump-supporters increasingly refuse to hide in the shadows.  A curious thing is happening in America, and you'd have to work pretty hard to ignore it.  Trump-supporters are emerging from the shadows in large numbers, even in places you might not expect.  One might not be incredibly surprised to hear about masses of Trump-supporters rallying and taking part in patriotic parades in red states like Texas and even swing states like Florida, but eyebrows tend to rise when they begin happening in the capital city of the most important political stronghold of the Democratic Party.

You Don't Have Enough Ammo for the Post-Ginsburg 2020 Apocalypse.  The civil unrest that we've been dealing with since May got out of hand because it was being aided and abetted by elected Democratic officials in each of the riot cities.  Democrats were perfectly OK with looking the other way and pretending that the riots weren't happening.  It wasn't until last week that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi got around to condemning the violence, and that was only after new polling revealed that voter sentiment in the riot zones was shifting to Trump.  D.C. Democrats are already caterwauling about what they will do if the Senate votes to replace Ginsburg before the election and they happen to win control of the White House and Senate in November.

There's a formula to writing a blockbuster White House insider account.  First, leave.  Ideally, be fired in a storm of tweets and a cloud of controversy.  Second, deliver a killer new anecdote, preferably one that mixes proximity to power with mind-wilting triviality.  Three, explain that mistakes were made, but not by you.  Four, sit back and count the cash.  The art of the insider book deal has been perfected by a string of former White House officials amid an apparently insatiable demand from readers.

Attorney General Says BLM Uses Black Americans As 'Props,' Calls Out DOJ's 'Permanent Bureaucracy'.  U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the "law has broken down" in the hands of prosecutors and that DOJ heads, checked by the American people, should oversee these unelected prosecutors to uphold law and order in the nation.  The executive branch has virtually unchecked power in bringing charges, Barr noted.  "That means discretion is vested in the executive to determine when to exercise prosecution power," Barr said to a "legal-sized" crowd at Hillsdale College's Constitution Day Celebration on Wednesday evening [9/16/2020][.]  The only question is:  When should the branch use its prosecutorial power?  The answer is left in the hands of prosecutors who, according to Barr, prioritize cases that they "can get," meaning win, instead of the most important ones to prosecute.

Dan Bongino's Plan To Block A Democrat Coup Attempt Is Elegant In Its Simplicity.  The proactive response comes down to two action points.  [#1] Get every right-of-center outlet you can find to put these Leftist on the record before the election (because afterward will be too late) committing to renounce:  [A] any and all use of 'alternative electors' to sow chaos into the electoral process.  [B] any and all use of secession threats that Governors might be encouraged to use as a cudgel to enforce their will in the election.  [#2] Get everyone (Democrats especially) on record:  will you pledge not to appoint electors contrary to the vote of the people of your state?  Email all of your local and federal officials on those points.  If we get out ahead of this before the election, they can't spring it on us in the Chaos that is likely to follow.

Let's take a moment to applaud that unnamed female deputy's courage.  Within a very short time, we knew a lot about the Compton shooting of two deputies.  We knew that witnesses to the shooting celebrated and did nothing to help; that Black Lives Matter descended on the hospital, hoped for the deputies' deaths, tried to storm the Emergency Department, and blocked ambulances; and that no one in the Democrat party, from Biden down, called out Black Lives Matter for fomenting this anti-police terrorism, with some actually supporting it.  What we did not know until today was that the female deputy showed extraordinary presence of mind, competence, and courage.

It's time to end the lie that a person with a knife is basically 'unarmed'.  Part of what kept the Jacob Blake frenzy alive on the left was the fact that he did not have a gun.  The media and their paramilitary fighters on the street imply that the fact that Blake had a knife was inconsequential.  To them, he was unarmed.  The same thing is happening with Ricardo Munoz's death in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  A police officer shot Munoz when the latter came after him with a knife.  In reality, close-contact knife attacks are horrific and are just as deadly as bullets from afar.  The facts are uncontested:  the police got a call from Munoz's family that he was off his schizophrenia medicines.  They tried calling Crisis Intervention (i.e., the people leftists insist will take over future policing), only to have the Crisis Intervention people direct them to the police.  Within seconds of the first police officer to arrive coming to the front door, Munoz, who had stabbed four people in 2019, rushed at him with a large knife.  The police officer, while fleeing, shot him.

Trump's victory must be a rout.  While benevolence is a wonderful and aspiring trait, it cannot be extended to the ideas of the left.  The field is not fair, and the umpires in the media are one-sided.  Although many may not have the stomach for such defeat, it nevertheless remains the only path to save the country.  Trump simply winning the election cannot be the goal — demolishing and demoralizing the left must remain paramount.  All evidence supports America's existence requiring the 2020 election to be irrefutable rather than a "squeaker."

What happened to Bob Woodward?  Famed reporter Bob Woodward is dropping his new book about President Trump, Rage, next week.  Woodward has already leaked the book's juiciest excerpts to the media, such as the the President telling him during an interview on March 19 that he wanted to 'play down' the severity of the coronavirus in order to avoid a panic among the American people.  This comment has led Trump's critics to call for his resignation or for him to be impeached a second time.  Rage, however, is perhaps more revelatory about its author than its subject.  Let's assume that the critics are right, and that Trump's decision to portray calm in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was wrong and cost thousands of lives.  Didn't Woodward have an obligation to tell the public that the President said the virus was 'deadly' in February and that he admitted to 'playing it down' in March?  Isn't it rather sociopathic to hang on to a potentially life-saving piece of information for five months so that you can sell a few more copies of a book?

Disney, China, & the Ruling Class vs. America.  These days, even Disney movies reveal the deepening divide between Americans that threatens to tear our country apart.  Disney has spent years affixing content warnings to old material, revising and remaking it to conform with contemporary racial and gender standards.  Mulan seems like a perfect fit for this project — the headstrong young heroine who defies "traditional gender roles" to fight for her country (while wearing a binder, no less).  Except that the new version of the film, if you follow its logic, is so nakedly imperialist it would have made Napoleon blush.  The behemoth military complex of the Chinese state is leveraged en masse to defeat an uprising of nomadic tribes whose territory was stolen a generation ago by the current emperor, now an old warlord who demands tribute in blood and treasure from the several diverse regions of his sprawling fiefdom.  The independent nomadic powers are crushed and broken forever, but this time, their oppressor is a girlboss!  Hooray!

Stealing the election.  [Scroll down]  The election itself does not matter to Democrats.  They simply will litigate the election because they know they cannot win it because they screwed around for the last 4 years with witch hunts and impeachment, instead of seeking to flip President Trump's voters.  Without a nice slice of President Trump's voters (about 10% of whom voted for Obama at least once), Democrats are as dead as Biden's brain.  The Democrat riots in city after city are perhaps a training exercise for post-election violence.  Perhaps they believe the Antifa soy boys will intimidate the president's supporters.  Democrats are not exactly rocket scientists.  But I believe the courts are where the Democrats believe they can win the prize they covet most.  The Senate.

China Threatens Total Economic War by Dumping Treasuries.  On September 3, the Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, reported that Beijing was "likely" to sell some or all of its U.S. Treasury holdings.  More important, the paper suggested the United States might for the first time ever default on its debt obligations.  China is certainly trying to destabilize the United States, and it looks as if it's about to declare total economic war on America.  Beijing has tipped its hand.  The question for the Trump administration, therefore, is whether America should strike first.  Yes, it should, and Washington should hit Beijing as hard as it can.  A vicious attack merits an overwhelming response.

What's going on with the Durham investigation, if anything?  Ever since Attorney General Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia collusion probe, Trump supporters have been waiting for the bomb to drop.  And waiting.  And waiting.  But nothing ever happens.  Judicial Watch's founder Tom Fitton thinks that conservatives are being scammed.  Instead of an investigation, it's just another Washington cover-up.  I suspect (or, maybe, hope), though, that Barr and Durham are holding their fire because of the election.

Catholic priest says Democrats are going to hell — and Texas bishop backs him up.  A Wisconsin priest who condemned Catholic Democrats has the support of a Texas bishop.  Father James Altman, pastor of St.  James the Less Catholic Church, lashed out at Father James Martin, who participated in the Democratic National Convention.  In a 10-minute video posted to YouTube, Altman called the priest a "hyper, confusing spreading heretic" and had harsh words toward Democrats.  "Here is a memo to clueless baptized Catholics out there:  You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat.  Period," Altman said in the video posted Aug. 30.  "The party platform absolutely is against everything the Catholic Church teaches, so just quit pretending that you're Catholic and vote Democrat.  Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell."

Hey BLM/AntiFa:  What About the Workers?  [Scroll down]  May I propose a universal principle here?  Governments and politicians and activists and nice liberal ladies have no clue how to help the workers.  And the reason is simple.  You can propose all kinds of pro-labor legislation and unions and benefits and Diversity and Inclusion, and we'll assume that the union leaders and government tax-gatherers and race-card players don't loot the businesses right off the bat.  But what happens to the workers when the next technological revolution comes along and the workers find themselves working for a corporation that is on the skids?  Exactly.  Because the union leaders and politicians and activists have no clue what to do other than tax and bully and regulate.

The Stephen King Election.  Voters start mailing in absentee ballots.  Potential pluralities are cast before the first debate[.]  The debates are alarmingly weighted against the challenger.  A president, at full capacity, confronting each day, every hour, the horsemen of a Communist virus, insurrection, Never-Trump calumny, and Deep State hatred.  Mr. Biden, at the doorstep of his own private Delaware, rolled forth in his dotage, an empty icon representing one of the most corrupt and lawless administrations since the founding.  Trump's retort to Hillary Clinton, "Because you'd be in jail," seems in retrospect like a relative kindness.  At least the former first lady knew what was happening to her.

Q names pedophile politicians vulnerable to blackmail.  You are not supposed to pay attention to anything published on the website QAnon.  Avert your eyes!  Democrat politicians and their media allies are sharpening their attacks against Q, to make sure as few people as possible read what is published there.  Joe Biden, a man fond of touching little girls, recently opined that Q followers should seek counseling for their mental health. [...] Maybe Q is all wrong.  But when the combined forces of the mainstream media and Democrats tell us to avert our eyes, absolute obedience may be a mistake. [...] I've followed Q since the first drop, and I've grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q's messages.  Q followers were prepared long in advance for the easing of hostilities with North Korea, the deflation of the mullahs of Iran, and the discovery of Ukraine as a hotbed of corruption for American politicians.  They knew a great deal about Jeffrey Epstein's activities before the public did and anticipate even more shocking revelations to come.  As Q likes to say, "Future proves past."  As Q's predictions come true, they lend retroactive credibility to the entire enterprise.

What are the Stakes?  This is an election like no other.  To treat it otherwise would be a grievous and perhaps irreparable misstep. [...] Currently, the ruling classes mostly disenfranchise undesirables through social opprobrium, labeling them "deplorable" and letting their attack dogs in the media do the rest.  But in the Obama era, they began to belligerently "weaponize" the federal government, using the IRS and intelligence agencies to thwart their political opponents.  If granted control of the White House again, the lesson they will draw from defeating Trump is not only that they will not be held accountable for such tactics, but that such tactics work.  They will use government agencies to kneecap their enemies in every conceivable fashion.  Those are the stakes.

What You Need to Know About Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Kenosha Violence.  [Scroll down]  ["] It would have been helpful if there [were] body camera images, something where we could see from the officer's perspective sort of what the officer saw that made him believe he needed to use lethal force at that moment against Jacob Blake, whether he saw Blake reaching for a weapon or reaching for something, that there is a sense in which if Blake is reaching for a weapon, if Blake had made threats to the officers.  I've seen some reports saying he had threatened to shoot the officers, but again, none of that has been confirmed.  It's just sort of up in the air, this idea of what initiated, what prompted that officer to believe lethal force was necessary.  That belief may be reasonable.  It may be unreasonable.  We just don't know, but the facts are going to affect that belief.["]

The Democrat Lurch Back to the Primitive.  [Scroll down]  Compare the presidential tickets for 2020: Biden is an old New Deal era carthorse; a Budweiser Clydesdale that ought to be spending his last years sniffing the grass in a nice clovered paddock.  Harris is a total fake: the privileged daughter of two Berkeley academics masquerading as an oppressed First Woman of Color.  Are the Democrats dumb or something?  President Trump is a force of nature, that turned millions into billions when he took his dad's modest outer-borough apartment business downtown.  Then he learned, with his reality-show gig, how to relate to ordinary Commoners.  Vice President Pence is the epitome of a decent Christian man.  On top of that the Democratic National Convention was a celebration of youthful activists and helpless victims while the Republican Convention was a celebration of middle-class Strivers and Commoners.  And especially Black Strivers.  I wonder why?

Why Kenosha Police Officers' Use Of Force On Jacob Blake Was Justified.  Well-established legal principles govern the use of "deadly force" by law enforcement officers.  Initially, it is important to stress that the law is clear that an officer cannot use deadly force "merely to prevent a felon's escape."  Thus, shooting Blake would not be justified based solely on the fact that there was an outstanding felony charge against Blake and the officers were attempting to arrest him.  However, while generally police may not use deadly force to effectuate an arrest, the Supreme Court has made clear that deadly force may be used if "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or others."  In the videos, Blake appeared to be armed with a knife.  It has been established that a knife was found in the car he was reaching into, although whether he possessed it during his altercation with police is unclear.  The mere fact that Blake may have been armed with a knife, though, also does not justify the shooting.  Rather, objective reasonableness is determined based on "whether the totality of the circumstances justified the use of force."

Jacob Blake's Family Attorney Says President Trump Hasn't Called Them; We Should Hope He Never Does.  [Scroll down]  Blake was not at the house to stop a fight.  He was under a restraining order.  He entered the house without permission.  He sexually assaulted his sometime girlfriend.  The car he was trying to get into was not his.  He had an outstanding arrest warrant, and the police knew it.  With this new and improved version of events out there, Jacob Blake is not going to get a multimillion-dollar settlement.  He's going to prison.  The riots and deaths in Kenosha have been caused by a false narrative perpetrated, in no small smart, by Blake's partisans with the assistance of [Benjamin] Crump.  Crump is trying to keep attention on this case by causing a controversy involving President Trump because he sees the gravy train ending.  President Trump did the right thing in calling Blake's mother when he did.  That was then; this is now.  Knowing the facts as we know them now, President Trump calling Blake's family would look like a cheap pander because it would be.

It is the Party of Biden that must lose big in November.  With the upcoming November presidential election, only two months away, the major focus continues to be on Trump and Biden.  Who should win?  Who is better?  Do we want four more years of Trump or another four years of a Obama-type rule?  My readers will know immediately where I stand.  Biden would be major disaster for the country, especially because it appears he is declining both physically and mentally and seems owned by the most radical leftist elements of his Democratic Party.  This essay, however, is a call for voters to not just vote for Trump.  It is a desperate call for voters from both parties and from all ethnic, religious, and racial cohorts to vote for Republicans in every election and at every level of government.  Biden is only the figurehead.  It is the body of the now very corrupt, anti-American, and radical Democratic Party that must be killed, thoroughly and at all levels, including the House, the Senate, and in every state, city, and local council election.

Trump for the Win.  The Democratic National Convention was essentially centered in a Wilmington catacomb and featured an unexciting procession of former officeholders, incanting that Donald Trump had completely failed in the coronavirus crisis and was personally responsible for 180,000 unnecessary deaths and massive unemployment. [...] This will be exposed as the most mistakenly overconfident launch of a major party campaign for the White House since the renomination of Governor Thomas Dewey of New York against President Harry Truman in 1948.  The combination of the two sequential conventions and the performance of the Democratic media in covering them will be a shattering blow to the Democratic strategists who retrieved Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from the prenomination ash heap and put them forward as a respectable camouflage for the party's outright Marxist program.  Whatever possessed them to imagine that they could avoid any comment on the most widespread and most destructive urban rioting in America in over 50 years, could lay the public health crisis entirely upon the president, could maintain their advocacy of an immigration policy that would ultimately result in every poverty-stricken person in the world moving to the United States, while ignoring this administration's reduction of illegal immigration by 90 percent; all of this and many other issues will be as much a matter of interest to psychiatrists as to historians.

David Dorn's Wife Gave the Most Powerful Speech of the RNC, CNN Smeared Her.  David Dorn's widow, Ann Dorn, took the stage at the RNC last night to deliver one of the most powerful speeches in the history of political conventions.  Her husband was murdered by looters in St. Louis after riots broke out following the death of George Floyd.  He was simply trying to protect his friend's shop from lawless thugs.  When I say that every American, regardless of political persuasion, should sit down and watch this speech, I mean it.  It was that important and no one should look away based on their partisan views.

Chaos v.  Order on the Ballot — Again.  Richard J. Daley, the old-school mayor of Chicago, told the city's superintendent during the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to "shoot to kill any arsonists" and "shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting." [...] They don't make Democrats like they used to.  But occasionally years, and usually not the good ones, reincarnate.  Vice President Mike Pence summed up 2020 as "this year like no other" during his Republican National Convention speech this week.  But a 1968 vibe, when riots challenged a shared ethos of law, order, and patriotism, reverberates in the 2020 campaign.

Jacob Blake Had An Outstanding Warrant and a Knife — Two are Dead and Kenosha Burned Down For Nothing.  Yesterday [8/26/2020] late in the afternoon the Wisconsin Department of Justice released some preliminary findings with regard to its investigation into the officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake.  Remember that the initial reports were that Blake had come to the location where his car was parked in order to help break-up an alternation between two women.  Blake had his three sons in the car, but it is uncertain whether he had them when he arrived, or if he picked them up at the location of the incident. [...] So, at the very outset we learn that Blake had not been asked to come to the location to help break up an altercation between two females, we learn that his presence at the location wasn't welcome by his girlfriend, and there may have been legal process outstanding against him that made it illegal for him to be there, such as a Protective Order.  Next we learn that the officers were attempting to place Blake under arrest.  Radio dispatch had advised the officers prior to the effort to arrest him that Blake had an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

No Lives Matter.  With many minority groups claiming historical injustices against them and demanding remedial recognition and reparation, with official endorsement by many institutions of those claims and demands, and with their propagation via all major channels of communication, no voices have been raised in support of the indisputably smallest and most persecuted minority group — the individual.  "Individual" and "individual rights" are words that must not be spoken.  Any recognition of the individual draws attention to the fundamental and massive violation of individual rights stemming from coronavirus totalitarianism and governments' encouragement of riots, vandalism, and violence. [...] The game is always the same.  In the name of some collective greater good — safety, anti-racism, fill in the blank — the wealth, property, work, rights, freedom, and lives of individuals are stolen.  Of course the alleged greater good is never realized, but that was never the point.

Jack Cashill's Unmasking Obama.  If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of the consequences of the real-time reports.  You don't have to wait that long, though.  It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.

The Mirror-Image Convention.  The first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention was a mirror image of last week's Democratic telethon.  The issues that the Democrats ignored — violence in the cities and China — were mentioned again and again.  Where the Democrats showcased elected officials and celebrities, some of the most effective speeches on night one of the RNC came from lesser-known individuals such as activist Andrew Pollack, Cuban immigrant Maximo Alvarez, and nurse Amy Ford.  The phrase "systemic racism" wasn't heard.  But paeans to American greatness and American exceptionalism limned each address.  Last week, President Obama said that democracy was on the line in this election.  The speakers at the RNC agreed — but for reasons that were the direct opposite of Obama's.

The Things Not Said:  What Do Democrats Have to Hide?  In the case of the Democrats, a kind of poetic justice was achieved last week when a virtual convention nominated a virtual candidate for what promises to be a virtual presidency.  COVID-19 made both major parties opt for political conventions that don't put delegates and others at risk with large in-person gatherings, but for Democrats, lessening the risk of disease also meant lessening the risk of the public finding out that there is less than meets the eye to Joe Biden and his candidacy.  What was obvious from start to finish was that a pre-recorded, pre-scripted, pre-ordained infomercial gave Democrats the perfect opportunity to divert the attention of America away from their doddering candidate and their socialist policies into a fawning celebration of phony feel-good sloganeering and Trump hatred.

America Is Polarized.  One Thing Can Still Unite Us:  Rooting for Joe Kennedy to Fail.  Election Day is fast approaching and the country remains as polarized as ever.  Political meaning has been grafted onto every decision we make in our daily lives.  To have the wrong opinion is to commit an act of violence.  Refusing to take sides is just as harmful, if not more so, than picking the bad side.  There is still, however, at least one upcoming event that can unite our fractured nation and bring joy to the hearts of all Americans, regardless of political persuasion.  On September 1, the Democratic Party will hold its Senate primary in the state of Massachusetts.  The incumbent, Sen. Ed Markey (D.), is being challenged by Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D.), a ginger-haired pipsqueak.  Kennedy is also, of course, a member of the degenerate political dynasty whose legacy is defined by death, addiction, sexual assault, and sympathy for the Nazi regime.

'Plot to Change America' Driven by Identity Politics.  America always has been a dynamic country of constant change, with its people looking ahead.  But an elite-driven ethos, which has become the dominant ideology of the country's most powerful institutions, threatens to overwhelm the ideas and traits that made America what it is.  [Video clip]

Democratic Convention Ignores the Elephant in the Virtual Room:  Big-City Violence.  As I keep telling you, when you hear politicians talking, pay attention to what isn't said.  Train your eye to see the negative space between the dancers, because that, too, is often the story.  Urban violence threatens the peace of targeted Democratic suburban voters, like those soccer moms who've just installed police scanner apps on their cellphones.  Trump is taking advantage of this, but he didn't create it.  What America is witnessing in cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York is a clash between the hard left and the liberal Democratic mayors who lead those cities.  And this Democratic infomercial is all about the swing vote, if there is such a thing, in battleground states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  Naturally, Democrats accentuate the positive.  Yet as the DNC infomercial makes plain, this new left Democratic Party of 2020 sees only two types:  The Oppressed and The Oppressors, a formula that invariably leads to rising conflict and anger that can't be covered over with virtual kindness and virtual empathy.

Democrats Killed Cannon Hinnant and George Floyd.  The deaths of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs, and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North Carolina, are both symbols.  Floyd's death during a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a political inquisition.  Hinnant's death has been ignored outside the local and conservative media.  The out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer restraining him, but across the country.  And Cannon Hinnant's murder at the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control crime.  The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant's deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.

When Half of NYC's Tax Base Leaves and Never Comes Back.  The separateness in New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America's eastern edge, stands out.  There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational poor.  They depend on each other, but with COVID who needs who more has changed.  It's easy to stress how far apart the rich and the poor live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown.  The rich don't ride public transportation, they don't send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays far enough apart to keep it all together.  But that misses the dependencies which until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem.

What Difference Does It Make?  I've been railing for years against out of control government spending; undeclared never-ending wars across the globe provoked by the military industrial complex; un-Constitutional surveillance of Americans by our Deep State government overseers; the extreme greed and criminality exhibited by Wall Street bankers as they pillage the national treasure; corrupt politicians of both parties paid off to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors; propaganda spewing fake news media corporations; the Deep State running things behind the curtain; and the destroyer of worlds — the Federal Reserve — debasing our currency as they enrich the few at the expense of the many. [...] When I was censored on sites like Seeking Alpha and Financial Sense because they had sold out to the Wall Street cabal, I stumbled into blogging, with partner dust-ups, server issues, denial of service attacks and ad company censorship along the way.  But I'm still slogging and blogging away twelve years later, through presidential coup attempts, market crashes, the Federal Reserve rescuing the .1% once again, the most overhyped flu in the history of mankind used as a means to destroy our last vestiges of liberty and freedom, and the evil oligarchs attempting to seize complete and final control over all the economic, social, political and military levers of our society.  I'm convinced there will be no consensus regarding an agreed upon presidential victor on November 4th, or possibly weeks after, or possibly ever.  The amount of incompetence in handling mail-in-ballots by the USPO and those tasked with counting them will be off the charts.  The level of fraud in attempting to win this election will be on a level never seen before, making Daley's shenanigans to get Kennedy the necessary votes in 1960 seem like child's play.

The Democratic National Convention's virtual production is awful TV.  The Democratic Party kicked off its presidential convention on Monday — with one caveat.  Instead of meeting in person in Milwaukee as they had originally planned, Democrats opted for a virtual, four-night event due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.  Given the significant risks associated with large gatherings right now, the Democratic National Committee made the right call.  But it could have at least prepared a better production than what we're seeing right now.  Because it's difficult to imagine voters lasting through two hours of this stuff, let alone eight hours over four nights.

The Twilight Of Great American Cities Is Here.  Can We Stop It?  The dreadful death of George Floyd lit a fire that threatens to burn down America's cities.  Already losing population before the pandemic, our major urban centers have provided ideal kindling for conflagration with massive unemployment, closed businesses and already rising crime rates.  The forms of disintegration vary.  In overwhelmingly white cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis, violence has featured white radicals endorsing the extreme agenda of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter.  In more diverse cities, such as Chicago and New York, protests have devolved into basic thuggery as law enforcement has been curtailed and large portions of the prison population have been released.  The pandemic has shaken the once confident ranks of new urbanists.  At a time when even The New York Times is suggesting that density and packed transit lines worsened the contagion, some still embrace theology over data, with some advocating ever greater density, more crowding in cities, and mass transit.  Fortunately, people tend to be less theological about their locational choices.  According to The New York Times, 420,000 people left New York City between March 1 and May 1.  This nearly equals the city's total population increase from 1950 to 2019, according to demographer Wendell Cox.

Get Your Kids Out of Public School.  We are standing on the precipice of the biggest education revolution in generations.  As schools refuse at union behest to reopen full-time instruction in the fall, parents are flooding into alternative options like homeschooling and pandemic "pods."  For the first time in modern political memory, there is likely to be an exodus from public schools.  It will not just be the worst-served in poorer neighborhoods, to whom most school choice programs are geared, that leave.  It will also be middle-class and wealthier families.  This presents the biggest opportunity for domestic victory the Right has had in 70 years — if the Republican Party does not squander it.

Let's Clear up a Misconception — There Is NO DOJ Policy Preventing Indictments Prior to an Election.  This is one of those subjects where everyone is confident that a policy exists, and they know what the policy is, but no one can formulate in precise terms exactly what the policy says or means.  That's because there is no policy at DOJ which prevents the taking of enforcement action — whether that is an overt investigative step or seeking the return of an indictment — which is linked to the number of days remaining before a scheduled election.  None.  No policy.  Not written down anywhere.  Never cited.  Never quoted.  Never enforced.  There is a policy that prohibits the taking of any overt enforcement action for the purpose of affecting an election.  That is prohibited.  But that policy doesn't prohibit taking the same enforcement action when there is no such nefarious intention.

9 Things Every American Should Know About the Navajo Code Talkers.  Navajo code talkers, once unable to even talk about the role they played in World War II, are now lauded as heroes.[...] The idea of using Navajo as a way to create unbreakable codes against the Axis Powers — Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy — in WWII came from a veteran of WWI.  Phillip Johnson, the white son of a Christian missionary, had grown up on a Navajo Reservation and had learned the language in his youth.  It is possible that he came across the idea of indigenous languages being used as code during his service in WWI.  After Pearl Harbor, he proposed using Navajo, specifically, as a code to the Marines.  There were 29 original code talkers.  By the end of the war, there were more than 400.  Native Americans from at least 14 other nations and tribes were among those 400, working to keep the Axis from breaking encrypted, vitally important information.

The Case for Trump.  Americans who want to remain citizens of a united country that at least makes some desultory attempt to protect them and further their interests have no choice but to stay the course.  As the saying goes, the only way out is through. [...] [T]here's little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn't solve.  More populism.  More nationalism.  More patriotism.  More law and order. [...] In short, more adherence to the 2016 agenda.  The only way to get more Trump is, literally, to get more Trump.  Which means the president being reelected and implementing his core agenda in a second term.  But that alone will not be enough.  Saving America as a unified, self-governing republic is a long-term — possibly generational — project.

War Chief Republicans or Reservation Chief Republicans?  [Scroll down]  As a rule, war chiefs were American Indians who refused to submit to displaced from their tribal lands — whether by other Amerindians or by Americans.  The war chief chose war and its attendant ills over submission.  The reservation chiefs, often without being prompted, sold off tribal lands that were not theirs to sell for cheap trinkets: beads, whiskey, and buttons rather than risking conflict.  When I think of the reservation chiefs, I think of those who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24 worth of beads, or men like John Ross or Elias Boudinot who just accepted the idea that their people, the Cherokee, should passively submit to being removed from the Southeast to Oklahoma.  I think of the Chiefs Black Kettle and Little Raven who bowed their heads and passively submitted to being removed to reservations chosen not by them but for them.  I'm sure many of these men thought that what they were doing on behalf of their people was necessary, even praiseworthy.  When I think of the war chiefs, I think of those proud American Indians who fought back against their displacement, who refused to give up their traditions, who attacked despite overwhelming odds.

2020: The Year That Boiled the Frog.  Think of what we've lost:
  •   Professional, amateur, college, and high-school sports, as well as youth athletic leagues:  gone.  (Yes, there is some baseball now, but in empty stadiums — and the prospects for football, basketball, etc. are dim.)
  •   The schools are all closed.  Parents who depend on the schools to look after their children during working hours cannot return to the workforce
  •   The entire movie industry:  gone.
  •   Theater:  gone
  •   Concerts:  gone
  •   Summer camps:  gone
  •   Bars:  gone.  (Here in Massachusetts, they will be closed until there is a vaccine, which for many businesses, if not most, is a death sentence.
  •   Restaurants:  either closed, or operating under draconian restrictions.  Many places still do not allow indoor dining, and those that do permit it only at reduced capacity.  The restaurant business has thin margins under the best of circumstances, and you can be quite sure that nearly all restaurants are currently losing money
  •   Travel:  decimated.  (This includes hotels, car rentals, etc.
  •   Public gatherings:  churches, parties, funerals, weddings, reunions, school commencements, club meetings, cookouts, marathons, and so on: gone.
  •   Gyms and fitness studios, closed—many permanently.
That's only a partial reckoning — but what a list it is!  If one were asked, a year ago, to name the things that make up ordinary civic life in America, it would have been, more or less, the same list.  All of it is gone.

The Editor says...
I guess I'm a wet blanket, because I couldn't care less about professional sports, movies, bars, theaters, concerts, summer camps, fitness studios, or most social gatherings.  And America is better off, in the long run, without public schools, i.e., socialist indoctrination centers.  As soon as the face mask mandates disappear, I'll be back to normal!

Chauvin, Lane, Kueng, and Thao:  The George Floyd Fall Guys.  This is an illustration from the Minneapolis Police Department's official training materials on how to safely and properly subdue a suspect suffering from "excited delirium," a potentially lethal medical condition which, due to the rising use and abuse of illicit drugs, has grown to epidemic proportions on the streets of America.  Look closely.  The depicted suspect is flat on the ground with his head turned to the side in what the illustration calls "the recovery position to alleviate positional asphyxia."  The officer on the left is kneeling on the side of the suspect's neck.  Look familiar?  Could this and related parts of the officially approved and mandated Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) training curriculum be why former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin saw fit to kneel on the side of George Floyd's neck?  And could it be the reason why former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao assisted Chauvin as he knelt on the side of Floyd's neck?

Have Conservatives Gone Dark?  Going dark in a general sense means to cease communications or activities. [...] Judging from the results of recent political polls, one could argue that a significant percentage of conservative voters and perhaps even moderates have gone dark. [...] It is not difficult to understand why conservatives feel this way.  They watch night after night as a slow-motion liberal version of Kristallnacht rolls on in many American cities.  Police are attacked, businesses are looted and burned, statues are pulled down, and innocent bystanders or motorists in their cars are harassed or worse.  They know that wearing a MAGA hat or shirt in the wrong neighborhood may get them attacked and beaten.  They know that a Trump yard sign or bumper sticker may get their house or vehicle vandalized.  They know that if they say or post the wrong thing on social media, they may be tarred as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc., and could possibly lose their job or career.

Washington's dubious — and pricey — 'stimulus'.  With negotiations over a (yes!) fifth COVID-19 rescue package at an impasse, President Trump took action on his own Saturday [8/8/2020], signing executive orders on a number of "stimulus" measures.  Whether his actions or Congress' ultimately prevail, expect a pretty hefty price tag — and dubious economic benefits.  For starters, unilateral steps by a president, especially regarding the budget, are often legally and politically fraught.  The Constitution gives Congress the power over the purse, and if there isn't enough political will to act, it can be a stretch for presidents to simply use their "phone and pen" (as President Barack Obama put it when he issued his own EOs) and sidestep lawmakers.  Democrats have already questioned the legality of Trump's move, and even he says he expects a lawsuit.

Election 2020: A Republic, if You Can Keep It.  [Scroll down]  Now, connect the dots on a very plausible scenario.  On Election Night, President Trump is ahead and winning in the Electoral College.  Trump and Republicans are elated.  Democrats and the media pundits who have made it clear they are for Biden caution that votes which have not been counted — mail-in and absentees — could well change things.  Late on Election Night, President Trump declares victory, asks Biden to concede victory in the interests of bringing the country together.  Biden refuses.  Days turn into weeks, and the 600 lawyers already hired by the Biden campaign are in courts doing whatever it takes to advantage his candidacy.  Biden slowly crawls from his deficit and starts to take over states, mostly ones run by Democrats.  At some point, Biden decides he has won and demands President Trump concede.  This leaves America with the nine Justices of the Supreme Court deciding which ballots are counted and which are not.  There is only one conclusion to be reached here.  The 2020 election will put a strain on the very foundations of our democracy.

This Election Is a Choice between Freedom and Slavery, Good and Evil.  Ronald Reagan famously observed nearly sixty years ago:  "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same[.]" [...] Before the Chinese coronavirus turned into a weapon for destroying freedom, we were already under attack.  For years, hate speech laws have been used to censor points of view and silence critics.  Public schools have replaced education with "politically correct" Marxist narratives, while Christianity is banned from public life and public squares.  Socialists attack words as violence so they may use violence against our words.  Wherever we look, the left has been nibbling away at liberty and pushing us toward gilded cages under their control.  Now the Democrats' push to "fundamentally change America" is in overdrive.  A combination of their awareness that they have lost ground since President Trump's election and a growing sense of urgency to speed up their revolution before his looming re-election has led them to throw all caution to the wind.

The Disappearing National Political Convention.  The original Democratic National Convention planned for Milwaukee this summer was postponed and then shrunk thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.  And now it's all but disappearing into a virtual haze, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: [...] I'm just old enough to remember conventions that were interesting and spontaneous enough to justify TV-network "gavel-to-gavel coverage," before nominees selected in primaries much earlier crushed the life out of them.  And now they may finally be giving up the ghost.

This is not news.  This is somebody stating the obvious.
Counterintelligence Report:  China Prefers that Trump Loses Election.  William Evanina, Director of National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), issued a report on Friday which concluded his agency believes the communist Chinese government prefers that President Donald Trump does not win reelection in November.  "We assess that China prefers that President Trump — whom Beijing sees as unpredictable — does not win reelection.  China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China's interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China," the report reads.  The report also found that Russia is attempting to "denigrate" presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden.

Democrat Domestic Terrorism Can No Longer Be Ignored.  Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act defines "domestic terrorism" as activities involving acts in violation of state or federal criminal laws that are "dangerous to human life" and "appear to be intended" either to (i) "intimidate or coerce a civilian population," (ii) "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion," or (iii) "affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping."  Intimidating a civilian population?  Coercing government officials?  Engaging in mass destruction and assassination of police?  Ding-ding-ding! [...] Democrat domestic terrorists light fires everywhere they go, egg on violence against police and civilians, and threaten businesses who refuse to pay into their protection rackets by "donating" to their favorite money-laundering 501(c)(3)s; and our criminal justice system looks the other way or even actively abets the terrorists by releasing them from jail cells just as soon as they arrive, while leaving Americans to fend for themselves.

75 Years Later, It's Clear Truman Was Right To Drop The Atomic Bomb.  On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. [...] Eleven days before Tibbets's fateful flight, on July 26, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman's "Potsdam Declaration" gave the Empire of Japan one final chance to surrender unconditionally after more than three years of war in the Pacific.  If they persisted in fighting, the Potsdam text promised "the full application" of U.S. military power, culminating in "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland."  The closing of the ultimatum rings all the more forebodingly in hindsight:  if the Japanese refused the terms, the alternative was "prompt and utter destruction."

Durham's investigation drags on.  The Washington Examiner reported, "U.S. Attorney John Durham will soon interview former CIA Director John Brennan, another sign that the investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators is ready to wrap up by the end of the summer."  Notice the story did not say which summer. [...] This looks more like investigation theater than holding anyone accountable for the FBI spying on Obama's political opponents.  This case is being slow walked.

Democrats [are] paying for the Mueller Report.  The media is in denial that it matters that there is a gap in enthusiasm between the deplorable dregs of society behind President Donald John Trump and those social justice warriors backing Basement Biden.  CBS reported the other day, "While much has been made of enthusiasm, it may not be the most important measure this year.  An unenthusiastic vote, of course, counts just the same as an enthusiastic one, so this is a useful measure insofar as it indicates who's firmly behind their candidate and who will actually turn out this fall."  The Hill even went so far as to say, "Biden benefits from an enthusiasm gap, not the other way around."  That argument was made by Jessica Tarlov, who argues the Democrat platform matters more than the candidate.

The West is One Vast Social Engineering Experiment.  Many decades ago, I worked for a while in one of the old Victorian lunatic asylums in England.  They were by then called 'long-stay mental hospitals' and the patients were all highly institutionalized, conditioned by years of dull routine to an existence of passive compliance. [...] What is happening today in the West increasingly reminds me of what I saw in that long-stay mental hospital many decades ago, but is less humane.  Today, when a person displays signs of deviating from political correctness, the cultural overseers leap into action and denounce the behavior and the culprit, whose guilt is incontestable.  If confession, contrition, and penance are not instantly forthcoming, the only sentence is to be declared a 'far-right bigot', with the likely result that the mainstream news media will then pick up the story and try to ruin what is left of the pitiful target's life.

Seven Major October Surprises Awaiting Democrats.  [#3] China, China, China.  Trump keeps this simmering on the back burner, but it won't go away.  This week he suggested he would ban the Chinese-controlled TikTok app in the United States.  Supposedly, this was the instrument by which Democrats artificially beefed up the Tulsa rally numbers — perhaps tipping their hand too soon.  Trump has the winning hand on this and anything China.  The virus is, after all, the China Virus.  The Chicoms lied and people died.  Their tech recently has developed mysterious troubles (fires on ships, etc.).  Trump has made it clear to Xi that he can be a trading partner or an enemy, but there is no such thing as a "friendly adversary".  To the degree that the American public hears about Chinese mischief, it works to Trump's advantage.  After all, Democrat Joe Biden practically has "Made/Paid in China" tattooed on his chest.  Any new Chinese shenanigans both enhance Trump's status and damage Biden.

Save Taiwan.  The fate of Hong Kong should make us worried about Taiwan.  China's introduction of a new security law for Hong Kong — which hollowed out the spirit of the 'one country, two systems' notion — is a powerful reminder of the importance of sovereignty for the Chinese Communist party.  We should ask whether Taiwan is next on the list.  In the past few months, as the world battled to control the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing indulged in increased military activity across the Taiwan Strait.  The purpose was to remind the newly re-elected Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan is an inherent part of China and that there is no alternative to reunification with the mainland by 2049.  Westerners may find it difficult to comprehend the definitive nature of such a message.  But events in Hong Kong suggest that Beijing takes it very seriously.

Rich Lowry outs himself as a fraud.  As editor of National Review, Rich Lowry has advocated fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the appointment of conservative judges.  In his latest column, Lowry showed it was all a pack of lies meant to peddle subscriptions and draw donations to his magazine.  As president, Donald John Trump has delivered on all three as no president has.  Even Ronald Wilson Reagan did not cut regulations as severely as The Donald.  It is a tossup as to the better of the two.  President Reagan fought two communist powers — Russia and Red China.  President Trump fights two communist powers — Red China and the Democrat Party.  Lowry showed little appreciation for President Trump's accomplishments in his column on his Never Trump buddies turning into a cancel culture that wants to destroy any and all Republicans.

The Choice Before Us.  Back at home, left-wing radicals burn Bibles, assault and murder policemen and civilians, set fire to courthouses, vandalize and loot all manner of businesses.  On Friday [7/30/2020], thugs in Portland placed a pig's head on an American flag outside the city's Justice Center.  They put a policeman's cap atop it, doused it with a firestarter, and set it aflame.  The name of George Floyd, the career criminal who died in police custody at the end of May, was at first invoked mantra-like to justify or at least to explain this explosion of savagery.  Now, a couple of months later, there are still ritual invocations of his name but, really, you don't hear too much about Floyd.  The real agenda has come more and more to the fore.  Barack Obama summed it up when he said, in 2008, that he was after the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.  Cities like Portland give us a glimpse of what that transformation would entail.  The clips of the savages burning Bibles put me in mind of Heinrich Heine's solemn observation that Dort wo man Búcher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen:  "Wherever people burn books, they also end up burning men."  It may seem melodramatic, but here is the awful choice we face: the choice between the spirit of mayhem, burning pigs' heads, and burning Bibles, on the one side, and the traditional American spirit that cherishes the rule of law, free expression, and fructifying engines of prosperity, on the other.

AG Bill Barr Inadvertently Exposes Real Reason for House Democratic Hearing in Under Five Seconds.  [Scroll down]  In under five seconds, Barr exposed the "hearing" for what it was:  a pathetic show trial designed to give cover for the failed leadership shown by Democrats including the governors and mayors in the impacted states at the expense of Barr and President Trump.  Their hope was that by repeatedly cutting Barr off after their "gotcha" questions, many of which had absolutely nothing to do with a hearing about the federal response to the riots, they could make Barr look incompetent and overreaching and, via extension, Trump.  Barr clearly was not going to have any of that.

What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?  Last week, with violence spiking around the country, I wrote a column on the growing sense of lawlessness in America's urban areas.  In response, the Tribune newspaper union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, which I have repeatedly and politely declined to join, wrote an open letter to management defaming me, by falsely accusing me of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.  Newspaper management has decided not to engage publicly with the union.  So I will.  For right now, let's deal with facts.  My July 22 column was titled "Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats:  An overwhelming sense of lawlessness."  It explored the connections between soft-on-crime prosecutors and increases in violence along with the political donations of left-wing billionaire George Soros, who in several states has funded liberal candidates for prosecutor, including Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx.  Soros' influence on these races is undeniable and has been widely reported.  But in that column, I did not mention Soros' ethnicity or religion.

They come for John Kass.  Last week I missed the excellent John Kass's Chicago Tribune column on "The Soros-funded prosecutors."  The column was published in the Tribune on July 22 under the headline "Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats:  An overwhelming sense of lawlessness." [...] For calling out [George] Soros, Kass has been accused of promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  In his column today he cites a few articles supporting the Soros connection in positive terms.  Apparently Soros can only be named if he is to be praised.

Good Riddance To Drudge.  Whatever Drudge was, it's not anymore.  You'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.  Aside from his love of weather porn, Tom Brady, and anything Oprah or transgender-related, you might as well go to CNN.  At least with CNN you're getting it from the primary source.

No Holds Barred at the House Lynch Session.  [Attorney General William Barr] is strong and fierce, does not give an inch, does not get thrown off message, sticks to his guns, and sticks it to those who would take him down. [...] For the Democrats the hearing [7/28/2020] was "no holds barred."  No lie was off the table.  No insult was beneath them.  Under the guise of asking the Attorney General to answer questions, they rather used their allotted time to berate him, to berate President Trump, and to lie about the Antifa and other anarchist-driven riots that seek to undermine our Republic and to tear away our freedom.  They were not asking questions, and they did not allow Barr to answer them or speak when he tried.  Rather, they were like a parent on a tear against a child in big trouble, or a boss on a rampage about to fire his or her employee.

Tick, Tick, Boom, Boom, Time's Up, Obama Goons?  Three fuses have been set and are now burning: (1) the explosive origin story of the Russia hoax, (2) the growing backlash against Democratic Party-endorsed Antifa domestic terrorism, and (3) the bottled up economy being shaken right now with one little thumb preventing a carbonated eruption.  They have the potential to redefine the final hundred days of this race in a way that the Democrats' electoral fraud cannot overcome.  It's a contest between a news media establishment that has gaslighted the American people regarding a Russia hoax of the Democrats' creation and all the Americans who have felt that their votes have been taken hostage since 2016. It's a contest between Democrat mayors turning American cities into war zones where Antifa insurrectionists can throw Molotov cocktails and bricks at police officers free from consequences and a growing number of Americans who finally understand that the socialists running the Democratic Party mean to keep going until the whole nation burns.

Don't Lecture Me.  Hardcore liberals are far more apt to engage in public criticism and protest to support their views than conservatives.  A recent poll has just confirmed what we've all known in our gut for a long time:  While conservatives are hesitant to express their political views in public — whether it be at school, the workplace or at social gatherings, for fear of damaging reprisals — extreme liberals have no such reservations.  Emboldened by supportive social media platforms and major media outlets that are unabashedly liberal and decidedly anti-Trump, the far Left has no fear of repercussions as a result of expressing their political opinions.  According to a Cato Institute study conducted in July 2020 of 2000 Americans age 18 and older, "Strong liberals are the only political group who feels they can express themselves without fear of repercussions."  And express themselves they do.

The Establishment Has No Clothes.  America's elite — the world's elite, for that matter — is deeply corrupt.  So much so that it's becoming difficult to understand what makes them elite anymore.

It Is the Resistance, Not Trump, That Needs To Learn To Accept Election Results.  The final 2016 debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave voters much to think about.  That was the night Clinton admitted that she was willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia in Syria.  For his part, Trump highlighted Clinton's radical support of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, a charge she could not deny.  But media coverage in the days that followed focused almost exclusively on Trump's response to a question posed by moderator Chris Wallace, a Fox News host.  Asked if he would "absolutely accept the result of this election," Trump said — and you may want to sit down for this one — "I will look at it at the time."  For context, Trump had been talking about election-rigging for months, made easier by the confirmation that Democrats had rigged their primary election against Bernie Sanders for Clinton.  During the GOP primary, Trump tended to complain about rigging in contests he lost.

What to Leave Out of the COVID Relief Bill.  Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have spent the past few months putting off another round of coronavirus relief.  Watching and waiting made some sense, given the fluidity of our condition, but it now leaves them with little time to reach a common position and then negotiate an acceptable outcome with the Democrats.  Senate Republicans have made a good start by ditching two bad ideas.  One is President Trump's demand for a big reduction in the payroll tax.  Under the right circumstances, cutting that tax would be a very good idea.  It does not, however, fit the needs of the moment very well.  The millions who are out of work would not receive any direct benefit from it, while many people who don't need help would.  Federal revenue, meanwhile, would drop.  Deficits will unfortunately have to rise over the short term, but they should do so only for good reasons.

Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia is on the right track with activist investor reform.  Should people be able to invest in ventures that aim to have a social or environmental impact?  The answer is yes.  In fact, people should be able to invest in, buy stock in, and even bet on anything they want.  However, fiduciaries (those that manage other people's investments) must follow some rules.  The first rule of a fiduciary should be to put the economic interests of its clients first.  Some haven't exactly followed that rule and have let personal politics and beliefs get in the way, investing in assets that sacrifice returns for environmental, social, and governance activism — also known as ESG.  On the individual level, this is not an issue, but someone else making a political point with your 401(k) money should be a choice that is off the table.  Fortunately, the Trump administration is looking to codify this simple idea and help refocus fiduciaries on their jobs:  making money for their clients.

Communist China:  A History Lesson for Mark Cuban.  After [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter, claimed America is systemically racist, and accused [U.S. Senator Ted] Cruz of not doing enough to stop the COVID-19 pandemic (which Cuban failed to note originated in Communist China), he espoused the amoral canard corporate titans have long used to justify their complicit silence about oppression in the face of massive profits:  "But I have never gotten involved in the domestic policies of ANY foreign country.  We have too much to do here."  Cuban and his fellow corporate titans find Communist China's predatory trade practices offensive because they adversely impact American corporations' ability to make a buck.  What does not offend Cuban and his fellow corporate titans is Communist China's systematic crushing of the Hong Kong people's liberty and its relocating of Uyghurs by the trainload into concentration camps in order to exterminate their culture and their persons.  All that has no impact on these American corporations' ability to make a buck from this evil regime.

Election Turns On Five Questions, Such as Marxism.  The presidential election result is now down to five questions.
  •   Can the President override the Democratic press's thunderous campaign to terrorize the country over the coronavirus?
  •   Can the president successfully connect Vice President Biden's campaign to the hooligans, anti-white racists, and urban guerrillas who effectively are being encouraged by the corrupt Democratic mayors of many of the nation's largest cities?
  •   Will the economic recovery and the decline in the unemployment generated by the COVID-19 shutdown continue at its recent pace and strengthen the economy as a pro-Trump electoral argument?
  •   Will the Republicans make adequately clear to the country the authoritarian and Marxist implications of the Biden-Sanders unity document?
  •   Will special counsel John Durham indict senior members of the Obama Administration over their handling of the spurious allegation of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election and Justice Department violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and how will Mr. Biden himself come through it?
Apart from the Durham question, the president has it in his power to produce answers favorable to himself on the other four questions.

Bobby Jindal slams 'short-sightedness' of never-Trumpers: 'They should admit they are Democrats'.  Former 2016 presidential candidate Bobby Jindal warned "never-Trump" Republicans that their election-season opposition to the incumbent of their own party will not help return the GOP platform to one they closer align with — but instead "elevate" the Democratic forces they claim to similarly oppose.  Writing in the "Washington Examiner" on Friday, Jindal — a former two-term Louisiana governor — said that while many never-Trump Republicans have some policy differences with the president, they instead often target Senate Republicans and the entire contemporary GOP for scorn simply because of their alliance with or acceptance of the commander in chief.

China consulate to State Dept:  You can't make us leave.  What happens when a consulate refuses to close after it loses its diplomatic status?  Likely nothing good, but China's Houston consul apparently wants to find out.  Cai Wei told Politico last night that the State Department order to close the consulate violated international protocol, and he has no intention of closing the facility.

The Editor says...
Turn off the electricity, cut off the water, disconnect the phone lines, surround the building with Wave Bubbles, and bombard the building with Hong Kong radio stations 24/7.  They'll leave.

Why are federal agents in Portland?  Rioters and criminals have been attacking federal law enforcement officers and the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland for over 55 consecutive days.  The mission of the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Protective Service is to protect federal buildings, and the fellow officers and civilians inside.  The Federal Protective Service has protected the Hatfield Courthouse since it was erected in 1997.  The Department of Homeland Security has sent cross-designated law enforcement officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to support the Federal Protective Service officers in protecting the federal courthouse and the federal officers inside it from violent rioters.  The Department of Justice's U.S. Marshals Service also is supporting the Federal Protective Service at the courthouse.  Every federal officer protecting the courthouse and staff in Portland have received the service's specific training for that role.

Do Global Elites Commit Crimes Against Children?  The issue of how some of the most privileged people in the world treat children is getting more traction.  After the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, millions of ordinary people are critically examining the actions of Hollywood celebrities, titans of business, powerful politicians, media corporations, and other elite groups.  Scenarios that previously seemed unthinkable are becoming more thinkable by the day.

Let's stop the nonsense about federal agents in Portland.  There have been conflicting reports about federal agents in camouflage and unmarked vehicles detaining protesters in Portland, Ore., without cause.  This comes on the heels of scenes of federal officers, outfitted in blue shirts and tactical vests but no official patches or badges, protecting facilities in Washington, D.C., in June.  The events have called into question the role of federal law enforcement and how it intersects with traditional policing.  While many federal law enforcement agencies are investigative in nature and have special agents, not police officers, some do have a more traditional police role.  The Secret Service Uniformed Division has been in operation since 1922 and provides traditional law enforcement services around the White House and foreign embassies in the U.S.  Its agents conduct operations around the president and other dignitaries, including K-9, explosive ordnance disposal, and counter-assault teams.  The Capitol Police is approximately 1,500 police officers strong and functions much like a traditional police department.  Many other agencies have uniformed police officers as well, including the FBI, whose police officers protect the agency's headquarters, FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., and its enormous field offices in Washington and New York.

The Threat That Tucker Carlson Poses to the Media.  On Monday night [7/20/2020], Tucker Carlson blasted the New York Times for preparing to publicly reveal his new home — a home he had to move to when progressive activists vandalized his previous home and repeatedly threatened his family. [...] I want to explain exactly what it is that Carlson is doing and why they find it so dangerous.  Carlson approaches the news as someone who understands and feels the populist ideas that have long been ignored in the United States, but he does so as someone uniquely gifted to give an intelligent voice on them.  He has gained a following by explaining the very things that led to President Donald Trump being elected, and he has done so without swearing absolute fealty to Trump.  In fact, the relationship is rumored to be somewhat reversed:  Trump himself pays close attention to what Carlson is saying because he recognizes that those views are largely the views of his base.  So when Trump does something that Carlson disagrees with, and Carlson voices his disagreement, you can bet the President has heard him and is seriously considering a change of course.  This is also what makes Carlson so unique on his own network.

Unraveling "The Golden Thread": The Suspicious Cold War Death of Dag Hammarskjöld.  In 1961, Cold War tensions and the legacy of colonialism came to a head in the nation known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Early that year, Patrice Lumumba — who had played a crucial role in Congolese independence — was assassinated as part of an ongoing civil war in the country.  Lumumba wasn't the last statesman whose life was claimed by this conflict, either.  On September 18, United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash while attempting to negotiate peace among the conflicting factions.  In the nearly 60 years since then, Hammarskjöld's death has been analyzed from a host of vantage points.  Was the crash a tragic accident, or were more sinister forces at work?  It didn't help matters that the initial investigation was marred by imperialist, racist attitudes that led to information from several Black eyewitnesses being discounted.

Spending As If There Is No Tomorrow.  Perhaps now is not the time in the middle of a pandemic, job losses and threats of even higher unemployment, to mention the national debt.  Or, perhaps it is.  One of the common characteristics of the fall of past empires and superpowers is massive national debt.  Ours is currently at $26.5 trillion and growing by the second.  Americans should regularly consult the real-time debt clock and ponder the future.  The interest on the debt, which also grows daily, is higher than the nation's gross domestic product for the first time since World War II.  With more borrowed money going out the Treasury Department's door because of the pandemic and Joe Biden promising to spend additional trillions should he become president the debt will become an even greater economic albatross.

Trump has been right about China for years.  Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. [...] It seems distinctly less funny now.  There is a reason that the novel coronavirus is popularly denominated the Wuhan flu or CCP virus.  As Bill Gertz observed in How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick, 'the world does not need to prove that the communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the coronavirus from a lab' in order to cast a jaundiced eye upon its many malefactions. 'It is now clear,' he writes, 'that decades of international engagement and cooperation with communist China was a mistake that seriously undermined fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, openness, honesty, and free markets.

How to Cancel 'Cancel Culture'.  The woke left has awakened to the fact that it can destroy almost anybody's career and livelihood by just surrounding him or her with controversy and bad press, which convinces the person's employer that the simplest way to avoid the controversy is to fire the person in question.  The same techniques can and should be used against the enemy's own livelihoods and careers.

Democrats get ready for a Wellstone funeral for John Lewis.  Rep. John Lewis, a notable ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s during the days when civil rights work was dangerous, died Friday, and already the thumping can be heard from the Democrats for a Wellstone-style funeral.  As in that sorry 2002 episode, the funeral for Lewis won't be about honoring Lewis, it will be about Getting Trump.  From there, it won't take long for it to become a foot-stomping political rally, as happened in the case of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash.

For America to function, Americans must have a healthy fear of police.  The emotion-based group consensus that supports police use of authority and force becomes strained and fragile during times of intense political campaigns and ideological divisions accompanied by large group demonstrations that can shift quickly toward aggressive mob mentality, anarchic behavior, and chaos.  One elemental aspect of the normal dynamics of police power and authority is fear of arrest, detention, and possible citation or fine.  Policemen can be kind and helpful and embrace the best in community police values, but at a certain tipping point, their authority and exercise of it demand respect and submission.  Period!  Resisting arrest or assault of a police officer is and must be verboten in our society.

About That George Floyd Judge Judy Video.  One of the bits of fake news currently making the rounds on the geriatric circuit purports to show George Floyd, at age 17, on the Judge Judy show, where he admits to being a carjacker.  The message — that he was a rotten [person] and more or less deserved what happened to him at the hands of Minneapolis police — is impossible to miss.

A Silent Majority Isn't Good Enough In The Culture War.  The "Silent Majority" comes up a lot these days, often in the context of a warning to Democrats about an electrified coalition of under-the-radar voters motivated to support President Trump by the left's culture war.  It's true Democrats aren't helped politically by their proximity to radical leftism, although I'm not sure I buy the argument it'll cost them the Oval Office in 2020.  Whether the Silent Majority is enough to swing an election, it's certainly no longer enough to swing the culture.  If such a group exists, it needs to speak up.

Who Funds The Lincoln Project?  Exactly Whom You Expect.  If the Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn't merely an arm of the Democratic Party.  If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn't been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads.  If the group wasn't working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system.

Will the Federal Reserve Cause the Next Riots?  The Federal Reserve manipulates the money supply by buying and selling government securities.  This means that when the Fed decides to pump money into the economy, it does so by putting it in the pockets of wealthy, and oftentimes politically-connected, investors who are able to spend the new money before the Fed's actions result in widespread inflation.  Wealthy individuals also tend to be among the first to invest in the bubbles that form when the Fed distorts interest rates, which are the price of money. [...] In response to the government-caused economic collapse, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about a trillion dollars from mid-April to early June.  In contrast, it took the Fed all of 2019 to grow the money supply by 921 billion dollars.  Even before the lockdown, the Fed was massively intervening in the economy in a futile attempt to prevent economic crisis.  A coming crisis will likely be triggered by a collapse in the dollar's value and a rejection of the dollar's world reserve currency status.  The economic collapse will be worse than the Great Depression.  This will result in widespread violence along with government crackdowns on liberties, accelerating the US slide into authoritarianism.

McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.  In response to a growing anti-police sentiment, McGruff the Crime Dog has been taken to the vet and put down.  "We just didn't feel safe with him around," said activist Ray Clarke, one of the people who demanded McGruff be euthanized.  "He was always urging people to 'Take a bite out of crime,' and we don't need more violence like that from law enforcement.  He has to die."

Trump Needs to Scale the Real Wall of 2020.  America's small towns are underpopulated, while big cities of plague, protests, and panic are overpopulated, overpriced, and overpopularized. [...] The crisis of the inner city is not just the erosion of the black family, high crime, fatherless children, dismal schools, cynically concentrated abortion clinics, racism, and tribalism, but the old nemesis of segregation.  Black families should have the alternative of moving out of Chicago or Baltimore into smaller towns and the countryside, where race far more easily becomes incidental, not essential, to one's persona.

The Time Is Now:  Abolish the Department of Education.  The Department of Education should disappear, simply, because each university, each business, each person ought to be able to impose whatever rules of justice they wish on all people and institutions they deal with voluntarily. [...] We got along without the Department of Education before 1979 and we can do so again.  The value of a college education will not disappear if the federal government takes a hands-off approach.

How to help Hong Kong and kick-start our economic recovery at the same time.  Republicans and Democrats are largely united in horror at the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong, with the semi-autonomous state now facing increasing censorship from the mainland and rampant civil liberties violations.  We don't have to just watch in despair.  We should follow the United Kingdom's lead and open our doors to immigrants and refugees from Hong Kong. [...] The immigration boost wouldn't have to be an influx of unskilled laborers, a controversial prospect among some factions of the Right.  We could make visas "merit-based" — a shift President Trump and other immigration hawks have supported in the past.  Too, we could even restrict the program to skilled doctors, nurses, researchers, and scientists to help us combat COVID-19 and skilled programmers or technology experts to help us challenge the Chinese Communist Party's growing influence over global technology.  Suffice it to say we would be admitting people with the skills and resources to make contributions, not wards of the state or additions to the welfare rolls.

Police Shoot Tuning Suspect, as He Points Revolver at Officer.  A bit before 6 p.m., in downtown San Diego, California, two police officers noticed a man in a red track suit.  He was wanted in connection with a recent robbery.  He had a distinctive face tattoo, which is how the officers identified him so quickly.  In the ensuing confrontation, the suspect flees from the police, and is shot.  Protestors claim he was shot without justification.  The next day, a hundred protestors gather.  They threatened to "burn down the system".  The San Diego police act quickly.  They released video of the shooting from four sources, including two police body cameras. [...] The well done release by the San Diego Police took control of the narrative.  It is worth watching and studying.  It shows how easy it is to justifiably shoot someone in the back in defense of self and others.  Many have said shooting someone in the back is never justified.  That is false.  Real world defensive shootings are seldom static.  They are fast, dynamic, and changing quickly.  Adversaries are often moving, twisting, and turning.

Republicans must hold firm and reject unemployment extension.  After months of being crippled by the coronavirus and the resulting lockdowns, the economy is gradually improving.  Jobs are coming back, and businesses are reopening.  But that progress will hit a brick wall if Democrats get their way and lawmakers recklessly extend enhanced unemployment benefits, which will create a significant disincentive for people to return to work. [...] On July 9, weekly jobless claims slowed to 1.3 million.  While still high by historical standards, the number was lower than expected and well below the stunning 6.6 million claims filed in just one week of April.

Tucker Carlson rips the mask off the Democrat party.  I was working on a post about how the Democrat party is cynically hiding their presidential candidate, Joe "Who's My Wife" Biden, from public view, while using the Wuhan virus, mobs, and cancel culture to silence any opposition to Democrat politicians or their plans for America.  Then, while I was looking for a specific link, I stumbled across Tucker Carlson's monologue about Biden and the debates.  I knew I had nothing to add.  Carlson is getting increasingly angry about what's going on in this country.  The thread of humor that used to underlie his opening monologues is gone.  Instead, he's gone full constitutional warrior, tackling the Democrats' cynicism, and calling out the dual leftist practices of violence and censorship.  Every day, Carlson is better than the day before, and that's certainly true with this monologue.

You Know What's The Ultimate 'Place Of Privilege'? Living In The USA.  When I was about 10 years old, my mom brought me to the United States.  She had come to the U.S. many years before with only about $200 in her pocket when she stepped off the plane.  She made a life for herself, and when she was finally able, she brought me.  She eventually met my dad, and he later adopted me.  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  My mom and dad are amazing people — caring, salt of the earth, hard-working people.  Thrift shops and Goodwill stores were our malls when I was younger, and to this day I feel a sense of excitement when I enter one.  My parents gardened in the backyard, spent their money frugally, and continued to save for part of that American Dream:  their own house.

The Great Fireworks Rebellion of 2020.  If Donald Trump's Independence Eve address at Mount Rushmore was a battle cry for the republic, millions of Americans seemingly joined forces with the president the next evening with their own sort of ammunition: fireworks.  Lockdown orders and "social distancing" decrees canceled official Fourth of July fireworks displays across the country — the latest in a long list of cruelties inflicted on the public to suffocate freedom and joy — but fed-up patriots from sea to shining sea were having none of it.  Families and friends gathered in defiance of government bans on well-attended gatherings to celebrate our nation's founding.  Then, as the sun set, Americans lit up the skies with red, white, and blue bursts of pride in a not-so-subtle rebuke of leftist mobs intent on destroying our nation's past, present, and future.

Kanye West:  Removing God and Prayer from Schools Meant More Drugs, Murders, Suicide.  Removing prayer from schools has led to "more drugs, more murders, more suicide," said rap megastar and fashion mogul Kanye West, who unveiled his unfiltered thoughts on President Trump, God, and politics in an interview with Forbes just days after tweeting about his presidential bid.  "Reinstate in God's state, in God's country, the fear and love of God in all schools and organizations and you chill the fear and love of everything else, so that was a plan by the Devil to have our kids committing suicide at an all-time high by removing God to have murders in Chicago at an all-time high because the human beings working for the Devil removed God and prayer from the schools," the "Follow God" rapper said.  "That means more drugs, more murders, more suicide."

If Republicans Extend Federal Unemployment Benefits, It's Game, Set, Match For Democrats In November.  In March, a so-called "drafting error" in the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill led to laid-off workers receiving an extra $600 in federal unemployment benefits on top of the state benefits they were already slated to receive.  It was left as-is despite the protests of a few GOP senators, mainly because Schumer & Co. were quick to use the bad optics of seemingly 'taking money away' from people purposefully forced out of work to their advantage.  Also, outdated and technologically inept state unemployment systems weren't equipped to handle individual situations, making a one-size-fits-all approach the only way to make sure people were made whole — and then some.  It's the "and then some," however, that's been the rub for at least the past month or more as America tries to get back on its feet.  Sure, if the government was going to unjustly take away people's livelihoods to fight a virus that mostly kills people in nursing homes (without protecting those nursing homes) and has a death rate only slightly higher than the flu, said government certainly has the responsibility to ensure those people don't go under.  But in giving many of them an actual raise, they created a whole other set of problems that are now playing out in factories, restaurants, and thousands of other employers that typically employ a lower-skilled segment of the U.S. population.

How Mass Protests End.  As several political scientists noted in The Washington Post, "The United States rarely has protests in this combination of size, intensity and frequency; it usually has big protests or sustained protests, but not both."  When will the protests end?  And what will it mean when they do?  Although all waves of mass protest are different, they tend to follow a similar course.  Demonstrators can't stay in the streets forever.  When they relent, though, that doesn't mean they have stopped caring — or that the movement is over.  After protests die down, their goals and ideas can survive as the ongoing work of organizing continues.

As the crisis deepens, Q says rise or die.  Americans celebrated Independence Day this year in the most perilous state since the Civil War, uncertain if our divided house can still stand.  But beneath the terrifying screams of violence, riots, and political hysteria, a still, small voice could be heard:  the unprecedented voice of Q.  Q's growing community of followers believe that Q is a military intelligence operation, the first of its kind, whose goal is to provide the public with secret information.  Q, they believe, is a new weapon in the game of information warfare, bypassing a hostile media and corrupt government to communicate directly with the public.

Freedom and Independence are Inextricably Linked.  While asserting national independence 244 years ago, the signers of the Declaration understood the freedoms they sought belonged to individuals and that government secured — not granted — those rights.  The Founders understood that self-governance as a nation begins and ends with self-governance by the individual.  We could not have one without the other.  If we turn over responsibility for our lives, families, and communities to government our dependence expands and our liberty contracts.  It is as inescapable as the natural law of gravity.  The Founders' notion of freedom was inextricably linked to personal independence, described as the absence of interference into the daily life and destiny of individuals with the caveat that to preserve and protect freedom, individuals accept some inevitable interaction with government so long as it is minimized to the greatest extent practicable.  Consequently, the most crucial of those rights would be articulated in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.  First among these are the foundational freedoms of religious liberty and the right of conscience.

America's Sovereignty Is Teetering on a Precipice.  Two hundred and forty-four years after the 13 British colonies in North America declared their independence and became a sovereign nation, America is poised to collapse from within.  Her imminent demise will not come from foreign troops quartered on her soil.  It will come from Marxists and anarchists who use racial grievance and the cries of the oppressed to dismantle America's institutions and defenses.  Insurrection labeled as "peaceful protest" is the battering ram weakening our nation's foundations.  Using the voices of the oppressed and deceived masses, and their bodies and legitimate grievances as shields, is part of a deliberate plan to bring about a new order guaranteed to be worse than what exists now.

Happy July 4: Tyranny Of The Woke Mob Might Be Worse Than Suffering Under British Rule.  When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown.  But there's a new master gaining power in America.  We need to shrug it off before it takes over.  Because we're marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.

Cool Hand Trump.  As the president takes heat from Chicken Littles who whine about acting presidential, President Trump remains coolly presidential in handling two nation-paralyzing events simultaneously.  In both cases, the president gave Democrats plenty of rope and watched them hang themselves. [...] Democrats thought their lockdowns had wrecked his MAGA economy, which they believed would lead to a landslide for Doctor Demented and the end of capitalism.  Instead, President Trump is making America great again — again.  Voters notice.  Covid 19 so failed Democrats that they unleashed Antifa to turn cities aflame in the summertime.  How is that working for them?  Seattle's Karen mayor, Jenny Durkan, stuck her tongue out at the president and turned six blocks of her city over to these thugs.  Three weeks later, she had police shut it down after the thugs went to Her House.  How dare they?

5 Ways You Can Fight Back In The Cultural Civil War.  [#2] Shift your spending away from corporations that hate you, like Amazon.  If you're a conservative, understand that Amazon hates you (but loves communist China).  Also understand that you don't have to buy everything on Amazon.  That new can opener or garden hose you so desperately need?  You can order pretty much whatever you need from Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and so on.  Many of these places will even deliver to your doorstep.  Will you pay a little more for it?  Maybe.  Will it come in three or four days instead of tomorrow?  Yes.  But if you can't bear that miniscule inconvenience for the sake of your principles, then you don't deserve America.

Why Biden's Lead Will Evaporate.  Based on recently released documents, the once-rumored 'Obamagate' conspiracy is now known.  This plot involved people at the highest levels of government.  Also known is that the goal was to destroy Donald Trump's presidency.  Attorney General William Barr and Congressman Devin Nunes have been dropping hints that the seemingly endless investigations are about to come to a head.  What is unknown is what the response will be.  These crimes, if they go unpunished will firmly place the deep state in control of our fate.  Both the Democrats and the anti-Trumpers are fine with that scenario.  Americans are not.  If AG Barr actually does what is right, justice will be served:  Advantage Trump.

They are trying to start a war.  When Corona fails again, they will try to start a war with Russia.  The other day, the New York Times was subtly and not so subtly promoting the claim that President Trump was standing callously by and coddling Russia's Vladimir Putin even as Putin was busily offering the Taliban bounties for the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen.  It was the old "Trump is a Russian agent" canard whipped out in a new form. [...] President Trump denied it.  His acting director of National Intelligence at the time, Richard Grenell, denied it vehemently. [...] And for what it's worth, even the Russians denied it.  But the Times pressed on with the claim and even did some additional reporting to claim that it had proof. [...] Fortunately, there was CBS's Catherine Herridge, who batted back at the press at its own game — and found some pretty exculpatory backing for the Trump administration's statements.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams:  Republicans will be hunted if Biden is elected.  Comic strip creator Scott Adams said there's a "good chance" Republicans will be killed if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected.  Adams, who created Dilbert in 1989, sent out tweets Wednesday claiming conservatives would be targeted with violence should the presumptive Democratic nominee win the 2020 election.  "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year," Adams warned in a tweet.  "Police will stand down.  Republicans will be hunted," he added.  Police will stand down.  [Tweets]  After some social media users questioned his claim, Adams said he spoke with a woman who told him she was fired from her job because her colleagues suspected she supported President Trump.  "Just interviewed a woman who was fired for suspicion of liking President Trump.  Suspicion.  Fired," Adams wrote.

Riots to Distract from Obamagate?  In the 1962 musical-comedy, The Music Man, grifter Harold Hill cons an entire Iowa town by whipping up a false crisis (the moral decline of its young men) and championing a false solution (a boy's marching band). He then bilks the town of money for instruments and uniforms while only pretending to follow through with his plan. [...] Today in America, a dark and dystopian version of this theme is unfolding before our eyes.  The Iowa town is all of America, Harold Hill is Obama and the Democrats, the false crisis is the anomalous death of George Floyd, the false solution is 'defunding the police' (an uber-provocative diversion they know is unwinnable), the Mayor is President Trump, and the Town Council/Barbershop Quartet is the conservative movement, including especially conservative media and pundits tasked with exposing Obamagate to the public.  [Video clip]

The Sneaky Covid War on Cash.  We have seen the death of much of the world's funny money in just the last 40 years.  For example, in Peru, one million Intis would buy a modest home in 1985; five years later it would not buy a tube of toothpaste.  Brazil had so many new banknotes they ran out of heroes to print on them.  In Vietnam in the 1980's, factories had to hire trucks to carry the bags of dongs to pay the Tet (New Year) workers' bonuses.  In 1997 in Zaire, it took a brick-sized bundle of 500,000 notes of the local currency to pay for a meal — no one bothered to count them.  On the Yugoslav border in 1989, tourists foolish enough to change "hard" currency for Yugoslav dinars got 14 cubic metres of dinars.  "Dinars can no longer be measured in millions or billions, but only in cubic metres".  It had become a cubic currency.  These grim records were eclipsed in November 2008, when Zimbabwe suffered inflation of 98% PER DAY.

Disarming Elmer Fudd Shows Folly of Hollywood.  The streaming service HBO Max is launching a reboot of the classic children's cartoon Looney Tunes.  In doing so they've caved to antigun cancel culture with two of the cartoon's lovable losers.  When the perpetually-failing hunter Elmer Fudd heads out to hunt Bugs Bunny, he'll no longer carry his trusty shotgun.  Instead, show writers decided he'll need to bump off Bugs with a Grim Reaper-style scythe.  Gunslinger Yosemite Sam's two revolvers were also axed.  Rather than using Fudd and Sam to weave in early firearm safety education for kids, the cartoon's gun ban logic itself is a caricature.

The Room Where It Happens, Indeed.  As the House readied its vote to make a new state out of the District of Columbia, the Speaker went before the press to dilate on injustice of what has obtained for the past 230 years.  Mrs. Pelosi called the District "an affront to our democracy."  She noted that its residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and contribute to the "economic vitality" of America but lack for representation.  "How could it be?  Whose idea was that?"  It turns out that we know exactly whose idea it was.  That's because it was hatched at the very dinner party that, among other things, is now being immortalized anew in the Broadway blockbuster "Hamilton."  The dinner took place in 1790 at New York.  It was no cabal of counter-revolutionary cads.  The three persons in the room where it happened were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

The Old America Is Dead.  Where Do We Go From Here?  Patriotic Americans understand Muley.  Our people, our culture, our history, everything we hold dear, is under relentless attack by the Main Stream Media, politicians, "activists," and kritarchs in the courts, aided and abetted by enemies within, often our own kith and kin, who have internalized the blood-libel Leftist narrative of an irredeemably "racist" America that must be razed to the ground.  "If you know your enemy," wrote Sun Tzu, "and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."  Our enemy, in this case is the globalist Blob and its militant would-be Che Guevaras and LARPing Leninists, the MSM, the bureaucracy, the courts, the big corporations, and the education establishment.  Yet, for the most part, until recently, the Blob has not confronted the Historic American Nation head-on.  The Blob has been patient, killing us by the death of a thousand cuts, taking ground steadily through subversion, using propaganda and misinformation, censorship via Tech Totalitarians, and the slow encroachment of what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny," with mass immigration ("the Great Replacement") as its weapon of mass destruction.  The Blob is amorphous, a slippery, slimy thing that probes and gropes its way into whatever social-economic-political cracks it can exploit, eventually englfing its prey like quicksand.  It is also using "hybrid warfare" tactics that have been used before but have gelled with the expansion of mass communications and can quickly conjure up "flash mobs" and distribute "fake news."

Since we're canceling people for racism, can we talk about Charles Darwin?  [Scroll down]  I do think it's time for the left's own rules to be applied to one of their most cherished and beloved heroes.  Even by the most generous of measures, the intellectual and philosophical heritage of Charles Darwin is one of the most hideously racist legacies one can fathom.  And yet, his inherently racist dogma is not only presented in public schools across America, it is state and federal policy that every student in America demonstrate proficiency in understanding and applying his dangerous ideology.  Set aside the colonialist rage against the Spanish conquistadors just long enough to recognize that it was Charles Darwin himself who wrote in his diary after encountering the "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, "one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures."

Is This the Stupidest Time in America's History?  We have real problems in America right now.  We need to solve them with rational discourse, serious conversations, and genuine engagement with each other.  We need to work together.  Instead, it's as though decades of lousy education, a terrible media, and activists who favor retweets over real improvements have all colluded to create the perfect storm of stupidity.  It's a weird time.  We've all been locked up and cooped up.  We're worried about the long-term effects of a pandemic.  Many Americans are out of work and/or facing the end of their small businesses.  We're horrified by the fact that a cop killed a man who wasn't resisting arrest, while three other cops watched as the man said he couldn't breathe.  It's not surprising emotions are high.  But we cannot meet this moment with just our passions.  We have to be serious here.

Why Parler [is bad], and why Gab is superior.  I hate social media, but I've had accounts on Gab, Parler, and Twitter for about a year, so I've used them enough to get a feel for the usability and member engagement.  I've been in the software development world in various capacities for almost thirty years, so I have some opinions on how things work in this space and what's possible.  At this point, sadly, I think Parler is a bad joke.
  •   Parler's app is vulnerable to Apple and Google
  •   Parler is vulnerable to being delisted by their name registrar
  •   Parler's UI is horrible (especially for those used to Twitter)
  •   Parler has no API (that I've found)
  •   Parler is a closed system (your posts aren't visible to non-members)
  •   Parler has bait-and-switched users with their "free speech" spiel
  •   Parler is vulnerable to blacklisting by payment platforms
  •   Parler is vulnerable to being deplatformed by their hosting provider
  •   Parler requires personal info, which can be compromised or sold
  •   Gab has faced and solved all of these issues

Reality Is Going To The Polls.  Yes, blue cities are being wrecked, but in the end, Reality will get it's vote and it's the only vote that counts.  That vote will come in stages.  Stage 1 is where the cops leave black neighborhoods.  Stage 2 is where those neighborhoods turn into abbatoirs while the news media ignores them because rrrrrrrrrrracism!**  Stage 3 is where it gets so bad that no one can ignore it.  Stage 4 is where we realize that the problem wasn't racism after all, it was the destruction of the family.  Maybe we get to Stage 4, maybe we stop at Stage 3 and come to a different conclusion.  Either way, it's going to get harder and harder to sell the fake noose stories as we watch the black bodies pile up in black neighborhoods at the hands of black criminals.

A Black Lives Matter Reading List for Rich, White Liberals.  I lived under Soviet Communism in my parents' homelands of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  I stood in line for lard and I met people who had been tortured for thoughtcrimes.  I've worked in Nepal and the Central African Republic, two of the world's poorest nations.  I currently live in Paterson, a majority-minority city, where the median income is $34,000.  To me, America, with all its flaws, and my life, with all its limitations, are blessed.

Crush Your Enemies.  [Scroll down]  In the end, the upcoming election is not about Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden.  The 2020 version of Biden is plainly afflicted by severe, paralyzing dementia, but even in his so-called "prime," he had no particular vision or core convictions.  This is an election either for Trump or against Trump.  Biden's presence is irrelevant.  The roughly 43% of the solid for-Trump vote and the approximately 45% of the always-anti-Trump vote are already baked into the election.  The election will turn on that casually-attentive, somewhat-persuadable 12%.  The Republicans will make their usual mistake of thinking that the merits of the issues — the facts on the ground, like how far back the economy/employment has come by November and whether or not the racial tension has smoothed out a bit — will carry the day.

Sowing the Sixties Winds, Reaping Today's Whirlwind.  [Scroll down]  History now becomes the systematic demonization of our ancestors for their flawed humanity and failure to create an impossible utopia.  The West now is notable only for its crimes against that idealism, while its unique transcendence of those crimes, its recognition that certain behaviors and institutions are crimes, is forgotten.  For example, slavery, the historical evil that so exercises the "woke" protestors and rioters, is an historically unexceptional, universal institution.  In the past it was no more problematic than the domestication of animals.  But the rejection of slavery happened only in the West, from the 4th century BC Greek rhetorician Alcidamas, who said "The god gave freedom to all men, and nature made no man a slave"; to the Christian American and British abolitionists of the early 19th century, who finally brought about the end of slavery in the West.  But because the left sees only the West's flaws, today we are watching the violent assault on public monuments to people from the past, even statues of Lincoln, who ended slavery in the U.S.  In the Sixties and Seventies left-wing terrorists bombed military recruiting offices and university labs that allegedly served the "military-industrial complex."

The Left Craps Out.  There are plenty of leftists swaggering these days.  Cities have blazed, municipal and state governments have been humiliated, police forces are cowering, mighty corporations are trampling each other to apologize for things they had absolutely nothing to do with.  At first glance, this appears to be the left's moment in the sun, something they've looked forward to for many years, if not generations.  Throughout the 20th century, the left's problem with the United States was the lack of a proletariat to lead against the oppressors.  The American working class was the farthest thing in the world from an "oppressed" — they lived better than all but the ruling classes in most societies.  What did they have to revolt against?

America's Faithful Are Better Prepared for the Coming Anti-Government Rage.  Future historians looking back on the COVID-19 epidemic will likely record two U.S. domestic crises, one physical and the other psychological.  The first we already know: the spread of a potentially lethal virus forcing a countrywide shutdown in order to slow the rate of infection.  The second, soon to be painfully obvious, will stem from the sharp rise in government debt needed to support struggling businesses and unemployed workers during the shutdown. $3.8 trillion in 2020 alone, and more than $2.1 trillion in 2021.  Had Washington politicians listened to the advice of knowledgeable commentators and used the economic recovery of the earlier decade to prudently build a financial cushion, this dramatic increase would not by itself create a financial emergency.  But from 2010 to 2020, the federal government averaged deficits of more than $1 trillion per year, more than doubling its liabilities to $22 trillion.  So when the new borrowing is added on, the resulting deficit will be equal to the entire national economy (GDP), the level where any country's creditworthiness is called into question.

Venezuelan woman begs Americans to wake up:  This is how it starts.  Cubans warned us, we didn't think it could happen to us.  With entitled members of pampered Gen-Z actively engaged in the cultural cleansing of the United States, looking back on history through today's hard left lens, leave it to someone who has experienced this before to put things into perspective.  A woman who said she is from Venezuela posted a video amid the insanity gripping American streets, where even statutes of Union generals who led the fight to free the slaves isn't safe.  "Why do I even worry about some silly little statue coming down?  Or some silly little street names changing?  Why do I even care?" she asked.  "It's because the last time I didn't care," the woman then said, answering her own question.  "The last time, I didn't care about this as a teenager — I have already lived through these things when I was living in Venezuela."  She then detailed the changes she witnessed as a teen.

The Elites Are Revolting.  What you see out there is our alleged betters struggling mightily to hold onto the power that we Normal people dared to wrest away from them in 2016.  One component of their campaign is the burning and looting information operation conducted by black-clad pawns.  The other component is the soft power corporate/media/cultural conspiracy to silence dissent and enforce fearful conformity to their narrative.  Usually, a revolution is conducted by the peasants to throw off a tyrannical ruling class.  Here, the ruling class is waging a political and cultural war to retake and then tighten its grip on the masses.  They are no longer even pretending to seek the consent of the governed.  And once they retake power, that's it — they will never give up power again.

Republicans Must Understand:  We Are at War.  The Republicans have the presidency, the Senate, and the independent media — which is certainly better than nothing.  The Democrats have the House of Representatives...and the mainstream media, academia, education, Hollywood, medicine, and a weird weaponized "science" (that really drives the rational and logical people insane).  In the past, institutions such as the military, mainstream churches, big business, and professional sports may have leaned toward the Republican side.  These, however, have been outright neutralized or are in the process of being assimilated into the opposing side.  In the case of big business, it is firmly entrenched in the opposing side at this point.

Keep the Children at Home.  [Scroll down]  I make a modest proposal:  that it should be against the law for children under the age of 15 (say) to attend political demonstrations or rallies, and that disobedience to this law should be classified as child abuse.

The City that Really Did Abolish the Police.  As a movement grows in American cities and suburbs to overhaul police departments and confront their long records of racially unjust, violent enforcement, Camden is one rare — and complicated — success story, a city that really did manage to overhaul its police force and change how it operated.  And it took a move as radical and controversial as what some activists are calling for today:  Camden really did abolish its police department.  And then the city set about rebuilding the police force with an entirely new one under county control, using the opportunity to increase the number of cops on the streets and push through a number of now-heralded progressive police reforms.  And with time, the changes started to stick in a department that just years earlier seemed unfixable.

There's a reason racial tension is rising in America - it's by design.  If you've been paying attention recently, and you probably have, you've likely sensed that something profound is happening to this country right now, something that could transform what America is.  You can feel it happening. [...] Forty years ago, this was a middle-class country and as a result, America had strongly egalitarian values.  Pretty much everyone used commercial airports and ate at McDonald's.  Do you remember that?  People talked without irony about their rights as citizens and taxpayers.  You couldn't pay extra to jump to the head of the line at Disney World.  The idea that someone like Jeffrey Epstein could beat a sex charge because he was rich would have shocked us then.  We would have demanded an investigation into just how Jeffrey Epstein died.  Why?  Because Americans hated corruption.  They saw corruption as an offense against equality.  That was 40 years ago.  Things were moving in the opposite direction ever since.  We now accept, uncritically, the claim that some people deserve better treatment based on how they were born, and some deserve worse.

When Your Private Dinner Conversation Becomes Your Waiter's Facebook Post.  When you're out having drinks with friends, are your personal conversations about politics private?  Should they be?  According to at least one New England restaurant, the answer is no.

Mass Police Resignations Ensure Societal Chaos.  [Scroll down]  Seven police officers have resigned from the Minneapolis police force due to lack of support from city leaders.  The Star Tribune characterizes this as an "unusually large exodus," but one suspects it is only the beginning.  Retired Minneapolis police officer and use-of-force expert Mylan Masson, explains why:  "They don't feel appreciated.  Everybody hates the police right now.  I mean everybody."  Not everybody.  Millions of decent Americans of every ethnicity and political persuasion are appalled by those who would destroy the nation while calling that destruction "social justice."  They are disgusted as they watch cities get burned and looted and hear such orchestrated mayhem referred to as "peaceful protests."  Moreover, they know those orchestrating the divisiveness are a contemptible combination of racial arsonists, disaffected and indoctrinated youths with bleak futures, useful idiots who assume the color of their skin automatically makes them "guilty" and "privileged," and a cadre of elitist accomplices, organizers and/or cheerleaders with genuine wealth, power, and privilege — including private security forces and gated neighborhoods — who think being "down with the cause" has bought them absolution.

You can't order police officers to die for your politics.  Now that the Senate GOP has begun the process of rolling out their own version of a "police reform" bill, predictable partisan fights are already breaking out.  One of the major bones of contention is the idea that the bill would "discourage" the use of chokeholds by the cops during confrontations with non-compliant, disruptive or violent suspects.  As with some other provisions, this doesn't go far enough for the liberals and Democrats who are aiming to either defund or abolish the police, but will settle for as much as they can get in the meantime.  They want the maneuver to be forbidden entirely with punishment meted out to any cops who violate the prohibition. [...] While this certainly shouldn't be mandated from the federal level, we're talking about things that must be handled with extreme care even at the state and local levels.  The idea that anyone can simply grab a pen and paper and legislate how things will play out during a tense encounter between the police and a criminal suspect is laughable.  Or at least it would be laughable if there were anything funny about such a serious subject.

TUCKER: Why is Senator Ted Cruz Fundraising for a Cheap Labor Senator?  Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz sent out a fundraising email calling on people to make contributions to Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan. [...] This is a strange development when considering that Cruz signed on to a letter along with Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, calling for the suspension of work visas for a year until employment levels reached normal rates.  Indeed, Cruz's actions appear to be incoherent.  His signature on that letter is commendable, but there needs to be more consistency in his actions.  Namely, he needs to be propping up more candidates who actually believe in immigration restriction such as Kris Kobach or forming stronger alliances with the likes of Josh Hawley.  Trying to play nice with everyone will not make patriotic immigration reform a reality.

How to Fight the Woke...and Win.  [#4] Never apologize, and never quit.  The Woke view an apology as a confession, not as a chance at reconciliation.  As such, never apologize.  You will only be made to grovel further or surrender completely.  At the same time, never quit.  That is what your spineless employer will want you to do to save him the trouble of firing you.  Don't do it.  Make them fire you, then move to Point 5.  [#5] Use lawfare.  If you have the means, then use lawfare against the Woke at any and every opportunity (which is one reason why electing President Trump and getting good judges is important).  For instance, if your employer fires you to appease the Woke mob, then make him pay for it.  Don't go quietly.  Instead, hit him with the hardest legal counterpunch that you can.  It won't always work, but it will sometimes, and that matters. [...] [#7] Starve the Woke while feeding your allies.  Stop giving money or time to any Woke-supporting group.  Stop supporting Woke universities or businesses.  Stop watching Netflix and the NFL.  Just stop.  Starve them to the greatest extent possible.

What the wind blew away.  Really, do we have to go over this whole business with Gone with the Wind once again?  Since 1961, the United States has gone through the civil rights era and all that came afterward.  Does anyone really think we're going to rewatch or reread this classic tale of endurance and resilience, of a woman wasting years of her life pining over a man who was wrong for her when the right one was always right there beside her, and decide that the Old South, of which we see just a little before it gets blown up completely, really had something great going on in the plantation system?  Certainly, none of the four characters who speak for the author — Scarlett and Melanie, Ashley and Rhett — ever say anything other than that the war itself was a blunder of historic proportions. [...] In short, if you want a defense of war or the states that began it, Gone with the Wind is not it.  Slavery is in the book, as in slaves and then freed slaves.  But they, like everyone else, are secondary to the theme of the opus, which is that the fittest survive.

Greg Gutfeld compares similar deaths of George Floyd and Tony Timpa — one black, one white.  Fox News host Greg Gutfeld called out the media for fueling the divisive narrative behind the latest police controversies and suggested it's time to "take the foot off the race pedal."  The author and co-host of "The Five" contended that the liberal media needs to "stop pushing inflammatory uninformed opinions" during a monologue on the show Monday.

The 'Woke' Left's War on American History.  The Army now says it is open to renaming bases that have been named for Confederate generals, and it is time to draw the line.  The electorate should support President Trump's decision to veto this idea right out of the starting gate. [...] No civilized person defends, justifies, or glorifies slavery as practiced in the antebellum South along with the Union states of Delaware, West Virginia, and Maryland — unless we count Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who recently tried to show their solidarity with black Americans by wearing the kente cloth favored by Ashanti slave traders who sold other Africans to Europeans during the 19th century.

This is from a left-wing web site, presented here for what it's worth:
Removing a U.S. President Without an Election.  Five times in the last ninety years, elements of the U.S. power structure have tried to oust a sitting president without an election.  The efforts were aimed at Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.  Two attempts succeeded and three failed. [...] By the time President Kennedy took office in 1961, the military budget had grown twenty times larger in real dollars than in 1933.  The money was paying for a military-industrial complex, including the Pentagon, weapons manufacturers, State Department, CIA, FBI, NSA, Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, Members of Congress, think tanks, universities, and a battalion of friendly reporters.  The sprawling power system had become strong enough to perpetuate itself and to remove a president if necessary.

The Floyd Riots Mark a Century of Communist Agitation.  [Scroll down]  In George Floyd, our neo-communists found their own Sacco and Vanzetti, but much better.  As a black American, his death had much more frightening moral power.  It was caught on camera.  The offending officer was white.  In 2020, these were all essential variables.  Had any of three other officers at the scene — two Asians and a black American — been the one kneeling on Floyd's neck, the story would never have left the twin cities.

The dangers of bowing to the mob and defunding the police.  [Scroll down]  Regardless, our politicians are so worried about this fake army, that they are willing to say and do anything to appease the angry mobs even if it is at the ultimate detriment of the cities and country that we all share.  This is not a new phenomenon, but with the advent of social media and the amplification of Twitter activists, we've allowed cancel-culture to scare politicians, corporations, and individuals into bowing to the mob, even if it means there will be poorly thought-out political policies enacted as a result.  When a leader admits defeat out of appeasement, or gives the mob the apology they are chanting for out of fear, it will never be enough and they will eventually come for your head.  Which is why we need leaders with a strong moral compass, willing to stand up for rational thought with a true sense of patriotism for America.  Elected officials taking up seats for personal gain or those that are propped up by special interest groups don't have the driving force in their hearts to prevent them crumbling before the pressure.

Here's Why Lindsey Graham's Trump-Russia Corruption Investigation Is a Joke.  Sen. Lindsey Graham has always talked a big game.  When he's not praising Joe Biden or treating Robert Mueller like a national hero, he makes his way to Fox News from time to time to rattle the saber over FBI and DOJ corruption.  That's mostly lead to nowhere, as we now stand less than five months from a national election with nothing accomplished and not a single major witness facing a subpoena.  Now, though, he's finally pledging to do what he pledged to do over a year ago.  This past week, his committee passed a resolution allowing the subpoenaing of various Obama era officials involved in Trump-Russia investigation corruption.  Or is he going after FISA abuse?  Or the unsupported appointment of Robert Mueller?  Or the Michael Flynn abuse?  Who knows at this point.

Wokism's Cult Following.  Liberty is privilege.  It's a myth that everyone desires freedom; many aspire simply to be trusties.  But what of those who don't feel 'safe' in that safe space?  They could be a problem, but will soon be shown the error of their ways through reprogramming and soon be groveling on the ground, even washing the feet of demonstration organizers, grateful that they no longer trigger anyone.  Donating large sums of money to obtain forgiveness for social sins will be a standard form of obtaining absolution.  These features so strikingly resemble religious rituals that the Woke movement has been accused of being a cult.

Politics as Religion After George Floyd.  This Isn't an Orwellian Novel.  This Is Your Country.  What are you really seeing as Americans kneel, hands raised in secular prayer, repeating political creeds on the TV news?  And that secular foot-washing?  You're witness to neo-Marxist appropriation of Christian symbolism, in the aftermath of the horrifying Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.  And now, the priests of the secularist left separate the biblical sheep from the goats on the basis of skin color. [...] In the biblical parable of the sheep and the goats, the sheep went to heaven, the goats were sent to hell.  But in the current political universe, whites must atone for the sins of white racism even if they're not racists, even if their families arrived here only yesterday.  And even the mere suggestion this might be unfair, the slightest hint of resistance, can trigger accusations that could ruin careers, deny entrance to the professions, and drive nuance from the public square.  And it is all by design.

Free Citizens Do Not Kneel.  In the last couple of weeks we have witnessed people, most of them white, kneeling before black protestors and activists as a supposed gesture of repentance for their crimes of "white privilege" and tolerating "systemic racism."  The kneeling penitents include not just ordinary people, but police officers, National Guardsmen, and, in a shocking self-debasement of the world's greatest democratic republic, a gaggle of House Representatives adorned with "culturally appropriated" African kente cloth scarves.  White progressive racial masochism is nothing new; Tom Wolfe skewered it brilliantly nearly a half century ago in essays like "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers."  But the current manifestation is more significant and dangerous.  It has taken place amidst violent widespread rioting and looting and assaults, and so these acts of kneeling are a form of tribute exacted by the sheer power of destruction wrought by the rioters and their "peaceful" abettors.  As such, they undermine the very foundation of citizen self-rule and political freedom[.]

Devolution to Revolution:  An Already Demoralized U.S. is Now Being Destabilized.  The two destabilizing events recently occurring back-to-back, the response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd rioting, illustrate well how America is now institutionally incapable of making decisions in her own best interests.  That is, the overreaction to the disease and under-reaction to the rioting reflect a country long demoralized.  Moreover, if that's not troubling enough, know that this is a state of being that usually leads to tyranny.  We'd had pandemics before — ones causing more death, especially when adjusted for population — but we'd never before embraced lockdowns, a cure worse than the disease.  But at least the disease was a relative unknown; riots are not.  People the world over know how to deal with riots, and this isn't by letting them metastasize so thugs can run wild, hurt the innocent and destroy the nation.  Yet our "leaders" fiddled while the country burned, motivated by moral confusion and weakness, and some, most certainly, by ulterior motives.

The Editor says...
The so-called pandemic and the riots are connected:  Both are mechanisms to make Donald Trump look bad and diminish his prospects for re-election.  During the coronavirus panic, prisoners were released due to concerns about their safety — not ours, of course.  With lots of violent criminals on the streets, what happened next?  Rioting!  Who would participate in a riot?  Those who are most violently anti-Trump, and those who were already violent criminals and have nothing to lose by going back to prison!

What If Police Officers Go on Strike?  [Scroll down]  The lesson here is that police are starting to respond to these betrayals in more assertive ways.  The Ferguson Effect reflected the trend of police officers to be less proactive on the job, with the predictable spike in violent crime resulting from a lessened police presence.  City leaders apparently haven't gotten the message, so mass resignations like these are the next logical step.  But this mass resignation was only from the Emergency Response team.  Those 57 officers still work as Buffalo police — which raises the question as to what the next step might be if things still don't improve for them.  What if police officers go on strike?  Yes, there are strict rules in police unions forbidding this.  But...what if?  The City of Buffalo employs over 700 police officers.  If all of them went on strike tomorrow, does Mayor Brown have another contingency plan?  Theoretically, if he posted job openings for 700 new officers the following day, it would take months, even years, to vet, hire, train, and deploy them.  By that point in Buffalo's experiment in societal entropy, who would even want the job?

Disney Fans Say Splash Mountain Should Be Re-Themed Because of Ties to Racism.  Splash Mountain, one of Disney's most beloved rides at Walt Disney World in Florida, Tokyo Disneyland, and at Disneyland in California, is being criticized by social media users and Change.org supporters who say the ride's racial overtones need to be "re-themed."  The ride is based on the 1946 Disney film Song of the South, featuring characters such as Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox, and has been widely criticized for its depiction of blacks and romanticized view of the post-Civil War South.

The Editor says...
Perhaps the Splash Mountain ride could be redesigned to include a central theme of perpetual victimhood, with an undercurrent of senseless Antifa violence, culminated by a lecture delivered by Hillary Clinton.  That sounds like so much fun!

Communism Is Reborn with a New Name in America.  Do some people really think that the impeachment, the corona-gulag, and the pogroms all occurred in America one after another in a completely random pattern of events?  Why did pre-planned and synchronized riots and looting suddenly arise?  Because the adventure with the coronavirus hysteria failed.  Why did the coronavirus hysteria suddenly lead to a corona-gulag being created?  Because the impeachment failed.  Why did impeachment suddenly arise?  Because "Russiagate" (or, rather, Obamagate) failed.  Why did "Russiagate" arise?  Because leftism was defeated in the 2016 elections.

Know Your Enemy:  China.  If you want to understand why China will attack us, the place to start is the old U.S. Department of War film, Know Your Enemy:  Japan, made the last time we were attacked by a major Asian power that was transitioning from its feudal past.  The Japanese in WWII were driven by their creation myth which says that they were founded by an emperor called Jimmu in 660 B.C. Jimmu had a philosophy called Hakko Ichiu which means that "let us extend the capitol and cover the eight corners of the world under one roof." [...] The Chinese version of Hakko Ichiu is called Tianxia under which China gets to rule the rest of the world.  It has nothing to do with communism.

Be Courageous And Stand Firm, America — We Do Not Kneel.  The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd's death — and embraced by those guilted into submission — creates a two-tiered social stratification of "kneelers" and "those who refuse to bend the knee" that's wholly un-American.  Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in "critical race theory" and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others.  Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.  Unfortunately, it's also moved beyond just kneeling.

More Than Ever, It's Time to Unleash the Power of 'No'.  For way too long, too many conservatives and other normal people have failed to deploy our most potent weapon in the defense of free thought and expression — the utter refusal to go along with the demands of the carnivorous left.  As has been said before by me and others, we need to introduce these spoiled brats to the concept of "no."  This is a critical moment, and how we react now will determine if our future is citizenship or serfdom. [...] The rioting was really an information operation, and a failed one.  There were two big problems for the furious rioters.  One was that normal people saw no connection between protesting the treatment of George Floyd and looting big screens from the local Target, except that both disgusted them.  The second issue was the inability to identify a specific enemy.  Who exactly was the person supporting the killing of George Floyd?  What was the name of the person who said, "Yeah, that was a good thing"?

How Reliable Are Lottery Revenues?  Back in 2017, New Jersey decided to make the state lottery an "asset" for the pension plans.  As noted in yesterday's post, it looks like the NJ Lottery took a hit, just as New Jersey needs more money for the pensions.  So let me revisit my post on state lottery revenues from 2017.  I'm heavily editing from the original [skipping a data quality discussion], and then adding some new data to see if my conclusions are any different now.

Counterfeit Money Is The Motive Behind Gangland's George Floyd Arson And Looting Riots.  [Scroll down]  George Floyd was in bad health due to his drug addictions.  He knew his condition and all he was expected to do was agree to turn over a list of names involved in distribution of fake money.  Most grown men can handle being wrestled down to the pavement.  The four police officers had no reason to kill him but to the contrary needed to keep him alive as a witness in the counterfeit racket.  Reading him his rights and calling in a lawyer makes for good legal theory by the book, but in reality tough methods are the only way to bust large-scale criminal operations.  If Floyd has one iota of respect for his society, he would have confessed the names of his criminal associates preying on the poorer communities of Minnesota, and he'd be alive today under a witness protection program.  The police are not sadists who enjoy violence but must be tough to break the code of silence enforced by murderous gangsters.  It's a civil war and getting worse due to liberal judges and wide-open immigration for foreign thugs.

The Editor says...
Even if all that is true, George Floyd didn't deserve to be killed in the street, negligently or otherwise.

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Hold officers accountable who use excessive force, but there's no evidence of widespread racial bias.  Political commentator and attorney Heather Mac Donald posted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week that argues police should be held accountable when they use excessive force, but evidence of "widespread racial bias" by police doesn't exist.  "However sickening the video of Floyd's arrest, it isn't representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians," Mac Donald wrote in her piece titled "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism."  Mac Donald continues, "A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing.  Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions."

Arizona Dem nominee Mark Kelly's questionable business dealing and China ties.  [Democrat Mark] Kelly is an ex-Navy combat pilot, astronaut and husband of former Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured during a 2011 Tucson shooting.  Giffords became somewhat of a celebrity and folk hero following the shooting.  Her status appears to have bestowed a halo effect of sorts around Kelly, which may account for his 49-40% lead in the most recent Real Clear Politics poll average, though recent history — and especially the 2016 Presidential election — has demonstrated that polling is not always an accurate predictor, and a lot can change with five months still remaining till the election.  President Trump's November performance in Arizona is also likely to weigh heavily on the battle for this Senate seat.  Notably, Mark Kelly also enjoys a substantial fundraising margin over incumbent McSally, having raised more than $31 million in direct campaign dollars to her $18 million through March 31, 2020.

Protests, Riots, Death By Cop:  Have We Learned Nothing?  man died tragically after being held in a savage knee-to-neck hold by a policeman.  What was the officer thinking?  Protests have turned to riots in several of our big cities.  Why does this happen?  History is a teacher but we ignore its lessons.  The "we" above, however, is more of a "they."  In a nation of about 330 million, those who refuse to learn number only a few thousand:  the few law enforcement officers who abuse rather than protect and serve; the elected officials who don't police the police nor police the riotous, and even tacitly encourage violence; and the rioters themselves who on some instances refuse to govern their own emotions and in others plan to sow societal disorder.

Everyone Is Sure Biden Is Toast.  I have yet to meet a conservative who thinks Trump is going to lose. [...] Of course, I want him to win, because I love America, but I get edgy when everyone agrees on something. [...] It's going to be close simply because neo-commies dominate most big states.  The pandemic panic has wrecked the economy and we could have a slow recovery — the Dems will do whatever they can to make that happen.  Then there's the fraud factor — despite all the smartest, brightest, best people telling us that there's no such thing as election fraud, there's such thing as election fraud and the Dems will totally make it happen if they can.

Fear: The Best Tool of the Ruling Class.  Social and political responses to the fears of the Corona-19 virus pandemic are news headlines, but do they deserve headlines? [...] Combining a stretch of environmental-saving enthusiasm and fuzzy thinking, activists have wasted no effort in trying to link the imagined effects of climate change to its imagined impact on the Corona virus pandemic.  Economic hardships and social deprivations imposed by the ruling class are said to be good for the globe, and that the necessary price to save it is a cultural and scientific retrenchment.

And the winner is...  There is one big... wait, make that yuuge winner in the sacking of major American cities that has been underway since mobs started with looting Target in Minneapolis and spread all the way to Macy's Herald Square flagship in Manhattan and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  Scott Adams took to Twitter to spell it out: ["]I did not appreciate how profitable fake news could be for Jeff Bezos.  If the Washington Post can support the protestors long enough, there will be no retail store competition for Amazon.  Almost there.  I'd give it a week.["]

By Forcing Control On Hong Kong, Beijing Killed The Golden Goose.  President Donald Trump announced Friday that he has directed his administration to "begin the process of eliminating policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment."  His announcement came a day after China's People's Congress passed Beijing's controversial new national security law related to Hong Kong.  Trump's announcement will profoundly affect the future of Hong Kong and the U.S.-China relationship.  The president's decision was based on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's certification to Congress Wednesday that "Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China," a decision he said gave him no pleasure but that "sound policy-making requires a recognition of reality."

I'm Not Watching the Minnesota Movie.  I have not watched any of the videos out of Minneapolis or listened to any of the commentary.  I have not watched because I resent having to watch only one genre over and over again.  This is the genre in which a white antagonist, presumed guilty at the outset, kills or injures a black protagonist, presumed innocent.  More than 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2019, but no movies for national release were made about blacks killing blacks, the most common scenario.  Nor were any made about blacks killing whites, Hispanics, or Asians.  In fact, these movies are generally suppressed.  No, only one genre of movie is allowed.  In recent years, we have seen the Trayvon movie; the Ferguson movie; the Baltimore movie; and, for comic relief, the Jussie Smollett movie among others.  The most lethal of the movies was the one filmed in Ferguson.  The most dishonest one was the Trayvon movie, filmed on location in Florida.

The United States and the World Trade Organization.  The WTO, the successor to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was founded in 1994 with stated objectives:  strengthen the world economy, lead to more trade, limit barriers such as quotas and subsidies, increase investment, employment, income growth, throughout the world, and to help governments resist protectionist pressures.  Its decisions are reached by consensus and are binding, and are theoretically non-discriminatory.  However, WTO has not lived up to expectations.  It has not been responsible for any major international accord since the trade facilitation agreement of 2013 that aimed at reducing border delays and costs, nor played any significant role in solving the trade dispute between the U.S. and China.  At a time when output in the world's developed economies has sharply declined, and uncertainty about the future is delaying investment and decisions, the WTO task has now become more difficult for a number of reasons.

Here's 23 Questions Joe Biden Needs To Answer About China.  Communist China poses a greater threat to America and our interests abroad than any other nation in the world.  If it wasn't clear prior to the spread of the Chinese coronavirus, resulting largely from the Chinese Communist Party's Chernobyl-like response, the subsequent threats should crystallize this point.  It has acted malevolently toward the U.S., our European and Anglosphere allies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India, and across the South China Sea.  Countering the CCP is essential to preserving American life, limb, and liberty.  The public deserves to know what presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's approach to China would be.

No Bailouts for the Blue States Until They Open Up.  It feels as if it has been, oh, hours since I've complained about the blue states so I may as well get a quick rant off of my blogging chest for you, dear VIP subscribers.  I also better enjoy the fact that, as of right now, I'm still writing from a kinda/sorta red state.  Sadly, Arizona is looking more purple every day but we ain't blue yet.  [Paywall]

Reopening the economy only works if people return to work.  Business owners across the country are lamenting that people are not coming back to their jobs, even when offered.  For small businesses able to survive the quarantine, more will need to be done to get their workers off welfare and back in the workforce.  It's going to require thoughtful action from state and federal leaders, as well as strict enforcement of existing laws regarding unemployment benefits.  Thankfully, some of the nation's governors are making bold and commonsense moves to address the three-headed monster of a health crisis, budget woes, and businesses on the brink of extinction.

The Red Pill Goes to Court.  There is no formal policy in the Department of Justice that governs the filing of politically-sensitive criminal charges during an election year.  There does seem to be an unwritten but widespread agreement that it would be a bad idea to do so within 60 — some would say 90 — days of an election.  We can therefore reasonably expect that if United States Attorney John Durham is preparing to charge high-level figures from the Obama Administration with crimes related to: the use of government surveillance capabilities to conduct political opposition research against the opposing party's candidates and their campaigns; or the use of law enforcement powers to obstruct and sabotage the incoming Administration, Durham will most likely do so before August 1.  The weeks and months that follow will be an extremely interesting period in American history.

As Long As a Political Party Believes It Owns African-Americans, Blacks Will Not Be Free.  We are the most color-blind society on the planet.  When was the last time the United Kingdom elected a Black Prime Minister?  Or how about a Black president or prime minister in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Greece, Germany, Belgium, or anywhere else in the oh-so-politically correct dissolving European Union?  Has China ever had a non-Chinese ethnic head their godless country of bat-cat-rat-eaters?  How about the vaunted Russians?  Was Stalin Black?  Khrushchev?  Brezhnev?  Andropov?  Gorbachev?  Putin?  Any Blacks in the wings?

The Editor says...
Yes, but on the other hand, there were 142 million people in Russia in 2009.[*].  Only 50,000 of them were Afro-Russians.[*].  That's why they have no plans for a black president.

Misinformation, Disinformation, and Lies.  Misinformation may spread if no clear official information is present.  The underlying problem is that there is no simple way to prevent that spread, nor is there a single root cause behind it.  Different motives and goals contribute to that spread and to the discussion of the policies, competition, and legitimacy of public authorities.  The internet has brought important changes in how information is spread and how communication occurs.  What is more certain is that prominent public figures play a considerable role in that the spread has regrettably been shown in the context of discussing the responsibility and activity of officials to deal with the pandemic, COVID-19, such as the transmission and the accuracy of reported mortality rates in various countries.  A difficult problem is that much of the misinformation is not completely fabricated, but is the result of spin.  There is no simply way to prevent misinformation, and there is no single root cause for the appearance of misinformation, and there are different motives for it.

I Miss the Freedom of the 1970s.  I never thought I would live to see freedoms and liberties being stripped away from Americans to the extent they are being stripped away today.  It is shocking to see and infuriating to live through.  But I am reminded that although we are losing our basic freedoms en masse today, they have actually been gradually eroding for many decades, mainly as a result of the ever-expanding power of government.  This is happening throughout the Western world, but it is particularly disturbing in the United States — because the United States is supposed to be a special, exceptional nation.  Younger Americans today have no idea what life in a truly free country feels like.  I do.  I am 60 years old, and I can tell you that the last time the United States was truly free — for average Americans — was the 1970s.

The Editor says...
If you're over 30, you probably perceive that the last time this country was truly free was the decade in which you were a teenager.  The 1960's were better than the 1970's, and I suspect the 1950's were even better, from the standpoint of freedom.

The American Media Has Betrayed America.  Who is pulling the strings of mainstream media in the United States?  Why is the media circus focused on vaccines that may be available sometime next year, and probably will only be partially effective, without offering the slightest concern that vaccines may already be over-prescribed?  Everybody knows vaccines are an important tool for maintaining public health, but why has the media painted the issue black and white?  Maybe getting as many as 90 vaccines before the age of 18 is too many.  Maybe vaccines should be used more judiciously.  Maybe people don't want to be forced into getting a vaccine in order to have an "immunity passport."  The horrifying constitutional implications of where we're headed as a nation during this dress rehearsal for martial law are not of interest to the media.  Along with the nauseating, infantile, feel-good, "we're all in this together" corporate commercials that have rolled out in between the useless television newscasts, the only news coverage available paints people who object to the lockdown as, that's right, Trump supporters.  Or white nationalists.  Or "conspiracy theorists."

The ACLU's Absurd Title IX Lawsuit.  That the ACLU is suing the federal government in the hope of altering its due-process standards is not headline news.  That the ACLU is suing the federal government in the hope of weakening its due-process standards is headline news for the ages.  Once more, the line between parody and reality has been blurred.  The targets of the ACLU's suit are the Department of Education; its secretary, Betsy DeVos; and its assistant secretary for civil rights, Kenneth Marcus.  Their offense?  To have made it easier for the accused to defend themselves.

How to Arrange a Credibility Bookcase for Your Toddler's Zoom Background.  Step 1:  Choose a bookcase aesthetic.  Remember, this background is the only way to establish credibility for your two-year-old in our new world.  Are you raising a tiny influencer or a budding anthropologist?  Should you color-code the book spines into a rainbow or alphabetize rows of National Geographic Kids?  These questions must be answered before your toddler can dominate his Zoom music class or his FaceTime with Nana.  You need people to take him seriously when he says, "Me want 'tilla chips."  His bookcase must communicate:  I am no basic baby.

No, Democrats running lockdown states, jobs won't just magically come back.  Democrats who have never held a private-sector job can't fathom the implications of their policies.  They mingle with the private sector daily, but it remains as foreign to them as public schools.  They fail to understand that the public sector can't create wealth.  Wealth is created in the private sector.  All of it.  The private sector is the golden goose that provides the fuel for government, but clueless Democrats want to assassinate the goose anyway.  Government people forget that private-sector jobs produce something society wants.  It's a law of economics.  Otherwise, there's no income to pay workers.  When people no longer go to their jobs, stuff doesn't get made, stuff doesn't get done, and stuff spoils.  Supply chains break, so crops and livestock get discarded; crucial supplies run short; entertainment dries up; dining out becomes a wistful memory; and we all look scruffy without haircuts, manicures, and dry cleaning.

The American Aristocracy's Influence Is Waning.  [Scroll down]  We have become a nation flooded with so many meaningless and laughable Ph.D.s, it seems, not because their holders consider education a path toward greater enlightenment, but so that they can become new members of a noble peerage class entitled to demand newfound privilege and respect nowhere else due.  Expertise isn't conveyed by title; it's earned by consistently revealing a greater understanding of the world around us with exceptional competency and insight.  I know farmers who have thought about our existence more deeply than college professors.  I know mechanics who would be called "Doctor" in a reasonable world.  I have met brilliant men and women who hold multiple degrees and insist they be called by their first names.  I have never met a person of the left with a doctorate who did not insist on being addressed with the title, even when that title denotes supposed expertise in the type of nonsensical nothingness that would earn knowing smiles from normal folk.

China's Happy Harmony Hell.  On January 11, 2007, China launched the KT-1 rocket and obliterated a satellite in orbit, spreading tens of thousands of pieces of high-speed orbiting metal debris that will threaten both manned and unmanned spacecraft for decades to come. [...] The new space/economic/cyber/technology war was now painfully in sight.  Every technology imaginable, from navigation to your banking account, runs seamlessly through information relayed by these satellites.  The signal was clear:  your economic life is no longer safe.  PLA General Peng of the Chinese Military Academy stated without irony that this activity "creates happiness for mankind."  [Bill] Gertz collects 200 pages of evidence to refute this claim.  We all know about the Uighur Camps, Tiananmen Square, the enslavement of Tibet, and organ harvesting.  No one is happy in China.  But the logic of war runs much deeper.  Xi Jinping, the leader of all Chinese thought and policy, respects three people above all:  Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler.  The two he hates most are Deng Xiaoping (the Chinese reformer) and Ronald Reagan, who crushed Soviet Communism.  Did you know that the highest-ranking Chinese official to ever offer to defect to the United States was rejected by the Obama administration?

Unemployment Kills.  The issue of unemployment and its micro and macro effects on society is broadly and globally researched in many disciplines of knowledge — economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, political science, criminology.  The conclusions are unequivocal — unemployment is much more of a deadly phenomenon than any virus.  Unemployment destroys lives and the mental and physical health of individuals and leads to higher suicide and crime rates, as well as poverty-related diseases.  It may cause civil unrest and disorder, catalyzing destructive processes within societies.  Furthermore, mass and chronic unemployment results in or accompanies the development of undemocratic regimes that neglect and abuse individual rights and freedoms "for the greater good," which legitimizes their absolute power.  How do you count the victims of those?

Can America Bounce Back?  The shutdown of the American economy was in large part enabled by the belief that it would be short, that the federal government could borrow a large sum of money at a low interest rate to ease the suffering, and that the economy could come bouncing back in the blink of an eye, making up any losses.  The shutdowns have extended so far four times longer than originally intended, with the governors and mayors of several states and cities proclaiming indefinite shutdowns.  The moneys borrowed from our future were nowhere near enough to ease the pain, and who lent that money anyway?  It hasn't been borrowed yet, so it's anyone's guess.  Two of the three pillars supporting shutdowns have fallen, so can America's economy really come bouncing back, or was that wishful thinking, too?

No Justice, No Freedom.  Four years ago the Obama administration and rogue partisans in the FBI and DOJ abused their powers in order to keep Donald Trump from being elected, and then to hamstring and sabotage his administration.  Now we are nearing the end of the investigations into those crimes, and the truth long obvious to many will finally be confirmed.  But if the verification of these crimes is not followed by indictments and the malefactors put on trial, our political system will be seriously damaged, and we citizens will lose faith in the integrity of our justice system and its role in protecting our political freedom

The Chinese Challenge:  America has never faced such an adversary.  Over the past decade America has been in denial about China's emergence as a global power.  We couldn't believe a country that for generations was a byword for poverty could compete with us.  With Donald Trump's election in 2016 we've transitioned to anger.  As matters stand, we'll be bargaining before long.  For thousands of years China's internal weaknesses — natural disaster, famine, plague, civil unrest, and foreign invasion — kept its attention inward.  We are now at the greatest turning point in Chinese history since its unification in the 3rd century B.C.

The 'Let's Roll' Election.  At the risk of sounding too dismissive of the considerable obstacles before us, I think everyone is underestimating how seriously supporters of the president view this election.  Michael Anton's provocative "Flight 93 Election" essay captured the mood of a significant and largely voiceless group of American voters in 2016.  We went to the polls after an exhausting and abusive election season with one thing on our minds:  if we had any hope of saving America, it was now or never.  After achieving victory, however, the election never came to an end.  The Democrats and press immediately engaged in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election results, remove President Trump from office, and dismantle any of his fledgling efforts at stabilizing an America in critical condition.  We were given not a single day to acknowledge that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

The Hoaxes Cry Out for Punishment.  If we are able to get all the facts about what actually happened in 2016 and 2017, this could very well be the biggest political scandal in American history.  What if the previous president and senior officials in his administration decided to use the power of the state to spy on and "take out" the incoming president and his administration?  And they did this on the basis of what?  Policy differences?  There was no Russia collusion or any collusion of any type.  Smart people knew that years ago.  This likely comes down to Obama and his administration trying to preserve their policy agenda, very specifically their terrible Iran nuclear deal; don't forget Obama fired General Flynn over Flynn's strong disagreement regarding the Iran deal and, of course, Trump's campaign promise to undo that deal.  It means, simply put, that the outgoing administration, unhappy with the election results, was trying to undo them.

How "rent strikes" will wind up hurting renters.  We've already seen multiple cases of tenants, primarily in the larger American cities, proposing or launching "rent strikes" where they refuse to pay their rent until the pandemic crisis passes and people are allowed to go back to work.  This includes one Democratic congressional candidate in New York City named Pete Harrison, who doesn't want anyone to have to pay, even if they can afford it.  Harrison picks a rather easy target for his wrath because his apartment building is owned by a major investment banking firm.  But what Harrison and the rest of the rent strike proponents fail to realize is that not all rental properties are owned by giants of the financial industry.  Many are owned by small businesses or individuals who frequently are not prepared to take a major financial hit any more than the tenants are.  Bloomberg News interviewed a number of such landlords this week to see how they are faring and examined what the long term effects of a rent strike could have on them, their tenants and the economy in general.

Governor should reopen state employee contracts to cancel 3% pay raises due July 1.  An unofficial state revenue forecast is projecting a $7 billion deficit for the next 4 years.  It is possible this deficit number is even understated based on the amount of economic activity that has been shutdown by the Governor's stay home order the last few months.  As of today, however, state employees are scheduled to receive a 3% pay raise on July 1.  A 3% pay raise also took effect last July.  With the state facing a massive budget deficit, the Governor should immediately reopen the state employee contracts to cancel the new 3% pay raise before it takes effect.

Givers and Takers:  Democratic governors' arguments that their states are "donors" doesn't hold water.  [Governor] Cuomo claims that New York is a net donor to the federal government — sending more money to Washington in federal taxes than the state gets back in federal spending — and that all New York wants from Washington now is its fair share back. [...] This argument is not new; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made it in the 1970s, when he began studying the flow of funds between Washington and the states to show how New York was being shortchanged. [...] But a close look at the kinds of spending that these studies examine reveals that much of the funding deficit comes from big, non-discretionary spending programs that send cash to individuals and businesses around the country — not to state government itself — and that much of New York's shortfall is its own fault, not Washington's.

A Time to Hate.  [Scroll down]  There is something so evil in a society that tolerates a dual standard of justice, dual standards of everything.  On the one hand, we political conservatives harbor profoundly deep feelings, but we do not destroy people's lives based on abstract politics.  Yes, we oppose them and expose them, and we hope that contemporary society and history judge them for the evil they represent.  But we do not destroy them in their lives.  They get away with everything.  Hillary Clinton spoliated 33,000 emails amid a federal probe, a federal crime that always ends up with prison time — but not for her.  It is a federal crime to lie under oath to Congress.  Comey, Clapper, Brennan — how have they all avoided prison time?  Strzok, Page, the whole bunch of them?  Adam Schiff.  The outliers on the Mueller team.  Not one single slime among them in the swamp has been brought to justice.

The Two Popes Problem.  When Pope Francis grants an interview, he makes news by subverting Church teaching.  When Pope Benedict XVI gives one, he makes news by upholding it. [...] The supposed conflict, though, is mythical, as Pope Benedict XVI is far too nonconfrontational and passive to wage any sort of battle against his successor.  Benedict has gone out of his way to soften any differences between the two, even though Pope Francis represents the very relativistic and politicized Catholicism he feared.

The 'New Normal'? Ridiculous.  Crises, even if they are manufactured ones, are great producers of linguistic mutation. [...] It's not only civil war that produces such linguistic deformations.  Any crisis will do. [...] I remember one meeting in particular when it was explained to us that storms like Hurricane Sandy were "the new normal."  "The new normal."  Is there a more nauseating flake of smug linguistic presumption?  I think that the imperative "stay safe," born of our coronavirus panic, comes close.  But "the new normal" is worse because it pretends to knowledge not just solicitude.  That wretched town official who was telling us serfs what we could and could not do with our homes did so on the hollow authority of knowing, or pretending to know, what the future would bring.  So it is now.

Richard Grenell, a True Hero of Our Times.  You may have noticed, as a mere citizen of this country, there are many things you are not supposed to know.  You are not mature enough or intelligent enough to handle certain information.  You are in, in effect, a child in a supposedly democratic republic.  When Congress wishes to interview key players on a matter of significance, they first, and often only, do it in camera so you infants are not allowed to hear the truth as it emerges under oath. [...] America in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and a fateful presidential election that may determine whether our future is free market capitalism or socialism, has found its Diogenes just in the nick of time.  His name is Richard Grenell, formerly ambassador to Germany and before that spokesperson for various UN ambassadors and now acting director of national intelligence.  Mr. Grenell, that ingrate, decided that we weren't so stupid after all and were able to determine the truth for ourselves if given access to the facts.  So he marched testimony, heretofore hidden, due to the restrictions of one Adam Schiff, regarding the Trump-Russia probe over to another potential Diogenes (William Barr — two for the price of one) and the rest is emerging history.  What are we discovering so far?

I'm Not Scared Anymore.  I have to confess that a few weeks ago I was scared.  Very scared.  Not of the coronavirus, which most likely will prove to be just as lethal, or even much less lethal than the flu virus that, coming from Asia, hits us almost every year.  No.  What I was scared of was the people President Trump appointed to protect us from the virus, particularly Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infection disease expert.  Why was I scared of him?  Because after just a perfunctory search on the Internet I found out that Dr. Fauci has been invited at least once to talk to the globalist crowd at the Harold Pratt House in Manhattan, headquarters of the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations.  But the CFR is not a simple organization like the National Association for the Protection of Stray Cats.  It is actually the visible head of the invisible government of the US, and the globalist conspirators do not invite people at the CFR to hear what they say, but to tactfully suggest to them what they must say if they want their careers to advance.

Bubble-Wrapped Americans:  How the U.S. Became Obsessed with Physical and Emotional Safety.  The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence:  "A kid might get hurt."  Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place.  But the operating word here is "reasonable."

Federal Red Tape Is Keeping Local Meat Processors From Helping Fix Our Supply Problem.  The increasing possibility of a breakdown in the meat supply chain in the United States due to COVID-19 is prompting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to renew his push for a bill that would make it easier for small, independent slaughterhouses and meat processors to sell directly to consumers.  Large meatpacking plants across the country have shut down due to fears of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers, and less and less meat is making it to grocers and restaurants.  Wendy's has run out of beef for hundreds of its restaurants (leading to many Twitter jokes about its most famous commercial).  Reason's Brian Doherty has documented how the broad shutdown of commerce is harming the world's food supply, and it's likely going to get worse.

Gutfeld pounds on Schiff:  His ego-driven adventure in impeachment implicates him in biggest global disaster in history.  In response to House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff blaming the coronavirus pandemic on President Donald Trump, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld delivered a fiery rant Tuesday [5/5/2020] urging Schiff to ditch his "funhouse mirror" and take a close look into a REAL mirror.  "We have to remember those who had no skin in this game, who love to play politics and assign blame as a sport, because they were wasting our time when time was so important, which brings me to Adam Schiff," he said on FNC's "The Five."  Schiff had "to create in his mind a working scenario to believe because the alternative reality, which is true, is too devastating," Gutfeld continued.  "If he might consider for a moment that his ego-driven adventure in impeachment shoved the pandemic back into a closet, which led to the surprise attack, which led to thousands of dead."

A Chinese Pattern Emerges:  First Fentanyl, Now Coronavirus.  There are people in China and America, some with connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who are upset with reports that the coronavirus is linked to the lab.  They want to blame President Trump for a plague unleashed by China.  But it turns out there are many controversial labs in Wuhan.  Some "study" viruses.  Some produce fentanyl.  A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times reveals that before Wuhan became known for a virus killing tens of thousands of people, it was the main source of fentanyl, described as the deadliest drug to ever hit U.S. streets, which is also killing tens of thousands of people.

We Have Work to Do.  We are precipitously coming to a point where the Federal Reserve and the federal government have exhausted their capabilities to properly aid states most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The Federal Reserve has put our currency in a vulnerable situation by decreasing interest rates.  This has a direct effect on the market.  The stock market is sensitive to the expectation of stability and growth.  Trade negotiations with China are currently indeterminate.  The immediate need is to get tens of millions of people back to work.  Each state needs to take responsibility to make it easier for employers to hire.  The precondition for healthy progress is deregulation.

True Friends of Liberty Are Rare Indeed.  Since March this year, numerous freedoms — freedom of association, property rights, free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly — have been pulverized as the full power of the state has been unleashed by government agencies across the United States.  In genuine emergencies like war or plague, we let governments do things that we would never otherwise authorize them to do.  But the sheer ease with which this has occurred in recent weeks underscores how a strong in-principle commitment to liberty has weakened throughout America.

The Federal Government Cannot Bail Out the Blue States.  Battle lines are getting drawn up between the two parties on the next round of "stimulus" for the economy.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are demanding as much as $1 trillion more in federal money to bail out state budgets.  The blue states of California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are lining up to be first at the trough.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said there should be "no blue state bailout," and he is right.  The whole idea of the federal government giving money to states is a foolish one.  It is based on the fiscal illusion that the politicians in Washington magically have some multitrillion-dollar stash of money that it can pass out to businesses, mayors and governors.  But this is an obvious fiction.

Stacey Abrams's embarrassing campaign for the vice presidency.  No one has ever wanted to be vice president as much as Stacey Abrams.  The Georgia Democrat, best known for her failed gubernatorial candidacy in 2018, has launched a full-fledged campaign for the vice presidency in recent weeks, telling every news channel that will book her why she thinks she's cut out for the job.  And in doing so, Abrams has proved why she's not.

A Modest Alternative to a Massive State Pension Bailout.  [Scroll down]  Yes, of course this would amount to a federal bailout of mismanaged and bloated state pensions.  And it raises an important moral question.  Why should a private worker in, say, Texas, be liable to pay for the horrible financial quagmire that New Jersey union bosses and politicians created in their own state?  What should a taxpayer in Texas have to do with any of that?  Shouldn't payouts to pensioners in New Jersey be adjusted, or perhaps the salaries for current public workers adjusted to reflect reduced revenue, or furloughs at least be considered to address the state's lack of liquidity, before demanding that taxpayers from other states pay for the problems that reckless unions and politicians in New Jersey created all by themselves?  What's on display here is a vivid example of the two Americas that are engaged in an ideological battle that's been softly raging for decades.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo Had the Worst Response to the Crisis of Any Governor in America.  The press has been gushing about the performance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for weeks.  The media often compares Cuomo's "decisive" response to the coronavirus pandemic to the president, and guess who always wins?  Whether it's good PR from the governor's office or just the media worshipping a liberal who says mean things about Donald Trump, it hardly matters.  What matters is results.  And in that department, Andrew Cuomo has been a miserable failure — using several metrics. [...] Maybe it would be a godsend for the Democrats to dump Joe Biden from the ticket and acclaim Andrew Cuomo their nominee for president.  The myth of Cuomo's superior crisis management would be exposed in short order, leading to an easy Trump victory.

How to stop the coming meat shortage.  Amid the coronavirus crisis, some are calling attention to the coming meat shortages the United States faces as the virus continues to ravage our economy.  Rep. Thomas Massie has been sounding the alarm for weeks, and the Kentucky Republican recently introduced the "PRIME Act" in an effort to address the coming crisis.  The congressman is right to be concerned. [...] There is no actual shortage in livestock. (Remember, farmers are about to kill their produce needlessly.) Rather, the breakdown is coming on the plant side of the equation where cramped quarters are hazardous.  Why can't farmers sell directly to consumers and circumvent this problem?  You guessed it — government regulations.

Is It Time for a Revolution?  It's time for America's business owners to fight back against a tyrannical government.  Some might call that a revolution.  But in this case, I'm talking about a war fought in the courts.  I'm talking about a legal battle.  It's time for lawsuits — lots of them.  It's time to defend our civil rights.  It's time to defend our property rights.  It's time to make tyrant governors understand this isn't a dictatorship and we're not their serfs.

Pelosi's Congress Should Shelter At Home For The Rest Of The Year.  Earlier this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer postponed lawmakers' return to Washington DC, citing concerns about coronavirus transmission.  Congress should stay out of Washington DC a lot longer.  Even until next year.  The primary reason isn't because they, like health-care workers or truckers or grocery store employees or pastors, might catch coronavirus doing their jobs.  The primary reason is that when they "do something," Congress usually hurts the country far worse than if they just took naps in the closet or played cards all day, like my husband's coworkers at a union-run former workplace.  The nation should have learned this from activist responses to the Great Depression, which we now know made the depression longer and harder.  It also created expectations, institutions, and ways of life that have upended our exceptional system of self-government.

The Roman Globalist Church:  Pope Francis accelerates Catholicism's descent into humanist utopianism.  On Easter Sunday, the Vatican released a letter Pope Francis wrote to Catholic organizations in South America.  Francis wrote that the coronavirus pandemic "might be a good time to consider a universal basic wage" that would enable the poor to enjoy "the benefits of globalism."  Such a measure, Francis wrote, "would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights."  Toward the end of his letter, Francis hoped the pandemic would generate "a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money, and places human life and dignity at the center."  Nowhere in his letter did Francis mention Jesus Christ.  The letter conclusively proves that Francis is transforming the Catholic Church into another non-governmental organization.  In the process, he is destroying the church's identity and credibility.

COVID-1984.  A well meaning policy intervention that makes a situation worse is often referred to as the "cobra effect."  In the time of British rule of colonial India, the British government wanted to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi.  The government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.  Initially, the program seemed successful — until people started to breed cobras for income.  Soon Delhi had more cobras than when it started the intervention program.  The Chinese experienced a similar well intentioned policy disaster in 1958.  The Four Pests Campaign attempted to remove mosquitoes, rodents, flies, and sparrows responsible for the transmission of disease.  The policy of eliminating these pests led to infestations of other pests that had previously served as prey for those that were wiped out and resulted in a massive loss of crops, causing the Great Chinese Famine, which killed an estimated 15 [to] 45 million people — far more than the "Four Pests."

Holding the economy hostage.  Elie Mystal of the Nation does not want to go back to work without "somebody to come take my children.  A school bus.  A babysitter.  A freaking traveling circus.  It doesn't really matter.  My economy cannot reopen, life cannot return to normal for me, until fully functional child care comes back on line."  That is very telling.  He does not care who takes care of his children — a freaking traveling circus will do — just so long as it is not him.  Mystal also wrote, "I live in the future and have subscriptions to approximately 18,000 streaming services."  So those are his priorities.  He wants to stream entertainment and shove his kids off on a freaking traveling circus.  Perhaps cutting back on streaming subscriptions would free up money to take care of his children.

The revolving door between the DOJ the law firm Covington & Burling.  [Thread reader] Whenever you think you have someone you can count on you have already fallen for the trap.

The Consequences of a Federal Bailout for the States.  As lawmakers debate over a bailout for the states, Jonathan Williams, the chief economist and executive vice president of policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council, has a warning for states.  "Strings that come with these federal dollars oftentimes outlive the federal dollars, as we've found out with the last time we had a bailout of the states during the Obama era," Williams says.  "And I think it's just a dangerous precedent to set that the states would look to the federal government to be their solution for problems that they are well-equipped to handle themselves."  He joins The Daily Signal Podcast today to talk about why states should say no to a federal bailout, if federal bailouts affect states' rights and sovereignty, if federal bailouts potentially affect tax rates, and much more.

Our incurious media.  Our incurious, lying propagandists in the media appear to have little knowledge of or respect for the long history of science and medicine that has brought us to where we are today.  But of course, this group of pitiful hacks have no comment when mentally ill individuals dump dangerous levels of hormones into their systems and mutilate their genitals in order to claim they have become the opposite sex.  With rare exception, the media in America are a vile and dangerous group of folks who are doing serious harm to our country.

How We Pale to Previous Generations.  America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering.  Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today?  No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.  Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies.  Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics.  Our writers, directors, and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors.  But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class, and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. [...] We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years.  Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.  In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?

It's Time to Stop Paying Government Salaries.  The first days of hashtag-quarantine-life were terrifying.  The models were terrifying. [...] But then we started noticing something.  The numbers weren't adding up.  Oh sure, when we heard Dr. Birx telling us those percentages it was sobering, but when we started looking at what that meant in real-time the concern didn't seem to match the increase.  In Los Angeles the mayor fretted over a doubling of the mortality rate in just a few days but a look at the numbers showed that doubling meant they went from around 200 to 400... in a population of four million.  Considering the horrific homeless problem that still remained it seemed almost impossible that the number would be that low.  As of today the mortality count in the City of Angels stands at 848.  In Orange County and Ventura County (LA county's closest neighbors) the mortality counts currently stand at 36 and 16 respectively.  We're not even close to the level of horror we were told to expect even with social distancing measures.

America Needs Less Federal Bureaucracy, Not More.  The American bureaucracy needs to be reformed.  Congress should make structural and appropriations reforms to regulatory agencies.  First, heads of executive agencies must serve at the will of the president rather than with "for cause" removal protections.  Second, the combination of powers wielded by agencies must be eliminated.  Third, Congress should pass legislation rather than providing an overly broad mandates under which agencies then govern.  Fourth, all agency appropriations should be approved by Congress in accordance with the principle "no taxation without representation."  These reforms will help protect us from the soft despotism of the bureaucracy and help preserve limited government.  It is consistent with our history and our traditions.

When Communism Is OK in America, Patriots Must Resist Harder.  With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Cold War virtually disappeared.  In the 1990s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO).  Under Deng Xiaoping (premier of China, 1978-1992), the PRC had begun to set up empowerment zones and allowed capitalist multinational corporations to operate within their borders.  McDonald's has some nice fast food outlets in China, and many of our medicines as well as our Barbie dolls are manufactured there.  Chinese restrictions on child-bearing won the hearts of Western liberals, who are convinced that over-population combined with climate change (formerly "global warming") is the cause of poverty on our planet.  "Sustainable" use of resources became a new mantra.  For many, sustainability means capitalism and communism working together side by side.

Governor Cuomo Is No Governor Compassionate.  I seem to be the rare person who is not impressed with New York governor Andrew Cuomo's philosopher-governor act.  The other day, I disagreed here with his "new normal" prescription that I believe calls for a less-vibrant America.  In his latest escapade, a reporter asked the governor about whether he understands the fear and pain of protestors who want to get back to work.  No, he does not.

The Multi-Talented Ms. Abrams.  Most politicians in the running to join a presidential ticket as the VP candidate are inclined to stay silent, change the subject, or simply express their humility at the thought of being considered.  Stacey Abrams isn't most politicians.

Concede the WH, take Congress?  Democrats aren't worried.  They are hoping for a repeat of 1972.  Oh sure, Dick Nixon murdered George McGovern's presidential ambitions.  Nixon was the first president to carry 49 states.  But Democrats held on to the House and the Senate, even gaining two Senate seats.  And that was what mattered to them.  It allowed them to work with the deep state to force Nixon out of office in less than 2 years.  Biden should do better than McGovern, But the real deal for Democrats are the House and Senate races.

COVID-19 Completes Liberal Takeover of Southern Baptist Convention.  Crisis and upheaval have brought out the best in some (think of Ulysses Grant) and the worst in others (think of Vidkun Quisling).  This holds true of Christian churches and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  In previous columns, my colleagues and I have raised red flags about the SBC, including corruption and leftward drift.  One sees this in executive leadership, in missions, in the management of seminaries, in the workings of the SBC's publishing company, in its political advocacy, in its gatherings, and in funding ties.  Some problems can be framed as left versus right (cultural Marxism creeping into the denomination's entities).  Some are not ideological, but rather symptoms of garden-variety Good Old Boy corruption.  We had a swampy SBC that was bad enough by March 1, 2020.  But then came COVID, and it got even worse.

Speaker Pelosi, end government-by-secret-caucus.  Our Constitution set up three branches of government.  And yet, in this crisis, only two branches are fully operational.  In particular, the House of Representatives is no longer functioning as a legislative body at all but as an executive committee run by just one representative: the Speaker of the House.  There are no open debates, no televised committee hearings, no minority rights.  "The People's House" is not open to the people.

You Won't Catch the Coronavirus at a Drive-In Movie.  [Scroll down]  You'd drive to your local outdoor theater, pay a reasonable per-person or per-car admission, find a nice place to park in front of this gigantic outdoor screen, wait for dusk, and then watch at least two movies, sometimes three.  On the 4th of July, there would be fireworks between shows. [...] How in the world did all this lose favor?  How did we go from thousands of drive-in theaters to just a few hundred?  Imagine if there were still thousands of drive-ins right now.  We could all go to the movies.  Hollywood would still be making money.  Progress isn't always progress, is it? [...] Everyone complains about how awful it is to sit in a movie theater today.  Everyone.  Sticky floors, the price of concessions, the talking and other obnoxious noises.  The drive-in solved all that.

Stop telling the government to make money out of thin air.  Reps.  Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal will save us all from crushing government debt — just make two coins worth $1 trillion each and parcel the money out!  L. Randall Wray, a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, disagrees.  He says the Federal Reserve, not the U.S. Mint, should make lots of money and give it to all.  The mistake here, as with all of Modern Monetary Theory (a.k.a. the Magic Money Tree), is to think that money is important.  It isn't. [...] Money is just the way we count, the way to keep score.  What matters is the things that are available, the goods and services that people can actually consume.  Creating more money doesn't change how many valuable goods and services there are, therefore, it doesn't change anything real.

Fawning US Media Is 1 Reason Beijing Thinks It Can Bully Hong Kong.  Pro-China authorities last week brazenly arrested Beijing's chief critics in Hong Kong, a city that is supposed to have a high degree of autonomy.  Unsurprisingly, that sparked further condemnation from the Trump administration at a time when the People's Republic of China was already under pressure in Washington because of its role as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Why would China be courting further foreign denunciation?  Perhaps it feels it has plenty of wiggle room.  China has silenced critics of its handling of the coronavirus crisis in the mainland itself, curbing potential downside at home, at least temporarily.  In fact, its communist leaders seem to be benefiting from a rise of xenophobia and jingoism.

This is Who They Are.  Contrary to the current "progressive" understanding, the First Amendment wasn't intended to protect obscenity.  The right to speak and to protest government is the heart of the First Amendment.  And, as the revolutionaries who gave us our Constitution intended, the Second Amendment wasn't written to protect the right to shoot squirrels.  It was written to protect the right to self-defense from tyrants who would deny the people's rights.

Beware The Guru.  South Korea now appears to have its COVID-19 situation under control.  Yet in February, a sudden rise in cases there centered on a group named the "Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony."  It was initially mistaken for a Protestant church, but later was revealed to be a kind of cult.  According to one account, its founder and guru, Lee Man-hee, considers himself to be "an immortal prophet sent to the earth to prepare for the end of the world." Actually, a number of other successful Korean churches probably qualify as cults.  Once touted as "the largest church in the world," the Yoido Full Gospel Church adhered to the teachings of its guru Yonggi Cho until he stepped down in 2008. Eventually he was convicted for embezzlement.  Rather than traditional Christianity, Cho's religion was really a type of Mind-Science — the idea that thoughts can magically alter reality.  Since his teachings promised health, wealth, and success, they unsurprisingly drew multitudes of adherents. [...] Jesus cautioned his disciples against such elevation of religious leaders when he insisted that "you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers" (Matt. 23:8).

You are what you eat during pandemic isolation period.  As others have expressed, my hope is that after COVID-19, there will be a new focus on public health.  Not just on preventive treatments and measures but also on wellness — on the healing power of being in and maintaining good health.  We have been reminded repeatedly that the simple act of adopting a healthy lifestyle can stave off chronic disease.  According to a Harvard University-led study published in January, when compared with those who didn't follow any healthy lifestyle habits, those who followed four or five healthy habits bought themselves an additional decade of disease-free living.  The study involved more than 30 years' worth of health data from 111,000 people who were free of cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease at age 50.  The elements of their healthy lifestyle should not be surprising to anyone.  They didn't smoke, limited their alcohol intake, ate a healthy diet, maintained a healthy weight and exercised at least 30 minutes per day.

Elected Sheriffs, A Defense Against Tyranny.  Some time ago, I wrote a series of Pro Second Amendment articles in rebuke to Democrat initiatives attempting illegal gun confiscation.  My thought was that along with the court system, one major line of defense against tyrannical local and state governments, and possibly even an out-of-control Federal Government, could be local Sheriff's.  The vast majority of these constitutional officers are elected officials who are directly responsible to their constituents and more importantly, the Constitution of these United States. [...] Most State Oaths of Office are [similar], first addressing fealty to the U.S. Constitution and only after, to the State Constitution and Laws.  However, not all of these constitutional officers understand the gravity of the oath they are sworn to uphold.

Planning the Great Escape from House Arrest — and From Communist China.  To a substantial degree, China produces what America consumes.  Each country's holdings in the other are enormous.  They are bound by innumerable contracts, deals, projects and cross-posted personnel that are not easily severed.  This system of cross-dependency was consciously pursued to vaccinate the world against a repetition of the two world wars.  However, globalization also significantly eroded the independence and freedom of action of individual nations, though not each to the same degree.  It permitted asymmetries to arise between the more aggressive and secretive regimes at the expense of those which, perhaps naively, adhered more closely to the posted rules. [...] Undoing current arrangements is tantamount to rolling back decades of policy.  However, the system will start to reopen in the direction of subsidiarity, where the interests of the component take precedence over maximizing the system as a whole.

Powerful Americans Were Catastrophically Wrong about China.  For the last thirty years, the vast majority of powerful institutions in the United States placed a gargantuan bet on the idea that the government in Beijing could be a reliable partner in prosperity and would be a responsible actor on the world stage.  Many leading politicians in both parties chose to believe this, many foreign-policy wonks chose to believe this, many academics and university administrators chose to believe this, and obviously, corporate America loved the idea of both using Chinese labor for imported goods and receiving access to the Chinese market.  This includes Comcast, Disney, Viacom, AT&T, and Fox Corporation — the parent companies of NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and Fox News, among other large multinationals that own major U.S. news organizations.  The controversy over the NBA last year was a vivid demonstration that most of these entities were not going to let little things like the Chinese government forcing over one million ethnic minorities into concentration camps or a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong disrupt these extremely profitable relationships.

Communist China's War for Global Dominance and the Wuhan-Virus Pandemic.  [Scroll down]  The Beijing gangsters decided that on balance, rather than see their "hundred-year marathon" unravel, the risks involved in letting the Wuhan-virus pandemic go global, sending the American economy into a tailspin, were worth taking.  For them, Chinese casualties in the outbreak of the Wuhan-virus epidemic, irrespective of the final numbers, are merely collateral damage, as were Chinese deaths during the period of the Great Leap Forward under the leadership of Mao, who alone was responsible for more than seventy million deaths.

The Dual Reckoning to Come.  China is not a good global citizen.  China is a corruptor of world markets and global culture.  China operates on a mercantilist, win-lose paradigm that has been destructive to all of its trading partners.  You don't have to ask people in America's Rust Belt.  Ask Italy whether or not their relationship with China has been a net positive.  The virus has exposed all of this.  It can't be hidden from anymore.  Perhaps the reckoning is simply that we move our supply chain out of China and disperse it, or what of it isn't repatriated, to other countries less likely to emerge as hostile.  Hopefully, that will be sufficient to file down the teeth of the tiger.  But what can't be done is to ignore the obvious fact that our forebearance with Chinese communists has been a mistake, and that relationship must change.  We can no longer ignore China's atrocious human rights record, its hideous product quality control, its constant lies, its increasing militarism, and its assault on individual liberties not just within its own borders.

Pope Francis's approach to COVID-19 is a reminder that he is a leftist.  In a few small ways, Pope Francis is a traditionalist.  He opposes abortion, gay marriage (although he supports gay civil unions), and the notion of infinite genders.  In most other ways, though, the Pope constantly demonstrates that he emerged from a Marxist background.  Despite being the Catholic Church's preeminent man of God, he has a Gaia-centric view of nature.  He also brings a Marxist's understanding of economics (i.e., simplistic and wrong) to the papacy.  That's why, on Wednesday [4/8/2020], the Pope suggested that COVID-19 is the earth's revenge for climate change and then implied that politicians concerned about the economy are akin to Hitler in 1933. [...] What's significant is that this viewpoint is totally antithetical to Judeo-Christian doctrine.  The Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, long ago abandoned animism in favor of a single divine entity, that created the earth and all that is upon it.

Not-So-Great.  I'm trying to picture how far the media would turn up the outrage meter if President Trump governed like Lyndon Johnson, and I can't do it; my imagination isn't expansive enough.  In Great Society:  A New History, Amity Shlaes presents a deeply researched, briskly told account of an era of tumult that was promoted and in many cases even funded by the federal government.  If you want to be reassured that we of the Trump Era enjoy the privilege of relatively placid times, this is the book to read. [...] To reduce the amount of money leaving the country, Johnson called for a moratorium on all American tourism outside the Western Hemisphere for two years.  He used the FBI and CIA to track his political enemies.  Oh, and imagine if President Trump were forcing hundreds of thousands of men to go to war in an obscure corner of the world for poorly defined reasons, and that tens of thousands of these young men, disproportionately poor and members of minority groups, were getting killed or maimed.

The Revolution Is Under Way Already.  Fear sweeps the land.  Many businesses collapse.  Some huge fortunes are made.  Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons.  The government's reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual.  Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets.  Political factionalism grows more intense.  Everything falls apart.  This was all as true of revolutionary France in 1789 and 1790 as it is of the United States today.  Are we at the beginning of a revolution that has yet to be named?  Do we want to be?

House of cards:
European leaders lament:  Coronavirus might just kill the EU too.  If the European Union now finds itself in "mortal danger," it's only because it's faced its first truly mortal threat.  The Washington Post reports that European leaders have begun to warn that unilateral actions by its members — most recently Hungary but also core members France and Germany — will undo their decades-long experiment in continental unity.  The raising of borders and the imposition of trade barriers in the coronavirus pandemic has all but sidelined Brussels in the crisis, and there's little indication that EU members are interested in anything but their own domestic political standing.

Small Businesses Are Almost Out Of Time, And It Matters To All Of Us.  With an average daily income of only $7 above daily expenses, the typical small business has a median cash buffer of 27 days of burn before it runs out of money.  Karen Mills, prior head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), said recently that "20%, even 30%, of small businesses could fail even in a good scenario."  Without immediate support to buffer the cash flows of stalled businesses waiting for the economy to reopen, it is a matter of days until millions begin to shut their doors, driving unemployment up significantly and sending the economy into a tailspin.  Small businesses make up over 99.9% of businesses, employ about 59 million people (about 47% of the U.S. private workforce in 2015), create over 41% of new jobs, and account for 45% of GDP.

A Marshall Plan for Main Street.  While our nation continues to fight against this pandemic, we have a responsibility in Congress to help small businesses survive this storm.  As one of America's main employers, Main Street is the engine of our economy.  According to the Small Business Administration, there are more than 30 million small businesses in America and nearly 60 million small-business employees.  That is over 47% of the entire workforce.  They deserve a government that responds to their needs, especially during moments of crisis.

Stop the panic.  Don't let the coronavirus win.  In response to the coronavirus pandemic, democratic governments across the world have implemented unprecedented peacetime lockdowns.  One California city is even using night vision equipped drones — made in China, ironically — to enforce it.  A city in Washington encourages citizens to snitch on those who violate the "stay home" order.  Let's pause a moment to consider the serious ramifications of what we are doing.  To combat a virus, some state and local governments have ordered everyone, including perfectly healthy people, to stay home for an undefined period of time.  Travel has been curtailed.  Americans abroad (like me) are stuck, not knowing when we can return home.  The consequences of such draconian measures are potentially devastating and irreversible.  With little to no public input, we eagerly have given up our basic rights, decided that economic health is entirely subservient to public health, and radically altered how our society functions.

Mike Lindell, Not the Media, Is the Hero.  MyPillow CEO Michael Lindell, a self-made former crack addict, is going to transform 75% of his manufacturing capacity to make 10,000 cotton face masks per day by the end of the week, ramping up production to 50,000 a day in a month.  That sounds like a patriotic act to me, especially given that Lindell is undertaking the effort without being forced to do so by a federal agency.  I hope the guy becomes a billionaire after this is all over.  NBC?  Not so much.  The headline on its "analysis" of Lindell's remarks was "Trump fluffs MyPillow in Rose Garden."  This matched the basic tone taken by a large faction within the political press.

Apocalypse More Or Less Now.  The $22 trillion U.S. economy is the single greatest achievement in human history, but it's more than that — it is the primary engine of human progress that has dragged the population of Planet Earth out of misery and want. [...] As Steve Skinner so aptly described it last weekend within these pages, we are massively overreacting to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.  And there are real consequences to this.  In two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. [...] It's worse than that.  We're losing businesses, significant businesses, and we're going to lose more.  Logan's Roadhouse, the restaurant chain, just closed 260 units and let all their employees go.  They're finished.  It's only a matter of weeks before every department store in the country is gone, which will take down every shopping mall in America.  The big-retail industry might have been on its last legs, but this will clearly finish it off.

The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Intentionally Being Used To Collapse The U.S. Economy.  The Cloward-Piven strategy is an 8-step plan designed in 1966 by hardcore anti-America Liberal Socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a new national system.  Here is their plan, look at it and tell me if you see anything it mentions that might be happening right now. [...]
The Cloward-Piven Strategy To Collapse America:
  [#1]   Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#2]   Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#3]   Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level.  That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#4]   Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government.  That way you are able to create a police state.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#5]   Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives.  (Food, Housing, and Income)  HAPPENING NOW
  [#6]   Education — Take control of what people read and listen to us" take control of what children learn in school.  ALREADY DONE
  [#7]   Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.  ALREADY DONE
  [#8]   Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor.  This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.  HAPPENING NOW

It's time to make the state governments feel the pain and consequences of the disproportionate shutdown of America.  At present, governors and mayors face no political downside to suspending democracy and the economy with overly draconian measures.  They only face accolades and praise from the media commensurate to the degree of lockdown they promote, based on the faulty science that failed so miserably in Europe.  It's time to make them feel the pain of their decisions so that they are forced to pursue a more prudent and balanced approach to coronavirus.  So far, all the damage to our liberty and economy is being pushed by state and local governments, not the feds.  On the other hand, all the bailouts and responsibility for dealing with the fallout of their virtue-signaling decisions are being placed on the president.  Isn't it time for state legislatures and county councils to convene and take full responsibility?  If they are big enough to declare nuclear winter on liberty, jobs, and the economy, they are big enough to handle the blowback and pay for their decisions.

Government and Economics Made Dead Simple.  There are only two types of governments.  Two.  That's it.  There are those where the people control the government and those where the government controls the people.  Likewise, there are only two types of economic systems: economies where free markets control commerce and economies where bureaucrats control commerce.  It's that simple.

The coronavirus and character.  The old adage is that 'tough times build character.'  The old adage is wrong.  The reality is that tough times reveal character and a stunning number of people come up woefully lacking in this department:
  •   A businessman who retooled his operation to make a wholly unrelated product because that product is needed in dealing with this virus is dismissed as "the pillow guy" by a media whose malpractice is almost a punchline.
  •   Members of Congress think it [is] wonderful for people in certain delivery services to go on strike.  Because it's apparently better to have more people crowding into stores, not to mention the loss of income for the strikers.  But, hey; eggs and omelets.
  •   CBS used footage from Italy in a story about an NYC hospital and called that a 'mistake.'  Just like ABC some months back mistook a Kentucky firing range for a Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds.
It's a remarkably enlightening time in our history, not because of things being learned but because of people being exposed for who and what they really are.

Governors Practice Political Distancing In Shifting Blame To Federal Government.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on the federal government to take control of the medical supply market.  Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker demanded that President Trump take charge and said "precious months" were wasted waiting for federal action.  Some critics are even more direct in demanding a federal takeover, including a national quarantine.  It is the legal version of panic shopping.  Many seem to long for federal takeovers, if not martial law.  Yet like all panic shopping, they are buying into far more than they need while not doing as much as they could with what they have.  For decades, governors tried to retain principal authority over public emergencies, but they did very little with those powers.  While many are doing impressive work now, some governors seem as eager to contain the blame as the coronavirus.  Call it political distancing.

The Chinese Communist Party vs America.  The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion.  Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people.  They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal.  Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.  At the heart of China's communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world.  After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.  If one doubts the CCP's resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country.  In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly.  The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world's preeminent economic and military power.

On Coronavirus, Trump Takes Charge.  Even in such a worrisome and dangerous time as the current public-health and economic crisis, there are some entertaining election-year maneuvers.  The Trump-hating media have been reduced to desperate weaving back and forth in their search for a plausible alternative to the incumbent.  And President Trump's domination of prime-time television every day with a demonstrably competent executive performance, even if it has not been without its Trumpesque flourishes of hyperbole and shifts of position, is propelling the practicing, wildly-out-of-the-closet Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi to severe lapses of judgment.

US Chamber of Commerce wants to keep America dependent on China.  In this time, when the Wuhan virus is ravishing the U.S., it is beyond nauseating to read that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants America to stay dependent on China for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and other manufacturing goods.  That might seem hard to believe, but it appears to be the case.  Tom Donohue, the 82-year-old, well coiffed, and highly compensated president of the CoC, is objecting to the Trump administration's "Buy American" mandates for medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.  This, the silver-tongued Donohue says, will "damage U.S. trading relationships for years to come."  It doesn't seem to disturb Mr. Donohue that the trade relationships and practices he wishes to protect and preserve with China are exactly the ones that have hollowed out the American middle class.  They have also left the U.S. dependent on that communist country for over 90 percent of our prescription drugs and much of our medical equipment and supplies, a truly surreal situation.

Fixing the Roof While It's Raining.  President Trump this afternoon signed a $2 trillion spending bill to respond to the health emergency, while the Federal Reserve spent the better part of a trillion dollars this week buying bonds of every description and lending money to foreign central banks.  That avoided a financial crisis and stabilized the stock market.  When I proposed a massive fiscal stimulus on February 27, I looked like a wild-eyed alarmist, and many readers on this site accused me of playing into a Democratic plot to panic the country and wrong-foot President Trump.  Market intervention is like buying a present for the birthday of your spouse; if you're late, you'll have to pay a great deal more.  A fraction of the $2 trillion tab would have maintained confidence in markets if it had been offered a month ago, but no matter:  What had to be done, had to be done.  That leaves us with a Federal deficit of perhaps $4 trillion — the $1 trillion deficit we ran before the crisis despite full employment, another $1 trillion in lost tax revenues, and $2 trillion in additional spending.  That's nearly a fifth of GDP, unprecedented in peacetime.

How Did We Ever Get to The Roaring Twenties?  [Scroll down]  I'm not trying to say our current situation is as bad as things were in the 1910s.  What happened during that time frame is unthinkable compared to our current predicament.  But it's encouraging to see what people have battled back from in the past.  The fact that people were willing to shrug off such a debilitating period and turn it into one of the most optimistic decades our country has ever seen speaks volumes of our ability to continue moving forward.

The Left is Loving This.  Consider, for a moment, what ideas Americans seem to have generally accepted in the last few weeks. [...] Thirdly, this crisis appears to have nullified any devotion to the concept of individual liberty among Americans.  A friend in Chicago tells me that he and his young daughters daren't risk even walking to the park that his tax dollars built, as he risks a $500 fine for doing so.  The stiffest resistance encountered by the government officials imposing these infringements upon law-abiding citizens is the quiet grumbling that exists beneath all these loud sermons about "social distancing" and "flattening the curve."  And finally, as Americans are left unable to care for themselves because the government is prohibiting their free association in the economic marketplace, the government is now facilitating a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers as cash payments to Americans below certain income thresholds.

China's Massive Belt and Road Initiative.  China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.  Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives would stretch from East Asia to Europe, significantly expanding China's economic and political influence.  Some analysts see the project as an unsettling extension of China's rising power, and as the costs of many of the projects have skyrocketed, opposition has grown in some countries.  Meanwhile, the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development and military expansion.

Coronavirus Is Not Even Close to America's Biggest Problem.  The immediate reaction of our government to the virus threat was to spend massive amounts of money.  The latest news is that politicians plan to "boost" the economy with nearly two trillion dollars in spending and loans.  "The package is coming in at about 10% of GDP.  It's very large," says Larry Kudlow.  For a plan of this size to sound like a good idea, you need to ignore some important economic facts.  Our country has unbelievable levels of debt, and our debt is rising rapidly.  The numbers are staggering. [...] Governments that have tried this approach have ended up with money that looks like this 50-trillion-dollar bill from Zimbabwe.  It's real paper money.  But this $50 trillion wouldn't buy much.  In Venezuela, the inflation rate is around 53 million percent.  That means everything costs more every day.

Conservative Leaders:  Public Health Measures Must Still Protect Constitutional Rights of Americans.  The public health crisis facing the country is unprecedented, and a whole of government approach is underway.  However, using this crisis as a justification to violate the basic civil liberties of Americans is unconscionable, and in no way justified.  This is also true at the state level, where unprecedented shelter-in-place orders threaten civil liberties as well.  We urge governors to make any movement limitations temporary and tailored.  A federal shelter-in-place order should be avoided at all costs.  Public health must be protected, but so, too, should the rights of Americans under the Constitution.  Americans have mobilized with extraordinary speed and cooperation.  The Trump administration has lifted regulations and expedited actions to begin vaccine testing, facilitate production of necessary medical equipment, and restricted foreign access to the country as appropriate.  These actions are justified.  A dramatic expansion of the police state is not, and we emphatically oppose it.

Wake Up America — China is the Pandemic.  The Democrats stalled the $2 trillion stimulus for three days, in an attempt at stuffing the initiative with all the leftist policies they knew they could never foist upon the electorate through legislation or the ballot box.  China infected the world to save its reputation and provide for itself enhanced income-producing opportunities — and is now not only lying about it but also using the death and chaos they caused as a weapon in its quest to rule the world.  The media is backing both plays.  Twisted millenarianism is one thing they all have in common.  Parties, countries, and media have priorities and if you die, you die.  You see, to the iniquitous Chinese, the Democrats, and the media, your life, or anyone's life, or millions of lives, is a mere quibble when ruling the world is the potential prize.

If money from the feds is free, why not give everyone $100,000?  Most politicians in both parties adamantly disagree with President Trump on the need to achieve proper balance between quarantine and our livelihoods.  They want an economic and liberty nuclear winter, and they want it indefinitely — without investigating any of the science and data behind it.  At the same time, they want to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars "stimulating" a dead body with nothing to stimulate and don't appear to see any downside to accruing all this debt and risking market distortions.  So if that's the case, why not just give every American a year's worth of income?  Like all Kabuki theater in Washington, where Republicans agree with Democrats on 99 percent of an issue but fight truculently over the last 1 percent, both parties shook hands (I mean elbow-bumped!) on a $2 trillion stimulus today plus $4 trillion in Federal Reserve shenanigans.  The bill indiscriminately throws too much money in a black hole without better defining and studying the scope of the problem to come up with a better solution.  It solves nothing, bankrupts our nation forever, and still brilliantly manages to leave many people behind at the same time!

China Is Lashing Out Because Wuhan Flu Has Unmasked It To The World.  The Chinese communists are afraid.  You might not guess it from the invertebrate and borderline anti-national corporate media parroting Chinese state propaganda, but they are.  Beijing is shaken.  Their dream of dominating the globe eventually, with the slow overstretch and collapse of the Pax Americana, was considered a matter of destiny.  Then suddenly, it all was shaken.  A combination of incompetence, criminal negligence, and totalitarian suppression of a new devastating virus originating from the raw meat and wet markets of interior China let it rage through the globe.  The world's first postmodern global pandemic, preventable but not prevented, has so far already caused the deaths of more than 13,000 people, torched all the major power centers, decimated the service sector, pushed the global economy to the brink of an unprecedented recession, devastated the stock market, closed the borders of all the great powers, ended global cooperation on vaccines, and rocked the boat of globalisation in ways unthinkable since the peak days of the autarkic 1930s.  If this is the hegemonic order of the future superpower, then civilization is doomed.

Abolish the World Health Organization.  Way back on January 10, the official Twitter account of the World Health Organization declared that 'WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan, #China.'  The tweet went on to say that 'It is generally considered that entry screening offers little benefit, while requiring considerable resources.'  A follow-up tweet described how 'WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on #China based on the information currently available.' [...] Two wrong tweets shouldn't call into the question the creditability of the World Health Organization, but the direction in which its director-general, Tedros Adhanom, has steered the WHO, and his unwillingness to diverge from Beijing's public pronouncements, should trouble the world.

This Too Will Pass.  Economists at Goldman Sachs are now predicting a decline of 24% in GDP for the second quarter, though with 12% and 10% rebounds in the third and fourth quarters.  Along with the illness and death itself, businesses and workers are suffering from lost income, and Congress is planning a $2-trillion relief package.  Individual investors have also been hit, and many who sell now may never return to the stock market — just as many bailed out after 2008 and did not participate in the 300% gain that followed the low of March 2009.  Altogether, the global economy is facing an enormous setback as a result of the coronavirus, and it may take several years or more to return to the highs of 2019.

Destroying America:  It's Not A Game.  The GOP Senate leaders could not pass a "shell" bill to enable a stimulus package aimed at mitigating the economic damage caused by the Chinavirus (COVID-19).  The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, will be submitting a separate piece of legislation tomorrow.  "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" and, at this point, the Democrats have nothing left to lose.  At a press conference earlier in the day the president was optimistic about the way the deal was proceeding.  "They are very close to getting a deal done," Trump said.  "So I'd be surprised if they didn't and if they don't, I think frankly the American people will be very upset with the Democrats because the Republicans are ready to approve a deal.  The only reason a deal couldn't get done is pure politics."

Time To Step Back from Economic Suicide.  [T]he marketplace realities of a locked-down nonfunctioning economy are inexorable, absolutely deadly and unsustainable:  [#1] No matter how much money consumers have in their pockets, they cannot purchase what the economy does not produce; [#2] The economy cannot produce anything when people do not work; [#3] People either do not work or work less productively when the government has instructed them to stay home and paid them to do so, when they spend much of each day caring for their children because frightened politicians have closed the schools and when they must spend the rest of the day searching for ever-scarcer food and essentials as sellers' inventories are drawn down near to exhaustion.  What sense does it make to isolate people at home away from their jobs and to thereby create shortages that force them to stand in line at stores in close proximity to hundreds of untested strangers?

Let the Cruise Lines Sink.  It is quite possible that all of the major cruise operators will need to declare bankruptcy.  While Carnival's stock has dropped almost 80 percent since January, it still could go a lot lower.  All the way to zero, in fact.  And yet, at least one well-informed bank analyst now believes that Carnival is undervalued because it is too big to fail and will be thrown a giant buoy to stay afloat.  The moral hazard created by the bailouts of a decade ago are undeniable in the hubris of this note, which suggests that investors can ignore bankruptcy risk for virtually any stock in the economy, even one premised entirely on luxury, because the government won't let anything fail.

Crisis Socialism:  No Bailouts for Open Borders Globalists!  Why should working-class American citizens being laid off from restaurants, bars, grocery stores, ports, gyms, entry-level service jobs and gig economy contracts rescue one of the beltway swamp's most powerful corporate lobbies — backed by the planet's third-richest mogul, Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway multinational holding company owns massive stakes in American Airlines, Delta, Southwest and United?  Reminder:  Berkshire Hathaway walked away with $10 billion after the 2012 AIG publicly funded bailout.  How much more in private wealth will Bailout Buffett reap from a federal flight fright freakout?  This exploitative campaign to "stabilize" U.S. passenger carriers is about shoring up globalist profits, not patriotism.

Justin Trudeau's Canada Is Obama's Dream for America.  To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history.  Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader, and an unmitigated disaster to the well-being of his country.  For example, Trudeau's unconscionably late and incomplete response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the "19" tells us it has been known for quite some time — much like Obama's delayed response to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and his determination to keep an illegal border crossing open, are only the latest of his ill-gotten political escapades.  Indeed, like the Obama of 57 states and the Austrian language, Justin Trudeau is a full-blown ignoramus masking as an intellectual prodigy. [...] His major accomplishments prior to being elected to the highest office in the land were instructing snowboarding, practicing yoga, and substitute teaching high school drama classes.

Cheap TVs, Expensive Flu.  Thanks to "globalism" — i.e., cheap goods from China — we've gotten many wondrous things, for example:
  •   Toothpaste on American shelves made with a poison found in antifreeze.
  •   Toxic Chinese drywall installed in about 100,000 U.S. homes, emitting noxious fumes that destroyed electrical wiring and metal fixtures and sickened homeowners.  Replacement of the drywall, pipes and wiring cost Americans billions of dollars.
  •   Hundreds, possibly thousands, of American dogs killed by melamine-laced Chinese dog food in 2007.
  •   The loss of about 200,000 beautiful maple trees lining the streets of small New England towns, eaten by Asian long-horned beetles that arrived on Chinese cargo ships in 1996.

Don't Call Democrats' Pork 'Stimulus'.  With much of the U.S. economy shut down to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Congress is putting together a $1 trillion stimulus package to prevent an economic meltdown, the third major bill to address the coronavirus pandemic.  That's a huge amount of money, but a question looms:  How much of it will actually help the struggling economy, and how much of it will just be politically motivated pork? [...] Before passing the second bill Wednesday, Democrats tried to force through a number of costly additions that had little to do with coronavirus.  And they wanted to make them permanent.  That might sound nice, but forcing small- and medium-sized businesses to foot the bill for expensive paid family leave and increased paid sick leave would bankrupt thousands of small businesses, which often have just a few workers and operate on the slimmest of margins.  Fortunately, GOP negotiators got the "permanent" part removed.

Will the Coronavirus Revolutionize Education?  With some K-12 school districts and administrators across America panicking and attempting to get ahead of any 'outbreak' of the coronavirus, more districts are opting for students to stay home.  I'd be willing to bet that most students thoroughly enjoy this. [...] Throughout the years, American homeschooling and online K-12 education has become far more popular and realistic than 'brick and mortar' public schools want to admit.  School choice is disrupting and angering public school districts and officials, and school boards are voting against student vouchers so they can continue to enslave students to their school districts instead of allowing state-allocated money to travel with that student to a school of their choice.  This includes online education.  School districts also keep knowledge of online schools and online education far away from K-12 students and their parents, at all costs.  After all, bodies in the seats mean more money for 'brick and mortar' school districts.  However, now that the coronavirus is causing school administrators to panic, 'brick and mortar' schools are encouraging students to stay home and engage in "Hybrid/Online" classes, where they communicate with their teachers online and complete online assignments and tasks at home on the internet.

Afghanistan:  Our Second Vietnam.  [Scroll down]  The political situation in 2016 was vastly different.  The Afghanistan war was fifteen years old but most Americans remained unconcerned and uninformed about the war.  They remain so today.  There are no huge anti-war protests and those in the media who bother to report on Afghanistan only do so to criticize Trump.  In both wars, the enemy was undefeated, its ideology intact.  The North Vietnamese and their surrogate force the Viet Cong — supported by Russia and China — were far stronger than the South Vietnamese.  The Taliban — long-supported by Pakistan, and now supplied with weapons, funds, and intelligence by Russia and Iran — are vastly stronger than the Kabul government.

It's All in the Stars.  [Scroll down]  We might also ask ourselves:  Who or what is [Harvey] Weinstein?  He is Hollywood, a representative of one of the sleaziest communities on the face of the earth, comprising a bunch of grasping, invidious, self-infatuated and morally corrupt people, many in cahoots with the man they have now turned against.

The problem with attacking for-profit health care, especially for Bernie.  Profit-seeking companies have cured cancer, reversed heart disease, and created every other advance you can name for the past 100 years of medicine.  A tiny fraction of innovation comes out of the NIH or non-profit society grants — and those discoveries would invariably sit on the shelf without the work and investment of profit-seeking venture capitalists and companies guiding the idea through clinical trials, regulatory hurdles, and production.  The majority of the profits that provide the incentive for innovators worldwide come from the U.S., and other health care systems piggyback (and rip off) our system to take advantage of the innovation that we provide.  In short, the U.S. market and the for-profit health care industry that serves it is the world's golden goose for global medical innovations... so please, Bernie, put patients before socialism and stop attacking profits.

Get Out of Afghanistan.  With few exceptions, America's longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount.  Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post's explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan:  Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend.  The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee's ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).  "Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience," Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking.  The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats:  Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded.  Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001.  And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars — an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out — spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world's most economically and politically free countries.

Socialism's Inequalities.  Few statements are more revealing of ignorance than the standard conservative indictment of socialism for "equally spreading poverty."  According to this critique, poverty happens when socialism's insistence on equality of conditions deprives people of the incentive to work.  Such statements so offend reality as to lead one to ask whether those who make them have ever opened their eyes in a socialist country.  No.  Socialism makes for the most radical of inequalities among human beings, and enforces them through the state's absolute power. [...] [I]n full-blooded socialist systems — the Soviet Union was prototypical — like Cuba, China, and Venezuela access to government power is the paramount avenue to success.  So much so, that all assets pale in importance by comparison.  Talent and enterprise seldom hurt.  But if you see someone prosper, you can be sure that he is well connected with the powers that be.  Under real socialism, prosperity and power are two sides of the same coin.  Always.  Invariably.  Food is the most fundamental feature of prosperity or lack thereof.

Think Trump is 'outrageous?' He's nothing compared to these past presidents.  Unprecedented, unprecedented.  Everything is unprecedented.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  Except it pretty much has.  Whenever you see the word "unprecedented" in the media, you should ask yourself:  Has this reporter ever read a history book?  Make the case against Trump if you want to, but if you pretend the sorts of things he does are without precedent, you simply make yourself look ignorant.  Virtually any presidency you examine is guilty of far worse acts than whatever you think is the worst thing Trump has ever done, from John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, a breathtaking offense against freedom that was meant to punish political resistance, to Millard Fillmore's Fugitive Slave Act, which made it so the evil tentacles of the South's slavery regime could reach up North and pluck back people who had successfully made it to freedom.

There are Trillions At Stake.  President Trump is disrupting decades of multinational financial interests who use the U.S. as a host for their ideological endeavors.  President Trump is confronting multinational corporations and the global constructs of economic systems that were put in place to the detriment of the host (USA) i.e., YOU.  There are trillions at stake; it is all about the economics; all else is chaff and countermeasures.  We are already familiar how China, Mexico and ASEAN nations export our raw materials (ore, coking coal, rare earth minerals etc.).  The raw materials are used to manufacture goods overseas, the cheap durable goods are then shipped back into the U.S. for purchase.  It is within this decades-long process where we lost the manufacturing base, and the multinational economic planners (World Trade Organization) put us on a path to being a "service driven" economy.

A Return to Beauty.  The guilty flee when no man pursueth, says Proverbs, but it does not follow from this that the guilty do not flee when they are indeed pursued.  The guilty also have a tendency to argue when they know that they are in the wrong, as for example architects who continue to deny that, for the past seventy years at least, they have been disenchanting the world by espousing a dysfunctional functionalism and constructing buildings so hideous that they make Frankenstein's monster look like Clark Gable.  I refuse to think so ill of architects as human beings as to believe them to be totally unaware of what they have done.  Rather, I pity them.  They are like those unfortunate government spokesmen who have to defend the indefensible in public, which is always a disagreeable and nerve-racking thing to have to do.  As government spokesmen invent a language full of polysyllabic euphemism to disguise the catastrophe their masters have wrought, so architects speak a language that is either incomprehensible or, where comprehensible, entirely beside the point.

Don't Revive the ERA.  The House of Representatives voted this month to begin the process of reviving the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional effort dating to 1923 and first passed by Congress in 1973. [...] Though supported unanimously by House Democrats, the law remains procedurally suspect.  The Department of Justice has stated its intent to prevent the U.S. Archivist from including the ERA in the Constitution, should it secure enough votes, because of the expired ratification deadline.  Meantime, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — despite her support for the ERA, in principle — said that proponents need "a new beginning" beyond the 1982 deadline.  "There's too much controversy about latecomers," she added, urging proponents to start the process over.  Yet supporters keep contorting laws and flouting precedent to defend their cause, arguing, in effect, that America can never actually reject a constitutional amendment.  In late January, Virginia joined Nevada and Illinois to support the ERA, in theory securing the required number of states needed to adopt the proposed Twenty-Eighth Amendment.

Harvey Weinstein [is] Now Locked in a New York Prison — Just Like Jeffrey Epstein.  With Harvey Weinstein now headed off to prison on Rikers Island in New York City and holding so many deep, dark secrets about powerful Democrats and Hollywood figures in his creepy head, the countdown on how many days will pass before he suffers some form of highly-suspicious death has begun.  Who knows?  Maybe he will "Epstein" himself soon, or be the only person in a very crowded prison to somehow contract the Coronavirus.  That would be, like, totally believable.

The Russian/Chinese Plan to Bring America Down.  The leadership of Russia and China (both basically Communist countries), believe that the United States is a serious threat to them in at least six (6) major ways:
  1 - our cohesive unity of purpose,
  2 - our Judeo-Christian values,
  3 - our democratic ideology,
  4 - our technical prowess,
  5 - our economic power, and
  6 - our military might.
In response, their plan is to undermine each of these — and the more the better.  Their effort is not a simple six-step sequential series, but rather a multi-pronged campaign.  Some current issues (e.g. immigration) actually span several of the above items.  What's very disconcerting is that the Communists have strong allies within our country — e.g. socialists, etc. who are effectively unwitting pawns of Communist ideology.  [PDF]

ICE Should Deport George Soros as a Nazi Collaborator.  The deportation of a Nazi death camp guard from his residence in Queens, New York, in 2018 by ICE was described as the removal of the "last known Nazi collaborator from the United States."  That's not quite true.  There's another Nazi collaborator living on Fifth Avenue.  He's a billionaire and untouchable because his dubious fortune has been used to finance the Democrat Party, radical leftists, assorted anti-Semites, and opponents of ICE:  the agency that should step in to remove the aged Hungarian from the United States.  The legal basis for removing Soros is quite clear.

Stone Sentencing Ends Russia Collusion, Part I.  The Roger Stone sentencing farce is as fitting an end to the Russia Collusion saga as one could conjure up ... though it might be more fitting to call it the end of Russia Collusion, Part I.  No sooner did the first flick conclusively bomb than the media-Democrat complex was issuing the casting call for Russia Collusion, Part II.  In the sequel, you're asked to believe that Putin is manipulating the chesspieces to steal a second term for President Trump — somehow preferring an incumbent who beefs up the U.S. armed forces, pressures NATO allies to beef up theirs, imposes painful sanctions on Moscow, provides lethal aid to Ukraine, ramps up U.S. energy production, and seeks to thwart the Kremlin's coveted natural-gas partnership with Germany, over an unabashed socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and whose policies would wreck the American economy, end the resurgence of American energy production, and hollow out the American armed forces.  It's a lunatic plot.

Battle of the Boroughs.  There are 329 million people in the United States of America.  They are spread across 3.8 million square miles.  The presidential race will be determined by the actions of three of them:  Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Michael Bloomberg.  Each is a New Yorker.  Each hails from a different borough.  Trump was born in Queens, Sanders in Brooklyn, and Bloomberg, a native of Massachusetts, has worked and lived in Manhattan since 1973.  For a long time New York City politics stopped at the Hudson River.  Now the nation faces the prospect of eight months of septuagenarian New Yorkers yelling at each other.  The geographic, regional, ethnic, and racial diversity of America is nowhere visible.  Religion is an exception:  The first Jewish presidential nominee of a major party will also be, in all likelihood, the most hostile nominee toward Israel ever.  How did this happen?

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway.  [Scroll down]  Hillary Clinton won 90 percent of the D.C. vote in 2016 compared to Donald Trump's four percent.  In the metropolitan area as a whole, which includes adjacent counties in Virginia and Maryland, Clinton won 68 percent.  The federal government is the area's largest employer; nearly everyone else is somehow tied to government work as a lawyer, lobbyist, consultant, or journalist.  By a 20-to-1 margin, Justice Department employees contributed heavily to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.  Any trial automatically is rigged either in favor or against a political defendant based on the team for which the accused plays — and if it's Team Trump, the outcome is predetermined even before the opening statements.  After all, how could a swamp-dweller objectively judge a case tied to a president promising to drain the swamp?  The jury selection for the 2019 trial of Greg Craig illustrated the near-impossibility of seating an impartial panel in Washington.

DC Law.  Washington, D.C. has a relatively small population from which jurors must be found for the federal and local grand juries, petit juries, and civil juries. [...] Since almost 80% of the city are Democratic voters, often employed by the government or are connected to law enforcement or have family members who are, the ability to expeditiously find panels in criminal cases is limited.  Worse yet, the chance of an unbiased panel in a case involving Republican figures is minimal.  If you think this puts Republican figures at far greater risk than Democrats, you are certainly not wrong.  Recall if you will the prosecutor who publicly stated the Starr special counsel's office believed Hillary Clinton had lied to the grand jury, but because ethical prosecutors are not to bring cases they have no reasonable likelihood of winning and no D.C. jury would convict her, they were declining to prosecute her.

Forget Iowa — let's switch to a one-day national primary.  [Scroll down]  The second flaw in the nomination system is that the emphasis on the early states may also increase the tendency of candidates to take extreme positions that increase partisanship and gridlock.  While candidates should be truthful, they sometimes take positions to attract voters.  In the early states, they may make statements which might be popular there but not acceptable to voters in other states throughout the nation.  Ultimately, the parties may have candidates espousing extreme beliefs which they do not believe, and that may cause increased partisanship.  What's more, the current system only requires candidates to show they can win statewide elections serially, not a truly national contest like the one in November.

The Path to Ruin Being Blazed by Congress, the President, and the Fed.  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell cited a record 11-year expansion, an economy "resilient to the global headwinds," "near half-century lows for more than a year" regarding unemployment, and how "GDP rose at a moderate rate over the second half of last year" in his appearances before Congress last week.  But his more oblique warnings about what should happen if a recession occurs came as the most interesting part of his words to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.  He essentially told Congress that economic gimmickry in sunny financial times leaves policymakers with few tools to combat a recession once the clouds roll into town.

America's Growing Approval Of Socialism Is A Rejection Of Freedom.  In February 2009, just after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Newsweek declared on its cover "We Are All Socialists Now."  More than a decade later, socialism has taken over the Democratic Party, and has a strong hold on young Americans.  It's gone mainstream in a nation founded on principles opposite the tenets of socialism.  Seven in 10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist candidate, while 64% of Generation Z told pollsters last year it is "somewhat/extremely likely" they'd vote for a socialist, according to a YouGov-Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll taken last fall.

New Film Shows How the War on Poverty Failed and the Real Hope for America's 'Forgotten' Cities.  Filmmaker Christopher Rufo traveled to three crumbling American cities — Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn.; and Stockton, Calif. — and documented the deep human struggles of communities left behind as the 1950s industrial boom yielded to a new kind of economy in the 21st century.  America Lost explains why top-down government solutions fail to address this urban decay and the film suggests a better path forward.

Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio.  [Scroll down]  He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times.  While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not.  He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power.  It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about "global warming" would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

The Steele Dossier's Biggest Fan Goes on a Really, Really Insane Rant.  [Scroll down]  A president wants people he can trust to enact his policies, which are subject to the oversight of the electorate via elections.  That's hardly new or unique to the latest inhabitant of the White House.  If you cross that trust, you can go back to the Pentagon or whatever agency you came from.  You'll still be getting your fat check and pension because no one is ever really fired from a government job.  Enough with the pretending that civil servants are actually servants.  They are typically overpaid, with huge benefits packages and get more time off in a single year than most private-sector employees enjoy over half a decade.  They are not martyrs, they are bureaucrats.  The fact that they can't just be outright fired with ease is bad enough, but painting them as everything that holds this country together is asinine and a false sense of grandeur that's incredibly idiotic.

Trump's Presidency Reveals 7 Undeniable Facts About The Swamp.  Although Trump may appear invincible at the time of this writing, ask yourselves who controls the helium to the biggest economic balloons.  The stock market is the pressure release valve.  But when the bond market blows, the USD is toast.  And, as supply chains snap and the bankers foreclose on the world, there will be ever-expanding pain for everyone to varying degrees, as the earth exhales.  Therefore, all current global trends,  including  especially Coronavirus®, are about establishing control prior to the advent of a new order.  Although the immediate future will be anarchy, out of that chaos will come order administered by technological switches and gates.  And the future will be cashless because slavery is rooted in economics.

The Once and Future Scandal.  Donald Trump, in concrete ways, has been far harder on Russia than was the "reset" Obama presidency, and far more helpful to Ukraine than Team Obama ever was.  Trump armed the Ukrainians.  He upped sanctions against Russia.  He ordered lethal retaliation against Russian mercenaries in Syria.  He vastly increased U.S. oil and gas production to Russia's detriment.  He jawboned Germany about its fuel dependence on Moscow.  He coerced NATO to spend more on defense.  He got out of an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia.  He is rebuilding the U.S. military.  Unlike his predecessor, Trump did not dismantle U.S.-joint European missile defense in order to coax Putin into behaving during his reelection bid.  He did not push a big plastic red reset button in Geneva to mark outreach to Putin, in rejection of prior Bush sanctions on Russians.  He did not forbid the shipment of anti-tank missiles to an endangered Ukraine. [...] So the libel of Russian collusion was absurd from the get-go.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Calls Senate 'Anti-Democratic.' Then Mark Levin Schools Him.  [Scroll down]  Just to rub it in, O'Donnell went on to call the Senate "American democracy's most structural flaw."  Sadly for O'Donnell and his fellow radical leftists, however, America is not now and has never been a democracy.  It's a constitutional republic.  The Founding Fathers made that choice very deliberately because they understood that real, full democracy is actually extremely dangerous.  As Levin explained on his show, the Senate was actually meant to protect the interests of the individual states.  "The 17th amendment" was, Levin explained, a "disaster."  Back in the day, if an attorney general from a state took a specific position, the state's senator would follow suit in the Senate (which would've shot down ObamaCare).  Now, however, senators can do as they [...] please.  This "democratization" has severely weakened the American system.

Gretchen Whitmer was Democrats' poor choice to respond to Trump.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi is commonly referred to in Washington as a master tactician.  But like the partisan impeachment fiasco and the humiliating Iowa caucus disaster, her selection of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to deliver this year's response to President Trump's State of the Union address was a major strategic misstep. [...] But if you bothered to watch the speech, you might have noticed that instead of following up with an example of her work to fulfill this campaign promise, Whitmer instead pivoted to what other Democratic governors are doing in other states — for example, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.  Whitmer didn't highlight her own work in Michigan [...] and that's because she failed to gather any support, from either party, for her 45-cent gas tax proposal, which would have left Michigan with the highest gas tax in the nation.

Fall Election About Personal and National Sovereignty.  As the Democrats try to sort out the hash they made of the Iowa caucuses — like the impeachment of President Donald Trump, a political mess entirely of their own making — a larger question looms over the fall election:  Will the United States remain a republic or will it molt into a plebiscitary "democracy"?  In the teeth of a constant battering from the left that seeks to call nearly every aspect of the American system of governance into question, the real question to be decided this fall is not Trump versus the Democrats' Your Name Here.  Rather, it's about the Constitution versus an entirely different political structure that may still go under the name of the United States of America, but in fact will be an entirely different country, bearing no more resemblance to the America of the founders than modern Rome does to the Roman Republic.  None of these pressing political issues, including Trump's evanescent impeachment, the critical function of the Electoral College, the proper role of the Senate, and the chaotic but yet somehow always predictable way in which one of the major parties insists on choosing its standard bearer, is occurring in a vacuum.

Insurgent 70-somethings Trump, Sanders have upset Biden's conventional apple cart.  [Scroll down]  Have you heard Obama ardently campaign against the party's current direction?  Or in support of his vice presidential partner for eight years, as Bill Clinton did for Al Gore?  Well, no, actually, you haven't.  The modern American political reality is that the Republican and Democratic parties today are basically just brand names.  They've become hollow, fundraising fuselages of once vibrant organizations that get captured every four or eight years by someone new with a contemporary personality packaged for the times.

The Cult of Western Shaming.  [Scroll down]  By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower.  American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.  Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.  After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

Obama Stole an Election, Not Trump.  [Scroll down]  It's long been noted that anytime Democrats accuse Trump or Republicans of something, it's the Democrats who are actually guilty of it.  A scholarly study conducted by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that suppression of the Tea Party movement by Obama's IRS helped him get reelected. [...] The effectiveness of the Tea Party, combined with Obama's relatively small margin of victory in key swing states, suggests that the IRS's suppression of the Tea Party movement likely tipped the scales in favor of Obama.  "Had the Tea Party repeated and built on their activism of 2009 and 2010 in 2011 and 2012, Obama would have lost the election.  What happened to the Tea Party boost?  It didn't grow from 2010.  It appeared to weaken," Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform wrote in his book, End The IRS Before It Ends Us.  "The Tea Party didn't fall down the stairs.  It was pushed."

Ruling Class Held Hostage by Trump's Impeachment.  Since the Reagan era, the American Ruling Class has succeeded in electing George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of whom were members in good standing.  Thus, by 2016 the ruling elites were thoroughly entrenched and dominant throughout the halls of power.  They were prepared to govern this nation for many years to come as one of the flaws in the magnificent governing blueprint set up by the founding fathers was the reality that this government can only function with just two major political parties.  Both political party hierarchies had and fully intended to continue nominating candidates for the presidency and Congress who were either beholden to or members of the ruling class.  The rank and file voters were left with only superficial differences in the choice of candidates.  The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an act of defiance and a rebellion by the deplorables and a devastating blow to the ruling elites.

Obama Prefers a Republican President.  During the 2008 election campaign, the party was divided into two major camps:  the left-centrist and more traditional wing supporting Clinton and the openly far-left, more energetic, and younger wing backing Obama. [...] Obama humiliated Clinton during the debate and his rallies.  The situation had reached a boiling point, as hatred between clans could cost the Democratic Party elections.  Formal reconciliation and the unification of groups around Obama took place in the house of the skilled apparatchik Dianne Feinstein.  It was decided that Obama would become the candidate for the Democrats, and Clinton would receive an important and prestigious post of secretary of state in the case of a victory.  Obama followed Sun Tzu's advice, keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.  Of course, formal reconciliation did not lessen Obama's and Clinton's deep hostility to each other, but they played the roles of good comrades in front of the public exceptionally.

Illinois pensions 101: Paltry contributions yield million-dollar payouts.  Illinois' pension crisis is the worst in U.S. history — which raises the question, "Why?"  First, because public employees pay very little toward their own retirement and assume none of the economic risk for investments.  Second, because workers retire relatively young so they are drawing from the systems longer.  And third, because they receive pension benefits often in excess of $2 million during the course of their long, generous retirements.  Ultimately, this poorly designed system is bad for the retirees.  They face a serious risk that the pension systems will go insolvent.

Paging Laura Ingraham:  An Alaska Senate Seat Is Yours for the Taking In 2022.  Everyone in Alaska already knows who Laura Ingraham is, and they all like her.  Name recognition isn't an issue.  They also know who Lisa Murkowski is — and they can't stand her.  The Republican Party machinery in Alaska is cowed by her, but an outsider need not care.  Someone like Laura Ingraham could walk in and just take the seat.

An Introduction to Q.  If you're unfamiliar with Q or only know it through the media's attacks, I'd like to provide a brief introduction to this extraordinary phenomenon.  I've followed Q since the first drop, and I've grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q's messages.  Q followers were prepared long in advance for the easing of hostilities with North Korea, the deflation of the mullahs of Iran, and the discovery of Ukraine as a hotbed of corruption for American politicians.  They knew a great deal about Jeffrey Epstein's activities before the public did and anticipate even more shocking revelations to come.  As Q likes to say, "Future proves past."  As Q's predictions come true, they lend retroactive credibility to the entire enterprise.  Q's followers believe that Q is a military intelligence operation, the first of its kind, whose goal is to provide the public with secret information.

A Tale of Two Terrorists.  Osama bin Laden deserved to die.  Only the fringe of the fringe disagree with this statement (looking at you, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn), which is why no one seemed to mind when Seal Team 6 invaded Pakistan to upgrade his train ticket to Hell to first class. [...] The country was ecstatic, justice had finally come to the man with the blood of 3,000 Americans on his hands.  Almost immediately, the raid was politicized to benefit President Barack Obama.  After all, he was facing re-election.  Democrats in and out of the media had themselves a new catchphrase: "gutsy call." [...] Now compare that to the reaction from those very same people to the operation that killed another terrorist mastermind, one with the blood of at least 600 American soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians around the world, Qasem Soleimani. [...] Iran shooting down a Ukrainian airliner and watching Democrats blame America for it was just the cherry on top.

One missile.  One Iranian regime change.  The death of Qasem Soleimani may have done more than lop the head off Iran's terrorism forces.  The regime change foreshadowed by a trucker's strike last June may come to fruition.  The Jerusalem Post reported, "A group of Iranian protesters demanded Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei step down on Saturday after Tehran said that its military had mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian plane, killing all 176 people on board.  'Commander-in-chief [Khamenei] resign, resign,' videos posted on Twitter showed hundreds of people chanting in front of Tehran's Amir Kabir university.  This is the first protest since the assassination of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani.  Last November, hundreds were killed in protests in multiple cities across the Islamic Republic.

Nationalism Is Looking Pretty Normal Right Now.  The recent troubles with Iran highlight the problem with America First nationalism: it would mean placing the interests of regular people at home before transnational "interests" like foreign wars that have no bearing on middle-American life.  Put another way, real people living in a real country with real interests of their own have a real problem with really stupid government and the real Stupid Party, otherwise known as the Republicans, that enables bad government while pretending to stand against it.  Americans generally have no desire to see the blood of their children spilled on the altar of the foreign policy establishment.  Not so "democracy" can be spread around the globe, whatever that means, and certainly not so that sovereign states may be compelled into "acting like a normal country," as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has said of Iran — not least of all when "normal" is defined by a government that provides millions in taxpayer funds for abortion and to inject children with puberty-suppressing, opposite-sex hormones, rendering them permanently infertile.

WW3 didn't happen but something else did.  The reaction to Soleimani's death has proved more destructive than the original strike itself.  It has already caused one mass casualty funeral stampede born of crowds eager to prove how beloved the late IRGC chief was; an Iranian missile volley that fortunately missed the town of Hit fired by the ayatollahs for face saving reasons and one accidental shootdown of a Ukrainian jetliner killing nearly 200 passengers in vigilance of an American strike that never came.  It also precipitated a nonbinding Congressional resolution "asserting that President Donald Trump must seek approval from Congress before engaging in further military action against Iran."

On Soleimani, President Trump Did the Right Thing.  James R. Hannibal flew the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the B-2 Spirit (stealth bomber), and the MQ-1 Predator UAV.  During that time, he worked numerous classified assignments and spent time as a mission planning cell chief, intelligence liaison, stealth materials liaison, and weapons and tactics officer.  He commented to American Thinker, "Americans need to understand that Qassem Soleimani was evil, a known terrorist, and proudly wore the blood of Americans on his hands.  Our intelligence surrounding this individual leaves no doubt about these facts.  This is intelligence that the politicians loudly mourning his death have access to, so they should know better.  That makes their betrayal all the worse.  They would sell out the memory of fallen Americans for their own political gain.  I have seen American blood spilt by Soleimani's proxy action with my own eyes.  I have wept over that blood on the worst day of my military career.  Any politicians pretending this man was anything but a bloodthirsty terrorist deserving of death have betrayed this nation and the people they claim to serve."

Iran's miscalculation.  It is hard to understand Iran Supreme Leader Khamenei's blunder in attacking the US Embassy in Baghdad.  He either believed Trump was weakened by his impeachment, as western liberal Media breathlessly and continuously reported, or he might have been misled by John Kerry's incompetent advice (apparently Kerry met again with Khamenei's emissaries in Paris just few weeks ago). Whatever the reasons, his goal of triggering a limited war with America to rally his people around the regime has failed miserably.  Iran desperately wanted a war — drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's heart of oil production, false-flag hits on oil tankers, unrest in Yemen — all aimed at this goal.  Trump restraint in responding to these provocations must have been disappointing.  But as Tehran resorted to attack the US Embassy in Baghdad, it must have realized it had overplayed its hand when the reaction was surgical, devastating, and unexpected:  the elimination of the mass murderer Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC's Quds Force, Khamenei's right-hand man and chief executioner.

Maybe This Cycle Will Force a Change in Which States Vote First in the Primaries.  There's a good chance that two months from now, every delegate in the first four contests will have gone to one of four white candidates:  Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Pete Buttigieg.  This might just be enough to spur some serious talk of changing the order of primary states — if not for insufficient ethnic diversity in those first four states, then out of the general sense that 46 other states would like a turn going earlier.  But as far as it goes, those first four are lacking some features found in many other parts of the country.  As Castro observed, "I've gotten asked more about ethanol in Iowa than I ever have about mass transit or transportation."

The Editor says...
Wow.  This is the first time I've heard a writer complain about "insufficient ethnic diversity" in specific states.  Is there now a racial quota for each state?  As if every state must have the same percentages of ethnic groups or something's wrong with them.  Too many white people = bad.  Too many minorities = impossible!  It sounds like the writer (in the National Review) watches too much television:  TV commercials are filmed in a world where all the heroes are black, all the villains are white, and women live in spotless houses without a man to be seen — except for the prowler outside who is always a white male.

Tucker Carlson's Inane Claims About the Soleimani Raid.  To say this point of view is hopelessly naïve would be too charitable.  It's one thing to abjure nation building, but the isolationist belief that the United States can safely retreat from all "foreign entanglements" is pure fantasy.  Carlson clearly doesn't get this.  First, it would not make us safe!  It's hard to believe that this isn't obvious to anyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001.  Unless one is naïve enough to accept Osama bin Laden's propaganda — that it was the result of our presence in the Middle East — it should be clear that fighting our enemies abroad renders us safer at home.  Moreover, the 9/11 attacks were hardly our first exposure to this reality.  American isolationism in the 1930s led directly to Pearl Harbor.

Soleimani Schemed Against America As His World Crumbled.  Qassem Soleimani's demise came as his life project — spreading the Islamic Republic's zeal in the Mideast and beyond — was crumbling.  That doesn't mean the Iranian general couldn't, or wouldn't, have wreaked the kind of harm that the Trump administration felt it needed to preempt.  It may even explain why Soleimani has been on such a manic campaign.  In any event, shortly after the drone kill at Baghdad airport was confirmed, Secretary of State Pompeo re-tweeted a video of gleeful Iraqis who had awakened at at 4:30 a.m. in Baghdad and proceeded to march at the city's Tahrir Square.  There they celebrated the death of the arch-terrorist who sought to dominate their country.

Democrats still delusional about Trump even after Qassem Soleimani death.  The calendar turns and a decade begins, but there is nothing new under the sun in Washington.  Even the killing of an Iranian mass murderer is cause for more partisan strife.  In a sane country, which America used to be, there would be shared sober satisfaction over the elimination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani.  Yet Democrats apparently outsourced their reactions to robots, whose script called for conceding that the departed was a very bad man, but prohibited approval of President Trump's decision to take him out.  Instead, the quibblers' chorus raised questions of timing and expressed fear of escalation and retaliation.  In the context of Iran's military aggression and Soleimani's bloody hands, there is another word for that fear:  appeasement.

No, killing Soleimani doesn't mean war.  Everybody knows Donald Trump is going to start a war.  His critics have been saying so since his first year in office — remember the war with North Korea they predicted right after Trump tweeted about unleashing 'fire and fury' on the Little Rocket Man?  That war didn't happen.  Nor did an insurgency break out when President Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an act that the Trump haters were certain would incite waves of violence and unquenchable turmoil.  But maybe the third time's the charm — maybe the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force division of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, in a US airstrike in Iraq will finally give the president's detractors the war they've been anticipating.  Or maybe not — maybe the critics are just as wrong as they've been every other time: about wars that Trump didn't start, about collusion with Russia that didn't happen, about the crash of America's economy... the list goes on.  The president should be reassured to have enemies who are so reliably wrong.

The Episcopal Church's Fruits of Heresy.  Anglican author David Virtue, a longtime critical observer of worldwide Anglicanism, reviews the Episcopal Church's decades-long fall from grace in an exposé of Christian folly in accommodating a secularized, sexualized modernity.  Virtue tells the depressing, detailed "story of a once proud Christian denomination that stood as a landmark church in a nation that has seen presidents, senators and business leaders pass through its hallowed red doors."  "Spiritual and ecclesiastical death marks the present and future state of this denomination" today as Episcopal Church membership has cratered from a 1966 peak of 3,647,297, to 1,676,349 in 2018.  Particularly the 2003 consecration of noncelibate homosexual V. Gene Robinson as an Episcopal bishop unleashed an "ecclesiastical tsunami wave" and the "worst single outflow of Episcopalians in modern history," over 100,000.  In an Episcopal Church "intoxicated with the spirit of the age," 31 percent of Episcopalians according to the latest statistics are 65 or older while 79 percent do not have a child under 18.

A Prediction About the Coming Split in the Methodist Church.  If the reports are true, then "a tentative plan" has been put in place "to split the [Methodist] church over differences on same-sex marriage and the inclusion of gay clergy." [...] Assuming that this split actually takes place, what will happen to these two branches, one conservative and the other liberal?  The answer is easy, based on history and common spiritual sense.  History says that the conservative branch will grow and the liberal branch will diminish.

Why the USA Needs a Space Force.  An ICBM is a weapon that attacks from space.  During its flight, an ICBM follows an elliptical orbit around the Earth.  It is based on land for convenience and because of arms control (proper control, I might add).  We have learned to live with ICBMs as a deterrent to all out war.  In the meantime, the U.S. has developed major space frontier vulnerabilities of a completely different kind.  Space has become the purveyor of information that we need for our very survival.  There are three types of information that have become critical:  1) observation of activities on Earth and in space, 2) secure communications, and 3) Global Positioning System navigation and timing.

The Editor says...
If we're paying for a Space Force, we no longer need NASA.

The Pope's Mask Falls Again.  Jorge Bergoglio is not so much the pope of the common man as a friend to the globally powerful.  He disdains the most devout members of his faith, labeling them "rigid," while rolling out the red carpet for thugs and pagan celebrities.  Not a week passes without the pope meeting and greeting some enemy of the faith.  The media, for the most part, continues to serve as his PR agents.

Our Lady of Perpetual Impeachment vs.  America.  During this coming year our nation is likely to be shaken to its foundations either by the indictment and trials of powerful individuals, or by the lack thereof.  The left may stop threatening to kill the president and actually do it.  It is quite possible that our southern borders will be overrun.  It's even more likely that we will be traumatized again and again by Islamic incursions, both anti-Semitic and anti-American.  It's looking like some terrible showdown is brewing in Virginia over the right to bear arms, and who knows what will happen with Iran, North Korea, or China?  We must choose our leadership wisely. [...] Were there a viable, responsible, clear-thinking candidate to run against Trump in November, small things might make the difference.  But this year we choose between a man who has been doing the job splendidly and Corruption Central.

Morality and the Presidency.  [Scroll down]  President Trump has been accused of "womanizing," but such behavior was rampant with John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.  What is more, even if the accusations against Trump are true, one would be hard-pressed to argue that they somehow threatened the security of the United States or compromised his presidency.  This was not the case with John Kennedy.  Kennedy was purportedly on the precipice of being compromised as a result of his cavorting with an East German communist spy (and others with connections to organized crime) while he was president.  Had this been publicly disclosed it would almost certainly have ended his presidency.  It could be argued that Kennedy fell in the only way that allowed Camelot to rise.  That image inspired a generation.  President Kennedy did not die in disgrace, but had he lived he may well have been forced to resign the presidency in disgrace (or suffer defeat in the 1964 election).

The Many Faces of Scientific Fraud.  Any scientific article must be considered a reconstruction, an account, a clear and precise narrative, a good story.  But the story is often too good, too logical, too coherent.  In a way, all researchers are cooks, given that they cannot write a scientific article without arranging their data to present it in the most convincing, appealing way.  The history of science is full of examples of researchers embellishing their experimental results to make them conform to simple, logical, coherent theory.

Watch Venezuela's Dramatic Economic Plunge Under Democratic Socialism.  Economist Mark Perry has been putting together a series of intriguing animated charts to show changes over time in everything from recorded music formats, Social Security spending, to top manufacturing nations.  Over the weekend, Perry posted his latest animated chart, this one showing per capita GDP among Latin American countries.  Pay close attention to the highlighted bar, which represents Venezuela.  [Video clip]

Christianity Today vs. the Myth of Monolithic Evangelicalism.  Thirty-five percent of Americans identify as Evangelical, Pew Research finds.  But only a fraction of them, or 6 percent of the U.S. population, are Evangelical according to Barna, a Christian research organization that applies nine theological criteria (e.g., firm belief that Satan exists).  It classifies a respondent as Evangelical only if he or she meets all of them.  Christianity Today is a magazine for that 6 percent, David [French] writes:  Its recent newsmaking editorial (in which Mark Galli, CT's editor in chief, argues that the president should be removed from office) "is aimed like an arrow at that audience," which represents the publication's "colleagues and peers."  That may be.  We shouldn't assume, though, that Evangelicals who disagree with the editorial are less committed to their faith.

Democrats actively rolling out scheme to remove VP Mike Pence so they can install Nancy Pelosi, then Hillary Clinton as President.  The criminal coup scenario I warned you about has finally arrived.  A scheme is now active to convict Trump and remove V.P. Mike Pence from power, then install Nancy Pelosi as president.  Once there, she will appoint Hillary Clinton as her V.P. with no resistance from the Senate, then she will resign, making Hillary Clinton the president.  I warned about this exact scenario in an earlier article entitled, "It's ON: The deep state plot to install Hillary Clinton as PRESIDENT this year, bypassing elections altogether."  As many Natural News have come to realize, I have excellent sources deep inside the bureaucracy, and they fill me in on what's going down.  That's the only way I was able to write the following words over two months ago, almost word-for-word what we just witnessed with the fake impeachment by the House: [...]

The Editor says...
Come on, now.  This scenario presupposes complete cooperation (at every step) from the spineless RINOs in the Senate.  That would never happen, right?

How Democrats Could Undo Trump's Lasting Legacy in the Courts.  Aside from the well-known power to impeach judges, Congress can also pack the Supreme Court.  Yet it apparently has still another power, one little known:  to abolish entire federal courts.  The only federal court mandated by the Constitution is the SCOTUS; as to "inferior courts," Article III states that Congress "may from time to time ordain and establish" them, which it has often done.  But implied is that what Congress can make, it can unmake; or, as the Legal Information Institute puts it, the Houses can both "expand and contract the units of the system" (emphasis added).

Barr is on the case.  Attorney General William Barr sat for an extended interview with NBC's Pete Williams to discuss the findings in the Department of Justice Inspector General report released yesterday afternoon.  NBC has cut the thing up in a couple of stories, but it has also posted the whole thing on YouTube.  Barr is familiar with the evidence gathered so far; he knows what he's talking about.  He understands that what we have staring us in the face is an unprecedented political scandal.  He tentatively anticipates the criminal investigation reaching "a watershed" by late spring or early summer.  I urge interested readers to watch the whole thing.  The interview is invaluable in its entirety.  I'm not sure whether Pete Williams is just playing the fool for purposes of the interview, whether he is a fool, or whether he is handicapped by the fact that he gets his news from NBC News.  Whatever the case, everything he elicits from Barr is of interest.

Tucker Carlson's Critique Of Paul Singer Is Part Of The Reckoning Underway In America.  Tucker Carlson is perhaps the only major media figure in America willing to attack across party lines to make his point.  On Tuesday night he went after Republican mega-donor Paul Singer in a withering 10-minute special segment on how Singer destroyed a small town in Nebraska in a hostile takeover of the sporting goods retailer Cabela's.  For those who don't know, Singer is a New York hedge fund manager who has made billions as a so-called "vulture capitalist," buying up the sovereign debt of financially distressed countries at a discount and then cashing in later, using lawsuits to pressure governments to pay up.  He's done something similar with U.S. firms — buying up debt, shipping jobs overseas, firing American workers and cashing out — in some cases at taxpayer expense.

New Zealand:  Not the Paradise Americans Think It Is.  I will tell you right now that Americans craving a move to New Zealand — who nonetheless love their Constitution and Bill of Rights, 'til death do us part — need to cancel all of those plans immediately, and don't ever look back.  In New Zealand, as well as in Australia, we do not have the comprehensive search and seizure protections Americans are granted by their Fourth Amendment.  What results is that the New Zealand police regularly deploy roadblocks — euphemistically called "checkpoints" — which infringe on you being able to go about your daily driving business unmolested by the state.  At all of these roadblocks, the intention of the police is to find ways to either drag you away in handcuffs (failed drug tests or carrying contraband) or shank your bank account (fines for expired warrants of fitness, expired registrations, etc.) in order to help the government compensate for their — by global police standards — very high salaries.

Robocalls on the rise:  Americans get 18 spam calls per month, report says.  The United States is again the eighth-most-spammed nation in the world and the annoying calls are on the rise, according to a new report.  Americans received 7% more spam calls in 2019 compared to the year before, said Truecaller, a Swedish company that tracks spam calls, but hung on to their ranking from the last annual report.  The report Tuesday comes after efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to crackdown on robocalls, which are the No. 1 complaint consumers make to the agency.

The Editor says...
The Editor gets four or five such calls every day.  Each call comes from a different number, so there is no way to block them based on the number alone.  Many of the calls come with obviously spoofed Caller-ID information, because the alleged calling number is invalid.  (For example, a call came in this morning from 800-174-2604.  How would one complain about it?  There is no such number.)  Sometimes the Caller-ID shows my name and number.  The Editor was one of the first to sign up for the National Do No Call Registry, which is a sham and a farce.  The calls have never slowed down.  In most cases, the telemarketing calls are placed by machines.  The machines sometimes pretend to be people and if you play along, they will carry on a conversation.  Sometimes the machines have apparently called a dozen numbers, and the person in the telemarketing "boiler room" talks to the first party who answers the phone, and hangs up on the rest.  Sometimes the telemarketer is obviously calling from a crowded and noisy room in India, claiming that his name is Steve or Larry or George, and he's calling from Microsoft.  The Editor sometimes engages these callers for a few minutes, just to waste their time, ruin their averages, and keep someone else from being annoyed.  The Editor is still paying the phone company 50 cents a month for "Anonymous Call Rejection," which does not work.  The Editor should write a book.

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam.  [Scroll down]  On the one hand, some number of Americans who visit an optometrist to get a new prescription will indeed discover that they have a serious condition that requires immediate care.  On the other hand, it is likely that a much greater number keep wearing glasses that are too weak — or won't wear glasses at all — because they want to avoid the cost, time, or stress of a visit to a doctor.  I have not been able to find any studies that credibly assess how this barrier affects Americans' quality of life.  But it's reasonable to assume that it has an adverse impact on many people, especially underprivileged Americans — those who don't have insurance, have little cash, or lack the social or financial capital to navigate our country's byzantine medical system.

A 'Farm Kid' Thwarts the Coup.  If a full and fair analysis of the Trump-Russian collusion hoax ever is conducted, it will reveal the collateral damage suffered by innocent people ensnared by the wicked, multi-faceted operation launched by Barack Obama's White House in the spring of 2016.  There are plenty of infuriating passages in The Plot Against the President, a must-read book by journalist Lee Smith.  But the description of how the hoax plotters targeted the family of Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) evokes particular outrage.

How Our Administrative State Aids Communist China.  [Scroll down]  Concerned with what the report discovered hiding in plain sight, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said:  "China wins twice.  First, the American taxpayer funds China's research and development.  Second, China uses that research to improve its economic and military status."  Equally disconcerted, his colleague on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) warned "there are serious consequences that come from giving a foreign government so much control over the vital research we rely on to drive our country's economic competitiveness and bolster our national defense."

JFK's Assassination Only Grows More Distant at Dallas's Sixth Floor Museum.  [Scroll down]  Finally, there is a lull in the traffic, and the men sprint into the street, moving as briskly as their stiff-looking boots will allow, with their hands reflexively holding onto the brims of their Stetsons.  One of them breaks off from the pack, readying his phone.  The other two plant themselves on the large X that has been crudely affixed to the middle lane with reflective tape.  There's some debate about its accuracy; the X moves a little whenever the road is repaved, replaced each time by still-mysterious sources.  But it supposedly marks the precise spot where President John F. Kennedy was hit by a fatal headshot on a sunny November day much like this one.  With the faded red-brick building of the former Texas School Book Depository stationed picturesquely behind them, the two men position their feet on either side of the X, and throw their arms around each other's shoulders.  As their friend snaps away, they smile.  It's a grim yet familiar scene, one that plays out many times per day here — like Dallas's own morbid version of Abbey Road.

The Editor says...
The scene of the JFK assassination is the most popular tourist attraction in Dallas, even though it is never advertised as such.  The tourists are welcome, I guess, but when they impede traffic they are annoying.  And since there are always cameras around, "Deadly Plaza" has become a popular location for political protests and news conferences.  The official explanation of the JFK assassination does not add up.  There are several credible alternative explanations which point to various kids of conspiracies, and numerous sub-plots and loose ends that most people have never heard of.

Adam Schiff's Terribly, Horribly, Painfully Transparent Back-Tracking.  If you have liberal family members around for this weeks Thanksgiving feast and celebration it would be wise to understand the scale of their disappointment, even if they have yet to recognize it.  Perhaps the best course will be just smiling.

Netanyahu's Indictment Is a Fraud.  The indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was announced today did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.  Israeli politics have become less workable and less democratic over time.  What we are seeing here is an attempted coup by the Israeli version of the Deep State.

Another feminist movie bombs at the box office.  [Scroll down]  I have not seen and don't plan to see this movie.  I saw one trailer about the "superwoman" theme and decided that watching a Stars hockey game was better for me.  Why are young women staying away?  My guess is that a lot of young women are sick and tired of the message.  So I have a message for the people of who financed this movie:  First, stop making films with predictable dialogue.  We know that Hollywood hates Trump and believes in climate change.  How many times do you have to tell us directly or indirectly?  Second, I would change the title overseas to something like "Charlie's Angels Defends the World from Trump."

How to Launder Foreign Aid.  [Scroll down]  All the former government buildings in and around Monrovia were shells, as destitute Liberians had stripped bombed buildings for whatever they could use or sell to scrapyards.  The two-story airport terminal structure had been bombed and gutted down to the concrete floors and columns during the war.  The Liberian Customs office at the airport was a two-car garage-sized structure with a single 25-watt lightbulb barely illuminating the area.  There were three desks, two with signs that read:  No bribes taken at this desk.  There was a single customs official present but she wasn't sitting at a desk with a sign. [...] Customs agents don't take bribes at those desks with signs but it is apparently perfectly fine to take bribes at desks without signs.  And if an American Embassy dumps taxpayer funds into a foreign company's operational account, isn't that how you launder money?

Democratic Debate Winners and Losers.  MSNBC went full "woke" with their production of Wednesday night's [11/20/2019] primary debate.  They held the event at Tyler Perry's historic Atlanta film studios — a seeming nod to the Black community although they perplexingly left out nearly any mention of Black voter issues — and they had an all women panel of moderators, led by Rachael Maddow.  Again, there was a perplexing lack of questions surrounding the issues you'd think most Democrat-voting women would be curious about... outside of the sacred abortion questions.

Americans Should Remember the Ninth Amendment.  The animating principle of the Ninth Amendment is one that, as Justice Stevens wrote, "goes to the very core of the constitutional relationship between the individual and governmental authority." Although the Ninth Amendment has only rarely been explicitly invoked by the Supreme Court, you can see its fingerprints on many of the Court's decisions.  The Court's protection of unenumerated fundamental rights that are "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" acknowledges that today, as at the time of the Founding, listing every one of a person's rights is impossible.

The Media Are Missing the Biggest Story Since the Fall of the Soviet Union.  Attorney General Bill Barr enunciated the anti-liberal manifesto at a speech before the Federalist Society.  Barr offers an ideological explanation for the rebellion against the establishment in a way Trump, being Trump, never could.  As such it is the first genuinely post-Trump political development in conservative ranks.  The Barr declaration means the attempt to isolate the causes of the 2016 rebellion to one man has decisively failed.  It is now a cause of its own, bigger than Trump.

The Department of Defense Joins the Coup Cabal.  Since the Vietnam fail, the Gulf War had to be fought twice.  Iraq is still a hot mess.  Syria has become another divided, surrogate killing field.  After thirty years of American campaigning, Afghanistan is arguably worse off today than it was under Soviet occupation.  Libya is still a smoldering Obama/Clinton era ruin.  Now, North Africa has another Specified Command bureaucracy and another spasm of pyric small wars.  And the global, so-called, "war on terror" might be the longest and most expensive bad joke in the history of military inertia.  Adding insult to insanity, we now have a new Cold War with Russia.  Much of this came to pass with [General James] Mattis and company at the helm in the Pentagon.

Bernie Sanders Goes Full AOC: 'Time for Us to Become the Party that Fights for Queer Liberation'.  In the campaign for the 2020 presidential elections, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has joined forces with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow members of the so-called "Squad." [...] She connects all those issues to FDR, a guy who literally did nothing to help "queer liberation," and who (rightfully!) dragged his fellow countrymen into a new world war.  You can certainly say that FDR helped establish peace and prosperity, but he only did so after declaring war on the Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan).  Yes, yes, Harry Truman finished the job.  True.  But without FDR, America's involvement in the Second World War may have been much more limited than it was.  And that's not all — other Democrats were also quite warlike.  Woodrow Wilson (World War I).  FDR (World War II).  JFK (Bay of Pigs).  LBJ (Vietnam).  Bill Clinton (Yugoslavia).  Barack H. Obama (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan).

The Establishment Hates Russia.  [Scroll down]  It's true that Russia is neither England, France, or Mexico for that matter.  We are not at war with Russia, but our relations are less-than-friendly.  Western elites' chief problem with Russia is that it has not complied with the script Western advisors provided after the downfall of Communism.  Russia was supposed to embrace the ever-changing kaleidoscope of modern values, including capitalism, secularism, multiculturalism, and sexual liberation.  Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia did exactly that, but these reforms led to chaos during the 1990s.  A handful of oligarchs became rich by looting the country, while prosperity declined and gangsters ruled the streets.  Vladimir Putin restored law and order, as well as Russia's ability to project power abroad.  Now Russia is a moderately authoritarian county that is largely white, nationalist, conservative, and increasingly Christian.  As such, it is an obstacle to the Western elites' desire to make the whole world look like San Francisco.

Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar.  Susannah Cahalan is the author of "The Great Pretender" about famed psychology professor David Rosenhan, whom she discovered while on a book tour for her memoir, "Brain on Fire."  The book chronicled her experiences with doctors who believed her autoimmune disorder was a serious mental illness.

Time for Conservatives to Build Their Own Hollywood.  It's time for conservatives and what Kurt Schlicter calls the "Normals" to have an entertainment industry of their own.  Hollywood has effectively divorced conservatives (and the Normals).  And after a divorce, as they say, "living well is the best revenge."  The question is how.  It's not easy and one of the big reasons is the conservative world itself.  Conservative financiers abjure the arts — indeed they seem even to fear them — unless it's putting money in their local philharmonic to have their name on a plaque in the lobby.  Problem is, we all love Beethoven but he doesn't need our help at this point.  Conservative fat cats also put a ton of money in think tanks that aren't particularly effective.  I don't mean to unnecessarily diss those tanks.  Some of my best friends are, etc., etc.... but the truth is, one good movie or television series is worth more than a hundred, or even a thousand, position papers when it comes to moving society.

The Editor says...
A conservative version of Hollywood is a nice idea, but it's not likely to materialize.  First of all, The Studios at Las Colinas was supposed to be the Bible Belt Hollywood.  At least that's the impression I got 20 years ago.  Secondly, how would a company run a conservative film-making operation without employing homosexuals, fornicators, druggies, and self-important egomaniacs — just like the other Hollywood?

The Looming '1984' Election.  For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump's record and his Democratic opposition.  The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election.  It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism. [...] In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all — and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.

I Am the Anonymous Whistleblower.  [W]e Orthodox Jews, the fastest growing community of Jews in America, are deeply conservative.  Pro-life.  We oppose assisted suicide.  We are people of deep faith.  We live by the principle of personal responsibility.  We recognize only two genders.  We despise Communism and the socialist Left.  We love President Trump.  In the Democrat-predominant New York Tri-State area, more than 90 percent of Orthodox Jews are happy with Trump.  Even in radical left Los Angeles — Home of the Homeless, Turf of the Typhus — more than 70 percent of Orthodox Jews vote Trump.  We despise what the Democrats have done, particularly these past three decades, to destroy the social unity and moral fiber of our country.

How Libertarianism Makes People Susceptible To Huge Government.  [Scroll down]  For example, libertarian advocacy for legalizing drugs and prostitution seems to arise less from the prudential belief that suppressing these vices causes more harm than good than from a philosophical commitment to maximizing individual autonomy.  But hard drugs and prostitution are degrading, and they lessen the human capacity for responsible self-government.  In these and many other ways, today's libertarianism allows and even encourages the destruction of the virtues and associations necessary for successful self-government.

The reasons the IG report has been delayed will delight Trump supporters.  The continuing delays in releasing the Department of Justice Inspector General's report on the FISA warrant have discouraged a lot of conservatives.  But according to Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, whose sources on the ongoing scandal have been excellent, the reasons behind the delay are entirely positive.  Yesterday [11/6/2019] they appeared on Lou Dobbs's show on Fox Business Network, and laid it out.  [Video clip]

DiGenova and Toensing on Upcoming IG Report: "it's going to be worse than you can imagine".  Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing appeared on Fox News to discuss issues surrounding the ongoing investigations of Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Durham.  Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing bring the tick-tock hammer to the audience.  According to Ms. Toensing the upcoming IG report is going to be "very bad for people in the Obama administration."  Toensing went on to say, according to her sources, "it's going to be worse than you can imagine."  Mr. diGenova went on to say:  "it's going to be devastating" ... "it's going to ruin careers" etc.  Mr diGenova has a great deal of confidence in AG Barr, Horowitz and Durham.

The Editor says...
This cliff-hanging build-up to the upcoming IG report has been going on for weeks.  I'm ready to see bad things happen to bad people.  Bring it on, already.

No, Kentucky Isn't Turning Blue, Here's Why.  If you were on social media last night, you probably saw a lot of folks on the left celebrating that Kentucky, a deep red state, "had turned blue" because of the razor-thin victory of Democrat Andy Beshear over incumbent Republican Matt Bevin.  Let me just get it out of the way right now and tell you that Kentucky isn't turning blue.  The state hasn't been "flipped" or whatever else they're saying.  We've seen this narrative before.  When Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeated Republican Roy Moore in the special election for Jeff Sessions' vacant Senate seat in 2017, many on the left seemed to interpret that election as a sign of Trump's weakness, and Alabama's competitiveness in future statewide elections.

How the World to the Dark Tower Came.  "California," argues Victor Davis Hanson, is "becoming pre-modern" despite ballooning government solutions.  Like fictional pre-modern societies, it is becoming a two-tier society; a landscape of fantastical castles amid a sea of peasants.  It is as if the technologically sophisticated components of the Golden State were creating its shadow of poor, homeless, drug-addicted and unskilled populations. [...] Yet in some respects, not only California but the whole global world is morphing into a similar two-tier arrangement.  This may be driven by something called knowledge inequality.  The processes by which a society produced its goods and governed itself were once common knowledge to a large percentage of the population.  But they are not now.

Mexican blood is on liberal hands.  Drug abusing Americans have turned Mexico into a narco-state.  Last night, a drug cartel murdered nine Mormons in Mexico in an attack that should shame America's potheads, meth-heads, and coke users.  The blood of the LeBaron family is on their hands.

Fall Back, Spring Ahead.  Get ready to go through the routine of turning the clocks back an hour this weekend.  Daylight savings time is leaving us... yet again.  Daylight savings time has been with us in the United States since the days of World War I.  It has seen several changes since then but still exists essentially in its original form.

Fall back, daylight saving time — You need to cease and desist.  Proponents of daylight saving time — which ends at 2 a.m.  Sunday — argue that it gives more daylight hours after a workday and decreases energy consumption.  But the negatives far outweigh any positives.  It's time to get rid of daylight saving time once and for all.

How America Will Win the Next 100 Years.  Use any measuring stick and you will find the United States leads the way.  We are number one in opportunity, quality of life, access to healthcare, academics, and diversity in intellectual and political thought — we even lead the world in dog and cat ownership. [...] But American superiority is not a message we have heard from the Democrats running for president.  What's worse is that it seems to be a notion they outright reject.  If America, and our ideals of freedom, are going to outwit the communists in China and the antagonists in Russia, then we must elect leaders who understand how we became number one in the first place.

Chang:  China is 'the Third Reich in the 21st Century'.  Scholar Gordan Chang warns that the United States must ultimately "disengage from China" on all fronts if it is to maintain its status as a global superpower or risk China's massive potential to change the geopolitical structure of the world.  Chang, who just returned from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, spoke on The Sara Carter Show where he described the current state of Beijing and the authoritarian government's influence across the globe.  "This is the Third Reich in the 21st century," said Chang.  China's policy "is incompatibility with our system.  We are unfortunately going to have to reverse course and disengage from China to protect ourselves — to reduce our vulnerability to an extremely dangerous actor."

The First Four-Star Flag Officer in US History Joins the Effort to Void the Election of the US President.  From time to time, I like to promote the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee, as their cause is righteous.  I agree whole-heartedly with almost all of their stances on issues.  Here is one of those opinion pieces that I'm certain will resonate with you, too.  In fact, the topic makes me furious!

Black leaders say 'racist' Hoover's name has no business on new FBI HQ.  Black lawmakers want to strip J. Edgar Hoover's name from the proposed new FBI headquarters because they think he was a racist, outraging longtime agents who say America's culture of political correctness and victimhood has gone too far.  The fight is bursting into public view again as the FBI inches toward building a new headquarters, a plan that has been simmering for nearly a decade.

The Editor says...
Why does every government building have to be named after a bureaucrat or a politician?  No matter which name is chosen, eventually that name will fall out of favor.  It would be better to name a building, in an anti-Orwellian manner, after someone whose name we are supposed to forget.  Like Richard Jewell or Vince Foster.

There Is No Basis for Barr to Recuse Himself Over Ukraine.  If Dianne Feinstein didn't recuse herself from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, why should anyone ever be recused from anything?  Senator Feinstein is in the news, making the characteristically hyperpartisan and frivolous claim (on Twitter) that Attorney General Bill Barr should ["]recuse himself from matters related to Ukraine because of concerns about his role in President Trump's efforts to damage a political opponent and undermine the Russia investigation.["]  Feinstein says she is speaking for Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, all of whom have signed a letter to the AG.  There is no basis for Barr to recuse himself.  First, before we ever get to the law, the Democrats' claim is factually vacant.  The AG has no role in President Trump's dealings with Ukraine. [...]

China's president's daughter is at Harvard.  That's a big warning sign.  [Scroll down]  For a princeling, if you married Xi's daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside:  you would be killed in any palace coup.  If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn't having things going all his way.  Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China's elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.  The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China.  The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue.

Trump's greatest tweet ever:  Meet the dog who chased down Baghdadi.  How much did I enjoy this tweet?  Put it this way:  I'm thinking of voting for him next year now.  The dog, I mean.

The Post-Christian Pope and the Pacha Idols.  In his latest outrage, Pope Francis has had the police fish out of the Tiber the Pacha idols an anonymous Catholic removed from a church near St.  Peter's Square and threw into the river.  The writers at the Onion must be scratching their heads over how to satirize this one.  Their fake headlines can't beat the real ones, such as:  "Pope Francis asks for forgiveness after Amazon statues stolen, thrown into river."  His apology was of the most craven PC sort:  "As a bishop of the diocese, I ask forgiveness from the persons who were offended by this."  The post-Christian pope is rapidly making Rome pagan again.

The Democrats Are Neoconservatives Now.  When the establishment boot comes stomping, it's clear that party affiliation matters less to the swamp than loyalty to its dictates.  Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is a doctrinaire liberal in nearly every respect but one.  Yet what unites her and Trump is significant enough to make both targets of a machine bent on destroying them.  Last week, Gabbard became the center of an intra-party dispute after Hillary Clinton, the exiled queen of neoliberals, accused her of being a "Russian asset."  It was not the first time Gabbard was so libeled, but the attack, coming from Clinton, exposed a rift between the dominant international Left of apparatchiks who think that "Putin bad" is foreign policy, and the vanishing, historic anti-war Left that Gabbard exemplifies.

Take Tulsi Gabbard's explanation for not seeking reelection with a grain of salt.  Gabbard's decision not to seek reelection may have something to do with her longshot 2020 Democratic primary candidacy, which has never broken above 3% in surveys of potential Democratic primary voters, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.  But the congresswoman's announcement this week also certainly has something to do with her troubles at home, including declining fundraising and polling numbers, neither of which are mentioned in her official reelection statement.

Stop Claiming 'No Quid Pro Quo'.  Quid pro quo ... it's the new "by the book."  You remember "by the book," right? [...] That was the memorable phrase Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice emphasized in her notorious CYA memo.  Remember?  The memo took the form of an email.  She wrote it while clearing out of her White House office while Donald Trump was being inaugurated.  It purported to summarize a meeting more than two weeks earlier, when President Obama held an Oval Office pow-wow on next steps in the Trump-Russia investigation.  Fully aware that what they were orchestrating was highly irregular (the continuation of a probe targeting the new president even as he entered office), Rice took pains to note that Obama had insisted that everything be done "by the book."  It was a flashing neon sign that "the book" was being burned.  There is no "book" — no set of legit procedures and norms — that endorses the exploitation of executive investigative powers in the service of partisan politics.

GOP Has A Choice:  Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort Or Surrender Government To Democrats.  What we are facing now is not partisan warfare, it's not a mystery novel, it's not politics-as-usual.  We are facing an attempt to tear down the foundations of our republic by corrupt, unelected bureaucrats who have decided the will of voters is subordinate to their will to power.  It represents a fatal threat to our system of government, and if this coup succeeds — whether through impeachment proceedings, or through an election that (if the last three years are any indication) the other side is clearly willing to steal by hook or by crook — the nation will cease to be a constitutional, democratic republic.  This isn't about Trump, or Republicans, or conservatives.  It is about Washington needing to learn that political differences have to be settled at the ballot box lest they instead be settled with an undermining of our constitutional norms and institutions.

The Truth About China That LeBron and the NBA Don't Understand.  [Scroll down]  Genocide is more than an "excessive measure," and Mao was unquestionably a bloodthirsty, genocidal maniac.  Over the years, I have heard similar statements regarding the Holocaust, minimizing it subtly, as if it wasn't so bad after all.  I couldn't let this go.  "'Excessive?'" I said, so that the full room of students and business executives could hear me.  "Let's be clear, Mao killed between 40 and 70 million of his own people."  Silence.  Total silence.  I felt like Ann Coulter at Berkeley or like Daryl Morey after his controversial tweet.  One Chinese student sitting next to me, a fellow who had been quite friendly while giving me a tour around the campus, literally backed away from me.  The economist paused, looked around the room and at the doors, and then continued nervously.  No one argued the point.  It was as if I had said nothing.  They were afraid.  This is what societies with a history of violence and repression look like even after they're somewhat liberalized.

Pompeo: The Term 'Human Right' is Being Used 'For Something That is a Mere Preference'.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says his department's new "Commission on Unalienable Rights," which held its first public meeting Wednesday, aims to develop a document by mid-2020 that will make clear what precisely are "fundamental human rights and why they matter so much to America."  The initiative comes at a time when repressive regimes around the world are subverting the concept of human rights — a point highlighted by Pompeo in a speech Tuesday [10/22/2019] at the Heritage Foundation, where he cited as an example the Maduro regime in Venezuela's recent election onto the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC).  He returned to the subject Wednesday during an interview on Tony Perkins' national radio show Washington Watch, citing the HRC election as an example of how humankind has "deviated" from what human rights actually are.

What Is Conservative American Nationalism?  As I suggest in a new book, Age of Iron, conservative American nationalism is the country's oldest foreign-policy tradition.  Designed to preserve American self-government, it always has been based on a recognition that the United States is an independent nation-state.  This means that the material integrity, security, prosperity, and health of the U.S. as a nation ought to be of real concern.  It also means that in formulating U.S. public policy, the interests of American citizens come first.  One might think this is obvious.  And for previous generations, across party lines, it was.  But in our own time, a great many public intellectuals — along with the now-dominant progressive wing of the Democratic party — have together decided otherwise.

Democrats Seek to Drown Trump in Drama.  Democrats are running their own version of a hostage scenario, only they've taken a sizable portion of the American public hostage to their eardrum-splitting insanity.  Their hope is to create a crushing wave of noise and disruption through the use of bogus impeachment screeds, relentless media attacks, Antifa violence, never-ending investigations, daily Deep State leaks, Intelligence Community hits, strategically placed partisan polls, and the rest of the tactics they are deploying.  That noise becomes overwhelming, which is the point.  The never-ending churn is intended to wear out America to where enough voters so desire a return to "normalcy" that they will submit and vote for the Democrat.  They are trying to force voters to wave the white flag.  Their hope is that drama-exhausted voters will blame President Trump for their misdeeds and pull the lever for the Democrat.

Imagine if the Federal Government Were Ever Broken Apart into 'Flyover Country'?  [Scroll down]  Given the popularity in some circles of a push to deploy anti-trust suits against Big Tech, [James] Piereson went one step further.  Why not go anti-trust on the biggest monopoly of them all?  And what would that be?  Why, the U.S. federal government, of course.  He did not advocate burning down the house — but relocating it.  That could be done, he suggested in so many words, by moving the Interior Department to Boise, Idaho; Transportation to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Treasury to Laramie, Wyoming; and the like.  This would severely restrict the ability of the Establishment (aka the Deep State) to plot in cabals to do injury to their preferred targets, such as President Donald Trump.  These days they walk a couple of blocks — and plan their skullduggery over a pricey lunch.

McRaven and Mattis:  The M&M's of Perpetual War.  Give writers their pens, soldiers their swords.  Do not, however, salute old warriors who write in defense of war without end.  Do not let retired admirals and generals end the peace with their pieces about the honors of war.  Not the horrors of war, of the dead and disfigured, of the living dead who have nothing but their discharge papers and paper prescriptions, of minds deadened by killing and bodies dying from painkillers.  Do not let Admiral William H. McRaven and General James Mattis blind us with their medals and stars.

These 3 Countries Tried Socialism.  Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has never failed because it has never been tried.  But in truth, socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried, from the Soviet Union beginning a century ago to three modern countries that tried but ultimately rejected socialism — Israel, India, and the United Kingdom.

Is America Becoming Sinicized?  Westerners, who apologize when Islamists kill cartoonists and journalists for supposedly insulting Islam, do not say a word when China puts a million Muslims into re-education camps, bulldozes Islamic cemeteries and shuts down mosques.  Loud human rights lions in Europe turn into kittens when it is a question of Chinese organ harvesting, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the jailing and execution of dissidents.  American environmentalists demand a radical shutdown of the current fossil-fuel-based U.S. economy.  They say little about greenhouse gas emissions from China, the biggest polluter in the world by far.  Outspoken NBA athletes and hip Hollywood celebrities damn the Second Amendment, curse their president and boycott states they find politically incorrect.  But they become abject cowards when it comes to China.

Obama Broke NATO.  Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been fraying.  Without the common Soviet threat, NATO has struggled to justify its existence.  Frankly, it has outlived its usefulness.  Yet, despite what many of his detractors claim, President Donald J. Trump has not broken NATO.  That honor falls to Trump's vainglorious predecessor, Barack Obama, the man who presidential historian Michael Beschloss believed to have been the "smartest guy ever to become president."

Trump in a landslide?  This historically accurate model predicts exactly that.  President Donald Trump has a love/hate relationship with polls, surveys and predictions.  He loves the ones that paint him in a positive light, and, of course, he hates all those "fake" ones that don't.  He's going to absolutely adore this one.  According to Moody's Analytics, Trump is headed toward another four years in the White House.  And, if the numbers are right, it won't even be close.

The FBI Eagerly Accepted Foreign Interference — To Give A Third Term To FDR.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of the canonized saints of the Democratic Party, despite his long-known anti-Semitism, plus philandering that ranks him right up there with Democratic successors John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. [...] But the man Democrats consider the greatest president of the 20th century, the commander in chief who led the Allies to victory in the Second World War, and who established the country's most popular government entitlement, Social Security, did something that looks uncannily similar to what House Democrats are poised to impeach Trump for.

Is China Orchestrating the Democrats' Faux Impeachment Scheme?  China has not only compromised Biden, it is extremely likely that they are actively colluding with Democrats and the media to take down Trump.  Consider Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose financial ties to the Red Chinese are well-known through her husband, who somehow (like Hunter Biden) landed tens of millions of dollars in "investments" as she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Worse yet, China was able to implant a spy into her staff for about 20 years.  But, of course, she knew nothing.  We all know that President Trump is costing China a lot of money.  The media's unprecedented and insane attacks against Trump raise my Spidey-sense.

The Syrian Kurds Are Not America's Problem.  There has been much conflation of both the American mission in Syria and the disposition of America's erstwhile Kurdish friends.  The fact is, despite being the world's largest stateless ethnic population, sharing a contiguous landmass that cuts across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — roughly a 500,000-square-kilometer area — the Kurds are by no means a monolithic entity.  What's more, the United States government has never officially endorsed the concept of a Kurdish state in the Middle East.  Don't let those facts stop the experts from trotting out many falsehoods and half-truths about the messy situation that is Syria, though.

We're in a permanent coup.  On Thursday [10/10/2019], news broke that two businessmen said to have "peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden" were arrested at Dulles airport on "campaign finance violations."  The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing "dirt" on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.  Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators.  They're reportedly going to refuse.  Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will "refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump."  Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but "the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels." [...] The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that "official channels" have been corrupted.  The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.

Think Twice before Buying Chinese Stocks.  The Trump administration recently floated the idea of delisting Chinese stocks in the U.S.  This was met with ridicule and hand-wringing not only from the usual political opponents, but also from mainstream business analysts.  Though delisting Chinese companies already listed on U.S. exchanges is problematic, there are good reasons besides being a bargaining chip in the trade dispute why the U.S. should be more stringent about any Chinese company listing on U.S. exchanges.

Google, Apple, ESPN, Hollywood & NBA Committing Treason With China.  America's major entertainment and tech corps have decided that they're not going to be patriotic.  They have no particular loyalty to America.  It's just where a lot of their markets and talent happen to live.  But it's not as if they're incapable of loyalty.  The statements by the NBA and EA touting Chinese nationalism, Apple and Google's decision to pull protest apps, Hollywood's eagerness to let Chinese Communist apparatchiks censor their scripts, make it clear that they are capable of loyalty.  Just not to America.

The people are still sovereign:  Only Trump gets that.  There are a lot of differences between the global threat Roosevelt defeated in Germany and the global threat Mr. Trump faces now in the Syrian civil war.  But one thing remains the same:  American voters are still in charge.  Therein lies the great political sickness of our time.  American voters of every stripe are nearly unified against U.S. involvement in these endless wars in places like Syria at the very same moment when American politicians in Washington of every stripe are nearly unified in favor of same said wars.  The disconnect between voters back home and politicians in Washington is cavernous.  Mr. Trump is one of the only politicians to hear the voice of the people and obey it.

Liberals' Tears For Kurds Ring Hollow After Vietnam.  As a veteran of the Vietnam War and the so-called secret war in Laos, I don't get upset thinking about how we lost the war.  That's because we didn't lose it.  We won it.  It was lost — thrown away — by liberal politicians besotted with hubris over from their success in forcing Nixon from office.  It was they who threw away our victory.

Can we keep our Republic?  [Scroll down]  First was James Comey's phony investigation of Hillary's felonious abuse of rules for handling sensitive government information.  Even worse was the press conference in which he laid out the obvious predicates of an indictment, then found a nonexistent "intention" proviso in the penumbras and emanations of the relevant statute, and then usurped the Attorney General's authority as to whether or not to indict by making the decision himself during the press conference.  The second violation has not been as commented on as it should be — the handling of the "hacked" DNC servers scandal.  We know the narrative, since it is regularly repeated even by conservative commentators:  Several of our intelligence agencies discovered that a Russian operative named Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC servers, and then via Wikileaks publicized the contents to embarrass Hillary and weaken the Democrats, the goal being to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.  This has become a foundational dogma of the whole Russia collusion, foreign interference, Trump corruption tale that provides the flimsy rationale for the Trump-haters' invective and calls for impeachment.  But as George Parry summarizes in an important analysis, this claim is unsubstantiated by any forensic evidence.

Hey, Congress:  Take Back Your War Powers, Or Shut Up About Syria.  If you want to stop Donald Trump from making unilateral decisions regarding war and peace, then stop letting all presidents make unilateral decisions about war and peace.  It's really quite simple.  Trump can abruptly pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria because Congress, having abdicated its foreign policy responsibilities long ago, has no leverage to stop him.  When Congress passed the War Powers Resolution as the Vietnam War was winding down, it gave presidents the power to send troops abroad for 60 days in response to any "national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."  If the president failed to gain congressional support for the deployment, he would have another 30 days to pull back troops.  Congress is the institution vested with the power to declare wars, to debate where we send troops, and decide which conflicts are funded.

Five 'Gutsy Women' Who Didn't Make it into Hillary Clinton's Book.  [#4] Ayn Rand was born in Russia and was an eyewitness to the horrors inflicted by the Bolshevik Revolution.  By the time she emigrated to America in 1925, her core beliefs were established. [...] Her 1957 follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, portrayed a United States on the edge of collapse as a result of socialist and collectivist policies.  The novel proved to be enormously influential and stunningly prescient.  The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the creeping socialist policies that followed caused the sales of Atlas Shrugged to spike.  To anyone who had read the dystopian novel, it all seemed depressingly familiar.

His doctors ordered an emergency flight by air ambulance.  His insurer wouldn't pay.  Yes, Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else in the world.  Yes, for all those trillions of dollars spent annually, we have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates than other developed countries — two key metrics for judging the effectiveness of a nation's healthcare.  But the thing that never ceases to astonish me is how needlessly cruel our system is.  I'm not just talking about the life-saving prescription drugs that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.  I'm talking about the small acts of greed and pettiness that make a bad situation for the sick even worse.

A Tale of Two Coups.  There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election.  The same or different types of "deep state" involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d'état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates.

For the Soul of America, 'Shifty' Schiff Must Go.  Fake news media and Democrats have launched another lie-filled, treasonous silent coup to remove Trump from office.  On TV, Adam Schiff lied to the world, claiming that during a phone call Trump threatened the president of Ukraine.  Schiff said that Trump told the Ukraine president that if he did not dig up dirt on Joe Biden, he would hold back funds from Ukraine.  To the horror of Schiff, Democrats and fake news media, Trump made the unprecedented decision to publicly release the transcript of the phone call between himself and the Ukraine president.  The transcript proved that everything Schiff reported Trump said was a lie.  In an America in which truth and justice rule, Schiff would be politically tarred and feathered and run out of Washington D.C. on a rail.

Muslims hurl firebombs, burn tires as Jews pray at Joseph's Tomb.  This is the hatred, bigotry and barbarity in which Rep. Rashida Tlaib was raised.  Palestinian terrorism and Palestinian incitement against the Jews must be debated in the United States Congress.

The Pope's Pitiful Reign of Error.  A visit to the Vatican was once an awe-inspiring religious experience.  It now feels more like a trip to Disneyland.  It exists primarily for tourists, not pilgrims.  It is a bazaar of camera-snapping Asians, cackling Germans, thieving vendors, gum-chewing priests, and trysting middle-age couples.  The overwhelming impression it leaves is that Catholicism is a religion of the past, not the present or future.  Whatever the future of Islam, at least Muslims have enough regard for God to keep Mecca and Medina from turning into Touristville.

Am I the Only One Who Does Not [Care About] the Ukraine Garbage?  [Scroll down]  But here's what does matter to me:  People who work hard and have worked hard all their lives to earn an honorable though modest income, only to find themselves challenged in later life as technology changes make their skills obsolete, even as people alongside them who are healthy and capable of working choose instead to game the system to live off government handouts ranging from food stamps to welfare.

How China 'Woke' America.  American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited.  It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or an EU nation.  Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China's embrace of capitalist reforms — as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law — would lead to constitutional government.  But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one's choice.

Why Libertarians Are Unwitting Enablers of Socialism.  When the anti-socialist vote is split, the socialist wins.  In the real world, we have nations so that people with a common culture and heritage can govern themselves.  This necessitates the existence of governments, laws, regulations, taxes, public spending, and a host of other things libertarians may consider nasty.  To oppose overreaching laws, bad regulations, high taxes, excess spending, wasteful spending, or inappropriate spending, is the duty of any fiscal conservative.  But the role of government is to protect a national culture, not to just get out of the way so corporate multinationals can commoditize the world.

America's domestic enemies are the Democratic Party and its allies.  The leading foreign enemies of the 20th Century were clear.  The Empire of Japan.  The Third Reich.  Then the USSR, the Peoples' Republic of China and the Korean War. Followed by an episode of the Cold War turned hot in Vietnam.  The domestic enemies — those inside our borders — were Soviet spies, many known to exist but identified only by their code names, particularly in the era of nuclear arms development.  Later came spies from the Peoples' Republic of China entering America as foreign students in U.S. universities, not just searching for state secrets but for industrial secrets enabling the theft of intellectual property.  Today, the leading domestic enemies of the U.S. Constitution are not dispatched to America from foreign shores.  They were born in the USA.  English is their first language.

Hey Democrats, Impeach This!  Remember 10 years ago when we conservatives trusted and respected the FBI and our intelligence community?  Good times.  Well, that's over.  It will be decades before a woke Republican is stupid enough to trust them again.  But on the other hand, we now have an opportunity to exploit their strategic blunder in order to rip them apart next November.  We have a chance to teach the Democrats, to the extent they are trainable, that their socialist-curious, corporatist nanny state dreams are electoral strychnine.  Letting these creeps steal our country from us is worse than the resulting carnage from the fight they've picked.  We could roll over, but instead we'll take the hit to keep our liberty.  In the end, after many figurative casualties, impeachment is going to boomerang on these clowns.

30 of The Biggest Lies & Hoaxes Perpetrated on The American People.  [#4] The Vaccine Industry:  Those overseeing the vaccine industry have weaponized it.  From the false swine flu epidemic, to the measles scare to change legislation, HPV causing deaths, thousands of reports of them causing autism, and over $4.1 billion in injury and death claims — it has been weaponized.

The Coup Has Begun — The Empire Strikes Back Everywhere.  You know I think there are no coincidences in politics.  Everything happens on a particular schedule.  So when I see a day as crazy as today I have to ask the question, "Why this, why now?" [...] When you lose control of the narrative, when you spin a story out of whole cloth all you can do is double down.  This is what the Democrats are doing in the case of Ukraine.

Angela Merkel's Toll on Germany.  At Leipzig University she devoted a year to studying Marxist-Leninist thought.  She attended a university in Leningrad for a year in 1977, away from Stasi and available to the KGB without the Stasi being aware.  Coincidentally, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Leningrad in 1977.  Being such a devout communist and so sympathetic to the Russians, it is inconceivable that she was not approached by the KGB during this period.  Which explains a lot about the way she has governed Germany for the last 14 years.  And why nothing about her was found in the Stasi archives after reunification — she wasn't one of theirs. [...] De-industrialising Germany today reduces Russia's military threat on its western flank.  This has been an ongoing project of Merkel's in her years as Chancellor.  The Fukushima disaster was an excuse for Merkel to close Germany's nuclear reactors.  The influx of Syrians a couple of years ago was designed to reduce social cohesion.  De-industrialisation of Germany using the global warming hoax as the excuse is ongoing.

Why is teen climate activist off limits, but innocent Covington kids fair game?  While conservatives have some points of contention with Swedish teen Greta Thunberg's rabid climate change activism, leftists are accusing them of outright attacking the child activist. [...] But several right-leaning pundits have noticed that there is a glaring discrepancy between how Thunberg is being treated by conservatives, and how Nick Sandmann was treated after the media picked up on edited footage of the Covington Catholic School students just standing there.

Why are we calling Ukraine story leaker a whistleblower?  The question begs to be asked:  Why is the person who came forward with a story about President Trump and a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky still being referred to as a whistleblower?  Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson, is a Trump appointee.  Allegedly he found a reason to go forward with a complaint lodged against President Trump stemming from a conversation with Zelensky in July.  The anonymous "whistleblower," as it turns out, is not, in fact, a whistleblower.  The complainant is essentially a gossipmonger.  The person admits no direct knowledge of the conversation.  Doesn't that seem to be an important fact in this whole story?

What Are The Differences Between e-Cigarettes Vaping & Vaccines:  Both CAN & DO Kill!  Before readers and astroturfers, in particular, decide to 'attack' this article, let me cite U.S. CDC/HRSA statistics!  E-cigs are vaped into adolescent kids' growing lungs, whereas vaccines are injected into babies' tiny, day-old bodies, i.e., the Hepatitis B vaccine!  How many day-olds will be injecting meth and other street drugs, or participating in unprotected sex — the diseases that specific vaccine is geared to 'protect' against?

The Democratic Nomination Process:  The Electoral College on Steroids.  The two processes start out quite similarly.  Candidates must win 270 of 538 electoral votes to gain the presidency, and 2,382 of 4,763 delegates to gain the nomination (in 2016).  For all intents and purposes, electoral votes and delegates are the same concept.  Electoral votes are allocated to the states via constitutional law and the Census Bureau.  The nomination process, created and controlled by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), literally uses the Electoral College in its formula of allocating delegates to states.  But the DNC's formula is far more complex, even awarding bonus delegates to bordering states that hold simultaneous primaries later in the voting season.  Defying the laws of science, the DNC considers Maine as bordering Vermont, Hawaii as bordering Oregon, and Puerto Rico as bordering Guam.

The US Export-Import Bank is China's cash cow.  If you are wearing a tie, there's a good chance it was made in China.  The factory where that tie was made was probably subsidized by the Chinese government.  But here's what you probably never guessed:  That subsidized Chinese factory may have been subsidized by you, the U.S. taxpayer.  And for that, thank the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency whose single biggest recipient is the communist-run government of China.  Congress this fall has a chance to end U.S. subsidies to China's crony capitalists, but some Democrats don't like that idea.

The Fool in the Vatican.  I never thought I would refer to a Pope as a fool, but it has come to that. [...] But after reading Francis X. Rocca's article in the September 11 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which has the pontiff saying that it would be "an honor that [conservative Catholic] Americans attack me," for not standing up for traditional Catholic teachings on marriage, sexuality and bioethics, while instead opining on climate change and migration, I can't hold my tongue.

Battle over the Bahamas:  Whatever happens in the world, the answer is always mass migration to the US.  Do the resources of the United States government exist for the benefit of Americans or for the benefit of the world?  This is a simple question that needs to be answered now, because it seems that any time any event — be it weather, poverty, or war — breaks out in any part of the world, the answer is always immigration, and it's always to be brought to just one country — the United States. [...] Are we vetting these people?  What about the public charge?  Who is paying for their stay, and where would they stay?  Will they receive work permits?  How can we ensure that they will not remain here indefinitely like hundreds of thousands have done since the 1990s when we began granting amnesty to people from all over the world who experienced natural disasters in their home countries?  Will we grant them birthright citizenship for their babies too?  Why aren't other countries pitching in?

Lack of Common Sense, Comfort Animals and Anarchy:  Where Does It End?  The truth is the truth.  It always has been, and it always will be.  And truth's oldest child is common sense.  Unfortunately, that child has all but been banished by segments of the American population in the last several decades.

The Turn Toward a Pre-9/11 Mindset.  Intelligence-based security can be effective only if the government can collect and analyze it in secret.  Otherwise, we will get scant cooperation from key sources of threat information, from foreign intelligence services to people who've been admonished to say something if they see something.  Yet we remain error-prone humans acting on imperfect information.  A suspicion that a person could be a threat, however reasonable, will necessarily be wrong in some cases.  Some innocent people inevitably will be harassed.  On the other hand, if suspected people are given notice of, and a meaningful opportunity to challenge, their placement on the list, the list will no longer be secret.  And if it is not secret, it will no longer be effective.  It is Congress that is supposed to wrestle with these tough line-drawing exercises.

Bubbles: Seen One, Seen them All.  One of the greatest blunders in the history of financial bubbles is not a policy error that inadvertently forces a collapse.  Instead the real blunder is celebrating the old theory that some agency can prevent financial setbacks and recessions.  In various forms it dates back to the early 1600s. [...] There is an old saying in physics that "If you keep your database short enough it will fit your theory."  A full review of market history from the 1600s concludes that great financial bubbles have had similar setups, climaxes, and contractions.  All five from 1720 to 1929 suffered severe liquidity problems in the fall of the year.  All cleared their problems in November, except for the 1825 Bubble when pressures ran into Christmas.

Case closed in Russia collusion.  I believe the real reason we're getting all these exaggerated, dramatized news headlines and impeachment threats against the president is that the Trump "collusion delusion" is slowly falling apart.  Starting with the setup of 28-year-old George Papadopoulos in a London wine bar with Australian liberal party hack Alexander Downer.  This is a man who in testimony forgot to mention his role in helping the Clinton Foundation get $25 million in aid from his government in 2006.  In attendance were liberal Israeli diplomat Christian Cantor and his mysterious attractive girlfriend whose job at the Australian embassy remains a mystery.  We have recently learned Mr. Downer never contacted either American or Australian intelligence about his conversation with Mr. Papadopoulos, which is against established protocol.  Instead, he directly contacted the U.S. embassy in London.  His connection there was Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary in Hillary Clinton's State Department.  Strange coincidence that I find very hard to believe.

Put Your Hope In Radical Decentralization.  The EU is the first step on the way toward the creation of a European Super-State, and ultimately of a one-world government, dominated by the USA and its central bank, the FED.  From its very beginnings, and despite all high-sounding political proclamations to the contrary, the EU was never about free trade and free competition.  For that, you don't need tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations!  Rather, the central purpose of the EU, supported all-along by the USA, was always the weakening in particular of Germany as Europe's economic powerhouse. [...] In fact, Europe has essentially become a dependency, a satellite or vassal of the US. This is indicated on the one hand by the fact that US troops are stationed all across Europe, by now all the way right up to the Russian border.

The Real "Helicopter Money": Since 2009, China Has Created $21 Trillion Of New Money, More Than Double The US.  Back in the days of the Fed's QE, much of thinking analyst world (the non-thinking segment would merely accept everything that the Fed did without question, after all their livelihood depended on it), was focused on how massive, and shocking, the Fed's direct intervention in capital markets had become.  And while that was certainly true, what we showed back in November 2013 [...] is that whereas the Fed had injected some $2.5 trillion in liquidity in the US banking system, China had blown the US central bank out of the water, with no less than $15 trillion in increases to Chinese bank assets, all at the behest of a juggernaut of new credit creation — be it new yuan loans, shadow debt, corporate bonds, or any other form of debt that makes up China's broad Total Social Financing aggregate.  Now, almost six years later, others are starting to figure out what we meant, and in an Op-Ed in the FT, Arthur Budaghyan, chief EM strategist at BCA Research writes about this all important topic of China's "helicopter" money which — far more than the Fed, ECB and BOJ — has kept the world from sliding into a depression, and yet is blowing the world's biggest asset bubble.

New World Order In Meltdown.  By now it has dawned on people that the central bankers acting as central planners in a command economy and printing money (aka quantitative easing) to fuel asset bubbles are about to wipe off the last vestiges of what used to be a market economy. [...] Perhaps the weirdest news to crown it all, came from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the Western central bankers were holed up for their annual retreat.  The president of Bank of England Mark Carney shocked everybody (at least those not present) by announcing that the US dollar was past its best-before and should be replaced with something the central bankers have up their sleeves.

Dan Crenshaw:  The 'Principled Conservative' Who Wasn't.  U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) has enjoyed a relatively glowing reception from right-wing media since his election to Congress.  But that honeymoon period may come to a very swift end, in what could be the single biggest political casualty of the "red flag" law movement.  The freshman congressman and former Navy SEAL is no stranger to endorsing positions that invite criticism from his right, including his support for keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely and his winks and nods to believers in the Russian collusion hoax.  But following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, earlier this month, Crenshaw offered support for what may be his most controversial position yet, "red flag" legislation.

Trump — or what, exactly?  No president for the past 19 years has sought to offer any remotely sane budget.  And with still relatively low interest rates, massive federal spending, a $22 trillion national debt, and an annual deficit of nearly $1 trillion, it is hard to imagine, in extremis, that there remains any notion of "stimulus" or "pump-priming" left.  Yet we hear little about such financial profligacy.  Not a word comes from Trump's critics about the need for Social Security or Medicare reform to ensure the long-term viability of each — other than the Democrats' promises to extend such financially shaky programs to millions of new clients well beyond the current retiring Baby Boomer cohorts who are already taxing the limits of the system.

Why No Congressional Investigation into Epstein's Intelligence Connections?  With convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein now dead, the Justice Department has launched an investigation into prison procedures that allowed him to commit suicide.  Meanwhile, women who were sexually abused or raped by Epstein when they were minors are continuing civil actions against Epstein's estate.  But why no congressional investigation into Epstein's relationship, if any, to intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Mossad, or any others?  Have we gotten to the point where everyone is so scared to be labeled a "conspiracy theorist" that Congress is precluded from conducting a legitimate investigation into the CIA or other intelligence agencies?  Such an investigation would not come out of the blue.  It would revolve around the undeniably sweetheart deal that the U.S. Attorney in Florida, Alexander Acosta, gave to Epstein and the reasons that he gave that sweetheart deal to him.

Red China Aligns with Dems to Swing the 2020 Election.  Red China is our frenemy, mostly enemy, and they steal our intellectual property or they get it gratis when a company opens up for business in their country.  The companies have to give them their secrets and follow their Communist rules.  That is ethically questionable and the U.S. has made these violent, dangerous people a Super Power.  President Trump is responding appropriately battling them and if a President had taken this on before now, it wouldn't be so difficult.

The Myth of Jewish Influence in the Democrat Party.  [Scroll down]  When the Democrats know they have you in their pockets, they move on.  For example, they figure they have Blacks in their pockets, so they now focus on importing Hispanic voters to leapfrog Blacks socially and economically — which is exactly what is happening.  And the Democrats likewise know they have non-Orthodox Jews, Fake Jews, and anti-Semitic Jews in their pockets.

Criticizing Israel is fine, but anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic.  [Scroll down]  Of all the world's 200-plus countries, the only country anti-Zionists declare illegitimate is also the only Jewish one.  That's pretty much all you need to know about their motives.  Why, for example, don't they make this claim about Pakistan?  In 1947, nine months before the establishment of Israel, India was partitioned into a Muslim state, Pakistan, and a Hindu state, India.  Unlike Israel, Pakistan had never existed before.  Unlike Israel's founding, which created about 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands and 700,000 Arab refugees from what became Israel, the founding of Pakistan created about 7 million Muslim refugees from India and about 7 million Hindu refugees from Pakistan.

Hong Kong is a huuuuuuuge embarrassment for Democrats.  Hong Kongers are waving the stars and stripes, singing the national anthem, and issuing a global cry for freedom.  For a Democratic party that loudly supports bend-a-knee leftists who hate the U.S. flag, such as Colin Kaepernick, that's a problem.  And for a party that is trying to sell socialism to the U.S. public, well, thug-state China's got socialism in spades.  President Trump has taken flak for his response to the crisis, arguably so, but the real clown show is in what's coming from the Democrats.

We Are In A Battle Against The Full-Scale Implementation Of Communism In America!  While for decades, Watchmen such as Steve Quayle and others have warned America of a sinister plan to destroy the national sovereignty of the United States by tearing down our nation's borders and allowing in to our nation those who will not conform to our way of life, eliminating our God-given Rights to defend ourselves which are merely protected by the US Constitution and 'endless wars for the global empire', for all of those decades, those warnings have been labeled 'conspiracy theory' by the mainstream media.  Well, as we learned in [an] extremely important story over at Breitbart [...] on Wednesday [8/14/2019], the attempts being made to take down the United States are very real despite being labeled 'conspiracy theory' with this new Project Veritas expose proving that tech giant 'google' was planning on tampering with the 2020 elections to "essentially overthrow the United States".

Terror without trust.  The crisis of confidence in Western institutions can be described as a crisis of morality.  The public has discovered that many public figures are shams.  The #MeToo sex scandals, the accusations of collaborating with foreign powers, and most recently the Epstein case have undermined the reputation of our social betters.  They are perceived are no better than the common clay and probably a good deal worse.  This has undermined the trust that formerly allowed them to exercise authority over the public. [...] Perhaps no one exemplified this more than Mao Tse Tung, a sex maniac and pedophile who was worshiped by millions of people.

The Election Is Legitimate Only If the Democrats Win.  "Horrifying!"  As we've seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception.  What "horror" had her inveighing so?  The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.  Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn't budge.  He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori.  Okay, no, Trump didn't use the phase a priori.  But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged.  Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.

The Strange Case of 'White Supremacy'.  America's founding documents were unique in their singular calls for innate and universal human freedom and equality under the law that would eventually and logically demand reification of such ideals.  In other words, in America there was a real chance to overcome not American sins per se, but the ancient sins of mankind in general.  The result is that more than 243 years after its independence, the current longest-lived democracy arguably is also the world's most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse nation and unmatched in its efforts to promote equality.

We need criminal and crazy control, not gun control.  Mass murder is not a gun control problem.  In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left 151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using paint cans filled with gasoline.  In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France.  In 2001, Muslim terrorists killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings.  Guns are a tool.  There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill lots of people.  American mass killers often use guns because they're convenient and available.  There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters, pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline.

Epstein's death raises questions about his prosecution and imprisonment.  Epstein should not have died in federal custody — the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons will have to explain how someone under their care, and recently on suicide watch, was able to commit suicide.  But the other lingering question is:  Should he have been in federal custody in the first place?

Wanda, Wilton, Bambi, and Randy Andy.  The Church had once led the West in moral standards.  Now she slavishly followed the West's lowest ones, becoming in the process as sick and dysfunctional as its shabbiest pagan institutions.  All the scandals that defined a crumbling secular society hit the Church, culminating in a pederasty scandal of epic proportions.  That scandal is not unique to the Church — indeed, it is seen across the culture, from public schools to Ivy League universities to the Boy Scouts and college sports programs — but it is reflective of the modern Church's uniquely stupid embrace of Western decadence.

An ahistorical Voice of America Is dangerous for the nation.  By pure chance I stumbled recently on a news report posted on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America website.  It was a news feature story about the personality cult of Argentine Communist Ernesto "Che" Guevara.  He is described as a "Marxist revolutionary" in a complimentary narrative that would make any antifa sympathizer proud.  Americans who know something about the history of communist atrocities of the last century might find it shocking and wonder how their tax money is being spent.  What VOA failed to mention is that Che was a ruthless communist, directly and indirectly responsible for brutal murders of tens of thousands of innocent human beings in Cuba and elsewhere.

Repealing Michigan's Rat Bounty:  A Cautionary Tale.  This current advance of the pestilential rodents reinforces the wisdom of legislators who recognize that the more things change, the more they may stay the same — or can become worse, due to short-sighted, unsound laws.  As the instance in St. Clair Shores evinces, the reasons for the Senate Law Revision Task Force's call to repeal the rat bounty remain sound, specifically that there are better, more efficacious means to curb the city's rodent problem than incentivizing a vigilante army of rat hunters who could prove a bigger problem than their quarry.

Democrats exploiting mass shootings for political gain have forgotten the lessons of the Wellstone funeral.  When Senator Paul Wellstone and seven others, including his wife and one son, were killed in an airplane crash in northern Minnesota on October 25, 2002, just 11 days before he faced re-election, a massive memorial service was planned for Williams Arena in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota basketball and hockey venue capable of seating close to 20,000.  Vice President Cheney, the presiding officer of the Senate, announced his plan to attend, only to be told by Wellstone's surviving sons that he was not welcome, much as President Trump has been told by some politicians and activists to stay away from El Paso.  Cheney, respecting the wishes of the family, did not attend, possibly avoiding some ugliness.  The memorial service degenerated into a political rally, so blatant that the Wellstone staff issued a public apology.

Shoehorning Multiple-Causation Shootings into Single-Cause Narratives.  We keep hearing the same kinds of anecdotes after a mass shooting.  The details change, but the gist is the same.  Often but not always, there's no father in the home.  Often but not always, the shooter has few or no friends and nothing resembling a real support network.  Often but not always, the shooter is unemployed or barely employed.  Often but not always, the shooter has some mental-health issue, sometimes formally diagnosed, sometimes not.  Often but not always, the shooter played violent video games.  Often but not always, the shooter was active on extremist or Columbine-focused chat boards or had a noticeable interest in or obsession with previous mass shootings.  Often but not always, the shooter has gotten in trouble in school or has been kicked out of school.

I'm Certain This Will Be Taken As An Insult.  When you see a run-down, dirty neighborhood full of trash and vermin you can assume the people living there don't really mind all that much.  Not so much that they do anything to prevent it themselves.  They wait until conditions deteriorate to the point Government steps in and makes it all like new again.

Social Media's Transition from Novelty to Malignancy.  What made sense as a communications vehicle for a diverse but circumscribed group of people sharing many life experiences on campus and later as a helpful tool for the larger world, has transformed benign to malignant as fast as rapidly improving technology could take it there.  Students moved off the campus into the "real world," taking Facebook with them. [...] Unlike on campus, where myriad shared activities were constant, for many the world of work just wasn't as engrossing or dynamic and offered far less commonality of interests among friends than the world of college.  Therefore, the communications rapidly turned to social life and the truly banal, like what a person was cooking for dinner, or the family dog's Halloween costume.

When You Understand Israel's May 1948 Borders, You Understand There is No "Occupation".  There are really only two ways to consider the borders of Israel when it declared independence in May 1948:  the entirety of the Palestine Mandate OR the proposed border put forward by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947.  As discussed below, only one of these is legally valid, while both options demonstrate that Israel does not occupy any "Palestinian Land."

Time to Kick the Islamizing Turkey Out of NATO.  Foreign and military policy needs to change along with circumstances.  During the Cold War, it made sense for Washington to forge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and make Turkey a member.  Today, an American-dominated NATO makes little sense, and Ankara's membership even less so.  Bringing in Turkey, which no one ever mistook for a liberal Western-style democracy, was always a bit of a stretch.  That nation has proven over the years to be politically unstable, with occasional military interference in governing affairs.

Democrats woke and broke.  The Democrats have no money but they do have 20-plus candidates for president.  Adam Parkhomenko, a former DNC national field director, told Vice, "When Hillary became the nominee in 2016 she was handed nothing.  The DNC was nothing and there was nothing to build on.  You'd think we would have spent the last few years making sure this would never happen again, and it has."  How you run your party is how you would run the country.

George Will finds his presidential candidate.  I'm so old that I remember when George Will's opinion mattered to Republicans.  Apparently, the Bezos Bulletin scribe realizes he's lost his influence on the Grand Old Party and now offers advice to the Democrats on their nominee, in hopes that someone out there still cares about his opinions.  His disgust at President Trump — who has the support of roughly 90% of Republicans — is such that he has now taken to telling (fellow?) Democrats whom they should nominate in 2020, in order to defeat the man who has restored the American economy to growth rates exceeding population growth (a task his predecessor assured us required a "magic wand"), nominated conservatives to the federal bench in numbers that matter, and exposed a nefarious plot among the federal intelligence and law enforcement apparatus to reverse a presidential election.

The [New York] Post says: de Blasio must be removed as mayor.  The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa.  It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.  Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City.  He does not care about its people.  He does not care about how it's run.  He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives.  All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.  And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

Something is Rotten in the Pentagon.  The strains of almost eighteen years of continuous war, Obama's massive budget cuts, and a tide of damaging politics have eroded critical parts of our military.  What has held together, until last week, was the most critical element:  the trust that must exist between the civilian leadership and the military of all ranks.  A huge blow to that trust has just occurred on Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer's watch.  Another failure of leadership, both similar and different, is taking place about the nomination of Gen. John Hyten, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, to be the next vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Devin Nunes Has a Warning for AG Bill Barr:  Without Prosecutions None "will trust the FBI or DOJ for generations".  HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes has a deliberate warning to U.S. Attorney Bill Barr, and the Department of Justice should take it very seriously.  In a 30 minute podcast interview last week, Representative Nunes rightly warns of massive political consequences if Justice Department officials don't face jail time for their conduct during the Russia investigation.  I strongly urge everyone to listen to the podcast.  [Link]

Nineteen Eighty-Four: What Orwell Got Right.  Starting in academia, politically correct speech has now infected the media, the arts, tech companies, and corporations.  The protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, works for the ironically named "Ministry of Truth," which is engaged in the practice of constantly editing history to conform to the current party line.  People and places are changed, erased, or added as needed.  "Who controls the past controls the future," Orwell explained, "who controls the present controls the past."  The erasing of America's past, the renaming of holidays, and the defacing and elimination of statues — the cultural vandalism that proceeds on a daily basis — is all part of an effort to conform America's history to the Progressive party line.

Don't Blame Wikipedia for Clinton and Epstein Edits.  Here's how Wikipedia works:  Anyone who cares to can go there and write an article. [...] For a lot of topics, Wikipedia is very useful, especially technical topics.  Articles on Math and Computer Science are generally at least pretty good, although sometimes written for a technical audience instead of a general one.  But the point is that there's no such entity as the Wikipedia Editors.  On current events, it's more like blog comments.

Hiding socialism behind skirts.  Former Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted on Sunday [7/7/2019] what I have said for months:  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the soulless Democrat Party.  His tweet responded to Pelosi dismissing as ineffective backbenchers AOC and three other rookie congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.  Pelosi told Maureen Dowd, "All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.  They're four people and that's how many votes they got."  True.  In the House, they have four votes.  But the Fearsome Foursome have the media and the party's billionaires such as Jeffrey Epstein.

The Absurd Attack on Alexander Acosta.  The leftist media machine has launched an effort to link Donald Trump with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.  This tiresome methodology of character attack is a threat to the core of free speech, as victimhood — whether of border children, women, blacks, gays, transgenders, or inquiring people — is transformed into a self-righteous weapon unhindered by policy prescriptions, employed by one political group against another on purely ideological grounds. [...] Consider that the ideology that wishes to erase criminal records attacked Brett Kavanaugh for an alleged juvenile offense, for which he was never charged; personally attacked Norm Pattis, attorney for Alex Jones, by association; forced the resignation of Harvard professor Ron Sullivan solely because he represented Harvey Weinstein (who has not yet been tried); and now calls for Alexander Acosta's resignation because he was a prosecutor in a case that (years later) the media have in hindsight "judged" was too lenient in sentencing.

A tired old man.  I'm tired of people telling me that symbols of freedom of this great country are supposedly symbols of oppression.  I'm tired of people telling me that symbols of Christianity offend them yet I am supposed to turn the other cheek when two persons of the same sex make out in public.  I'm tired of naturalized citizen politicians who denigrate the same people who kept them safe when we opened our arms to them to enjoy the fruits of America.  I'm tired of politicians who know the truth about the past Administration's illegal spying on political opponents yet continue to deny facts to brainwash the public with their lies.  I'm tired of the LSM who praise the yet to be found merits of the last Administration but will not recognize the herculean achievements of POTUS Trump.

When Dems Lose Elections, They Lose Pride In America.  [Scroll down]  They go on afterwards, I'm not going to play the whole thing, but they talk about all the ways they think America is not great and some of the stuff they say is fair, but a lot of it is questionable.  So, they use our high poverty rates without mentioning the fact that poverty in America is wealth anywhere else because of wealth transfers.  The problem we have here is not that people don't have enough money because they can get enough wealth transfer so that people living in poverty today are living at a fairly high level compared to other countries if you've ever been to another country with the exception of Democrat cities where people are homeless.  That's the kind of poverty that is widespread in a lot of other countries.  We'll talk about the high mortality rate among infants without mentioning the fact that we try to save a lot more infants who have been born so early that they would die in any other country.

John Adams Wanted Independence Day Celebrated With 'Devotion to God... Pomp and Parade... Guns, Bells, Bonfires'.  Americans declared their independence from Britain on July 2, 1776, a date that John Adams called "the most memorable epocha in the history of America."  Congress approved the Declaration two days later, on July 4, which we now celebrate as Independence Day.  Writing to his wife on July 3, 1776 from Philadelphia, John Adams said he believed the occasion would be "celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival."

Why Liberals Need To Shut Their Faces About Tanks Appearing During Trump's Independence Day Event.  Right now, we have a near Chernobyl-level style blow up over tanks and armored vehicles being part of the Fourth of July festivities this week.  President Trump ordered it.  It was a great decision.  And the fact that the Left is triggered by this means that he should have ordered more tanks for the event.  Tanks have been present for victory parades before.  The optics is fine.  No one cares about that.  Americans are patriotic and they like seeing tanks.  The only people who have problems with all of this are the Democratic Party and their allies in the media because Trump has taken over the event.  He can do that.  He should do that.  And the Left just needs to shut their face over this.

America's Detour from Sanity.  It is time for waking Americans to shout down every action witnessed or contemplated that devalues human life, denigrates fatherhood and motherhood, makes speaking the truth "hate speech," and replaces common sense and morality with political correctness.  This is a hard but necessary stand in order to make loud and clear to everyone throughout the land that Americans will no longer tolerate the deliberate and systematic dismantling of this nation.

Ideoloons.  In fact, idolatry is a major contributor to the current plague of ideologues.  We have made idols out of celebrity, of wealth, of movements (Antifa, Pro-choice, even the Earth itself) and if we can't achieve whatever we think demonstrates the approbation of these gods we become desperate and frozen, unable to crawl out of the hole we have dug for ourselves. [...] The most dangerous idolatry of all is the leftists' tendency to idolize themselves.  They shut their eyes to the clearly present God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and place their own puny selves on the altar and then run around trying desperately to prove that they're deserving of that position.  Virtue signaling has become a plague on our society.

Laws must be applied equally or they don't matter.  Yes, I know, Volodymyr Zhukovskyy is not an American, but he is in the country legally (pending the ICE detainer of course).  The problem is, with all the illegal immigrant criminals who are here getting a pass, day in and day out, on everything from identity theft to fentanyl dealing, why shouldn't Volodymyr, too, have expected all the passes he got — on drunk driving, on cocaine, on heroin, on larceny, in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, in Texas?  And so he enjoyed his multiple passes, right up until last Friday afternoon [6/21/2019], when he's accused of killing seven Americans by driving a pickup truck into a group of motorcycle riders in northern New Hampshire.

California Unplugged.  The very idea makes the mind reel:  San Francisco, San Jose, Silicon Valley — all gone dark.  The electric-car charging stations, the $500-a-plate sushi restaurants, the rows of workstations at Google, Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce — all suddenly unplugged.  This summer, blackouts could plunge large swaths of California into darkness — an act of deliberate policy, not equipment failure or operator errors.  Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California's largest power supplier, recently announced that it will begin shutting down parts of the grid, possibly for days at a time, to help reduce the risk of wildfires.

Will you survive the coming blackout?  The largest red flag on this issue in years just waved in South America.  Last weekend, tens of millions of people in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay found themselves in a complete blackout.  In one moment, they had electricity.  The next moment, they had none, and they were catapulted back to the 1800s.  Only much worse.  People in the 1800s were not dependent upon electricity for their jobs, money, communication, Internet, transportation, education, security, medical services, prescriptions, water, and very lives.  The national power grid of the United States is truly a mess held together with, as the joke goes, by not much more than "baling wire and chewing gum."

Jerry Nadler Is A Sexist Pig Who Should Be Censured By Congress.  On June 19, Hope Hicks, the former White House director of strategic communications then director of White House communications, was interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee.  The interview was not public and was behind closed doors.  Yesterday, a transcript of the interview was released.  It was revealed that during the interview Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) referred to Hicks as "Ms. Lewandowski" three separate times before she corrected him.  If I hadn't seen the transcript for myself, I simply would not have believed it.

Jerry Nadler Waddles Into Hearing, Calls Hope Hicks "Ms. Lewandowski" Three Times.  Jerry Nadler is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and he's currently leading what can only be described as a clown show of an investigation involving the President and his associates.  After saying the Mueller report would be the final word, he and other Democrats have decided they want a do-over, which means dragging everyone who's already been interviewed multiple times back in front of Congress for no real reason whatsoever.  This had Nadler waddling into yet another "hearing," this time with former Trump associate Hope Hicks being grilled.

A Madisonian Remedy to the Social Media Revolution.  So effective is Madisonian political science that it provides remedies for such up-to-date threats to freedom as social media and the giant companies that monopolize the provision of information about us and about others.  According to Madison, one way of "curing the mischief" of factions — citizens' propensity to act on passions and interests hostile to the rights of individuals and to the public interest as a whole — was to eliminate the causes.  This would require either changing human nature or destroying liberty.  Since the former was impossible and the latter would defeat a leading purpose of political life, it was necessary instead to control factions' destabilizing effects.

How Secret Algorithms Are Crushing Conservative Media.  "Where do I go to get my reputation back, even though nobody knows I lost it?"  That seems paradoxical, since your reputation is what people generally think of you — but in digital publishing what really counts is what computers think of you.  Earlier this week, secret algorithms besmirched my digital reputation, in ways that could negatively impact my paycheck, and my employer's profits.  And it all happened behind the scenes, without any of my readers knowing.

Red Ed.  The malcontents and revolutionaries were a tiny sliver of the population.  But it was this fraction of 1% that was more and more shaping the country.  How is that possible?  By the muscular device of infiltrating the command structure of any organization you encounter.  Universities.  Businesses.  Churches.  Foundations.  Political organizations.  Publishers.  Media.  Showbiz organizations.  If you see any possible political or propaganda benefit, try to take over.  Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov has explained to American audiences how cunning the Russians were at psychological warfare, subversion, and manipulating Western society.  The KGB thought they needed only about 20 years to undermine and destroy most countries.  Sometimes it seems that Russians love deception more than victory itself.  They love what spies call "the game."  If they could fool Americans into surrendering their country, Russia would win the biggest duel in history without firing a shot.

Why I dislike casual dress religious services.  We attend a funeral in a dark suit and somber tie out of respect for the deceased and his survivors.  But Progressive clergy these days are hard at work on destroying respect for The Deity. [...] If the answer to why we attend services is to engage in a social organization that provides a venue for weddings, funerals, and coming-of-age ceremonies, all focused on furthering "Social Action," on electing the right people, it makes perfect sense.  Who cares, after all, how one dresses at a political rally?

The Editor says...
Believe it or not, I've been to church a few times this year myself, and yes, the football jerseys and ratty-looking jeans are annoying.  Other annoyances include music that's 20 dB louder than necessary (God's not deaf), people reading from three or four very different versions of the Bible, people of all ages checking their email and social media feeds the whole time they're in church, those who can't sit for an hour without something from Starbucks in one hand, and people who leave trash on the floor afterward.

Manifesto Destiny.  This Land Is Our Land:  An Immigrant's Manifesto by Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion:  "Immigration as reparations." Historically white countries must open their borders because whites have sinned and deserve punishment. [...] It's absurd, of course, for Hindus, the world's most racist, reactionary, and inegalitarian culture, to be paid to lecture white Americans on our crimes against wokeness.  It's relevant to note that most of the new generation of South Asian pundits on the make, such as Mehta and Saini, aren't egalitarian progressives in any abstract sense.  They are regressives, loyal to their families, clans, and races.  They wish their people to drive before them their enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.

Swamp expert to Levin: 'There's absolutely no authority for the administrative realm in the Constitution'.  The administrative state, the federal leviathan, the Swamp:  The monstrous, centralized, bureaucratic, entrenched decision-making apparatus within the federal government that seems to answer only to itself.  On Sunday night's [6/16/2019] episode of Life, Liberty & Levin, LevinTV host Mark Levin and Claremont Institute senior fellow and University of Nevada, Reno, Professor John Marini talked about how that Swamp got to be so deep and how things are actually worse now than most people realize.  [Video clip]

The Sky-High Stakes in Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong's huge protest over a proposed law that would allow extradition from the territory to mainland China, there is far more at stake than "confidence" in the integrity of Hong Kong's legal system, or the health of Hong Kong's economy — important though those both are.  The real showdown going on in Hong Kong has long been between despotism and democracy, between tyranny and the Free World.  And whether we, the free people of America, and our allies, choose to think of it this way or not, the reality is that the showdown now taking place in Hong Kong will shape our future as well.

Breaking Up Big Tech Companies Is A Big Government, Not Free Market, Response.  Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have just become too powerful, says the narrative.  And it's not just the political right, which is justified in being upset at Big Tech's efforts to marginalize and silence it, that wants to use the nearly limitless power of the federal government to tame private businesses.  Some Democrats are in the game, too, most prominently Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who "has made breaking up the tech giants a cornerstone of her campaign."  The fact that a high-profile Democrat who has no appreciation for property rights and the blessings of markets, nor their power, is lighting torches and handing out pitchforks should be a warning.

The Occult Roots of The Wizard of Oz.  Although the Wizard of Oz is widely perceived as an innocent children's fairy tale, it is almost impossible not to attribute a symbolic meaning to Dorothy's quest.  As in all great stories, the characters and the symbols of the Wizard of Oz can be given a second layer of interpretation, which may vary depending on the reader's perception.  Many analyses appeared throughout the years describing the story as an "atheist manifesto" while others saw it as a promotion of populism.  It is through an understanding of the author's philosophical background and beliefs, however, that the story's true meaning can be grasped.

The Goal of Hollywood and the Entire Entertainment Industry is to Normalize Satanism.  In 1988, I left my parent's home in New Jersey and headed west to California.  In A very short period of time I found work as an actor, became a stand-in and double for then-stars like Richard Gere and Matt Dillon, acting in dozens of commercials and enjoyed small roles on many of the popular shows of the day.  I was a card-carrying member of SAG and AFTRA for 18 years.  From what I personally saw during the 6 years I was actively involved, before the Lord called me out of it in 1994, it was not an overly wholesome place.  Many crazy things were done behind closed doors.  But in 2019, not only are those things now done openly, you can also see that Hollywood, the music industry, and even formerly family friendly companies like Disney are working to normalize the occult in general and satanism in particular.

Capitalism Makes Miracles; Socialism Makes Dust.  A common example I often use in conversation with young people is a pizza that you might order for ten dollars on a weekend.  The owner of the pizza store, who might be making a good living assembling and delivering his product, did not plant or thresh the wheat needed to mill the grains into the flour used to make the dough, nor did he raise the cows that are milked to produce the cheese or the pigs needed to produce the pepperoni, nor did he cultivate the tomatoes used in the sauce.  No, the owner of the pizza store purchased all of these things from others, all of whom have their own ambitions and profit motives and employ thousands of individuals who likewise feed their families by applying their trades in order to provide us that $10 pizza that can feed any family of four or hungry college kids, indiscriminately, for that agreed upon price.

Venezuela: There's No Disaster Quite Like The Collapse Of Socialism.  Even while surrounded by military dictatorships and poverty, Venezuela at one time prospered with a strong economy and stable society.  Today, three Latin American nations produce more oil than Venezuela, though it has the world's largest proven reserves of crude, and just getting sick is nearly the same as death for some children.  It has rightly been called the "biggest economic disaster in modern history."  "Hospital shortages," says the headline of an Agence France-Presse story posted on Yahoo News in late May, are "a death sentence for Venezuelan children."  Half of the children who aren't dying can't get enough to eat.

Democrats stuck with Russiagate.  The only collusion in the 2016 election was between Donald John Trump and voters in 30 states.  But Democrats manufactured the Russian Collusion excuse after he beat them, their crone candidate, their billionaire donors, and their sycophants in the media.  For two years, Democrats promised the Mueller Report would bring him down.  But it didn't.  Mueller could not find a smidgen of collusion.  This presents a problem for next year because Democrats promised their base they would impeach the Orange Man.  They didn't.  In the eyes of their base, they are failures and cowards.  To the rest of us, Democrats are fools who fell [for] a hoax.

Must parental leave be dictated by government?  Can't we say something isn't government's job?  Both Republican and Democratic politicians want government to "do more" to give parents paid time off.  "This is not a women's issue.  It's a family issue," says Ivanka Trump.  "Every worker in America should be guaranteed at least 12 weeks," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.  "That's a very arbitrary number!  Why not 14 weeks?  Why not 26 weeks?" asks Independent Women's Forum analyst Patrice Onwuka.  She opposes Sanders' plan, saying government one-size-fits-all policies don't meet most parents' needs.

The Editor says...
The same idea is at the root of many leftist ideas:  Workers getting money without working.

It's Time for a Thoroughgoing Revamping of the Intelligence Community.  Today we've got too many spooks collecting too much money, with predictably bad results.  Among other bad consequences, intelligence is typically churned out by committees, guaranteeing that we don't identify our best analysts.  We need to drastically reduce the numbers of both budgets and bureaucrats, in order to figure out who's good.  Then we need to promote them, within a much smaller system.  It's hard to imagine this happening under normal circumstances, but today's circumstances aren't normal.

Levin: Only Way to Make Dems Stop Using Soviet Tactics Against Republicans Is if Soviet Tactics Are Used Against Them.  Thursday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity," conservative talker Mark Levin, author of "Unfreedom of the Press," made the argument for a criminal grand jury to be impaneled and a special counsel to be appointed to "get to the bottom of" the events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe based on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.  Levin argued that if Democrats were going to use "Soviet tactics" against Republicans, it was up to Republicans to reciprocate.

Impeach or get off the pot, Democrats.  History didn't begin in 2016.  Every modern president has asserted executive privilege.  Attorneys general have been cited for contempt on much firmer grounds.  Former Attorney General Janet Reno was found in contempt in 1998 for refusing to turn over memos about Bill Clinton's campaign finances.  In 2012, Eric Holder became the first US attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt after refusing to hand over memos detailing his knowledge about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' disastrous and bloody gunrunning scheme.  Nadler knows this, because he joined a Democratic Party walkout protesting the Holder vote.  Yet no Obama administration official was arrested.  There were no impeachments.  TV anchors didn't unsheathe melodramatic monologues about the corrosion of law and the end of democracy.

The Calming Feeling as Jew-Hate Now Takes Deeper Root in the Democrat Party.  When Ilhan Omar tweeted that Jews control because "It is about the Benjamins, baby," she revealed herself not a convenience-store-quality bigot but a ready-for-primetime Nazi.  Not every Nazi in the 1940s acted violently.  Most Nazis simply stood along the avenues and highways of Germany and cheered as Hitler's limo drove by.  Some made speeches.  Muslims led by the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, were among Hitler's best Nazis.  When Omar tweeted about "the Benjamins," she revealed her Nazi moorings.  The irony, hardly surprising, is that it is she who rakes in the cash.  Ilhan Omar has leveraged her anti-Semitism to raise more than a million dollars in record time.  [It certainly] was about the Benjamins — hers.

Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists.  Real coups against democracies rarely are pulled off by jack-booted thugs in sunglasses or fanatical mobs storming the presidential palace.  More often, they are the insidious work of supercilious bureaucrats, bought intellectuals, toady journalists, and political activists who falsely project that their target might at some future date do precisely what they are currently planning and doing — and that they are noble patriots, risking their lives, careers, and reputations for all of us, and thus must strike first.

A problem for every solution.  As Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James has written, "The federal budget is at the core of our political system.  Everything the federal government does, from taxing, to regulating, to providing services, to protecting our very freedoms, it does through the federal budget."  Liberals might dismiss the foundation's "Blueprint for Balance:  A Federal Budget for Fiscal 2020," but they shouldn't.  The document is based on verifiable facts.  If implemented, Heritage claims, it would save trillions of dollars compared to projections by the Congressional Budget Office and produce a budget surplus by 2025.  Everyone knows "entitlements" are the main drivers of debt and that politicians don't want to reform them because they fear attacks by the media and by their political opponents.

Liberals Are At War With Science In The Transgender Athlete Controversy.  Democrats have long claimed to be the party of science, but on an increasing number of issues, party activists are pushing ideological agendas that are at odds with scientific evidence — sometimes to the detriment of the people they intend to help.  California Sen. and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proposing that businesses prove they compensate men and women the same or pay a fine, although evidence shows the pay gap is not due to discrimination, but to women making different choices about work.  We know obesity is a dangerous medical condition, yet left-wing activists now demand obesity be celebrated and encouraged, actively working against the once-universally accepted idea that a good physique, diet and exercise is [...] good.

Let's Make Sure 'Obstruction of Justice' Is Properly Defined.  A line must be drawn.  No longer can the phrase "obstruction of justice" be allowed to mean something obscenely different from what any fair-minded, free person knows it was intended to mean.  In the minds of most, the phrase refers to blocking the discovery of truth, truth being the only legitimate basis on which appropriate redress can be made for some wrong that has been suffered.  Any codified law that uses the phrase "obstruction of justice" to mean something other than precisely this is in jeopardy of obstructing true justice.  If a law is needed to insure that an official investigation is not obstructed, then the language of the law must refer to obstruction of an investigation or obstruction of police work or obstruction of intelligence activities.

'Blazing Saddles' and other classic films don't deserve wrath of social justice warriors.  Classic films now face the wrath of perpetually enraged social justice warriors.  Last weekend's "Watters World" on Fox News Channel analyzed the impact of this politically correct phenomenon.  Exhibit A was Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles," the single funniest motion picture ever committed to celluloid.  Jesse Watters' guest, Cathy Areu, publisher of Catalina Magazine, responded to a clip of the comedy-Western in which Brooks himself portrays a Yiddish speaking American Indian chief.

"Something Strange Going On" At Fox News, And Not For the Good of America.  [Scroll down]  Nor is it just the millions of viewers that Fox News is gifting the likes of Sanders and Buttigieg with their 'town halls' that makes Fox "something very strange", it's the every day talking heads to whom the network is now giving voice:  With the 2020 election campaign underway, Fox brought in former DNC chairman Donna Brazile as a featured political pundit.  In other words, Brazile, who admitted she leaked questions for the last 2016 presidential debate to Hillary Clinton, is now an ongoing contributing Fox News political pundit.

Rent-A-Standing-Ovation-Crowd at Fox News' 'Town Halls'.  Since when did town halls become Fox News pep rallies? [...] Try to remember, folks that through no choice of our own, we all live in an era where "people are what they see on TV".  High time to tune out of Fox News and tune in to your own common sense.

Do We Need NATO?  NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remains a problem for the U.S. [...] NATO has always differed from other military organizations in that it claims that it is not only a military pact, but also an alliance of countries with shared values, individual liberty, democracy, human rights, and rule of law, and it has a mechanism for collective defense and military command.  From the start, there have been ironies in the composition of this "North Atlantic" alliance and in these claims.  Geographers have been obliged to accept Balkan countries, and Hungary and Bulgaria as well as Turkey, as countries within the designated region of North Atlantic.  In addition, the portrait of Turkey is less democratic than autocratic, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is the holder of all executive power and who in 1996 defined democracy as "not a goal, but an instrument."

China's Crackdown On Free-Market Economists Recalls Obama Tactics.  The Unirule Institute of Economics in Beijing, called "China's most prominent free-market think tank" by Bloomberg News, is a target of harassment from the Chinese government.  Its economists are considered dissidents by President Xi Jinping's regime.  The story reminds us of the treatment the Obama WhiteHouse gave to Tea Party groups that dared challenge the administration.

Democrats Look at South Africa, and They Like What They See.  Even in the wake of its latest free election, held on May 8, South Africa is not, on the face of it, a model of vibrant democracy.  The country suffers from persistent racial divisions, a stagnant economy, poor service delivery, rampant crime, and the world's worst income inequality.  Surely this would not be the kind of society that any American would want to transplant to our shores.  And yet the America that Democrats envision and are striving to create looks very similar to dysfunctional South Africa.  We should therefore view that country's steady unraveling as a cautionary tale.

Are Impeachment Democrats Geniuses or Idiots?  What would you have done as president the first time you heard about the Hillary e-mail system?  I'd say any president with half a brain would demand that either the e-mail system or Hillary is outta here by sundown.  But Obama is weak, feeble.  And what about the non-concession of the 2016 election?  I'd say that on election night, Hillary was drunk, and in no fit state to make a concession speech.  And then on the following day, she was hungover.  People don't make very good decisions when they are drunk and/or hungover.  And then the Mueller investigation.  I thought that Rule One for a lawyer is:  you never ask a question in court unless you already know the answer.  So, you gin up a two-year witch-hunt without knowing whether the witches did it?

Rebellion is Bursting out All Over.  As Spygate proceeds to its certain conclusion — the trials of those who engaged in this scandalous coup attempt — we receive the details of the scheme only in dribs and drabs.  Too many were involved and have too much to lose at this point by not revealing to the investigators their role in exchange for more lenient treatment, which is why I believe all will soon be revealed.  So for the moment let's turn to the broader picture that explains in large part why so many officials were so determined to keep Donald Trump from the White House and to oust him once he won the election.  To me, it has seemed they are clinging to the privileges and benefits of an order which is dying because its underpinnings — the post-World War II order — no longer suit the citizens of the countries involved, or the changing world.

Allow Venezuela To Fail.  Are we stepping on the same rakes again — in Venezuela?  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently tweeted "My message to the Venezuelan people is clear:  the United States stands firmly with you in your quest for freedom and democracy."  He also confirmed that the military option is on the table.  In other words, the U.S. is ready to liberate the Venezuelan people from themselves.  For those who suffer historical amnesia, it is worth pointing out, that the Venezuelans had democratic elections and they have chosen socialism.  Hugo Chavez was a socialist, and he ran on a socialist platform and got elected with wide popular support.  So was his successor Nicolás Maduro.  Whether the Venezuelans voted for socialist serfdom knowingly or they have been duped is irrelevant.  If people are ignorant or complacent, they deserve the government they elect.

The Next Battlefront:  Social Media.  Imagine a day when newspapers only publish articles regarding the benefits of late-term abortions, socialism, and open borders.  Where history books vilify Republican conservatives for fighting to defend slavery, inciting segregation, and founding the KKK.  Cable news shows would only report crimes committed by conservatives or capitalists and social media only allowed leftist ideas to be communicated over their platforms.  Well, if the left continues its scorched-earth policy against free speech, in no time at all the United States will have no resemblance to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.  So many examples exist that fully detail the poverty, violence, and atrocities that quickly emerge when free speech is taken away that it raises the question as to why so many younger Americans are indifferent about the loss of such an important right.

Hey, How About Sending U.S. Troops Into Venezuela?  Venezuela's dictator Nicolas Maduro is a former bus driver who rose through incompetence and luck to become a pompous, ruthless twit who's turned a wealthy oil-rich land into a stagnant, starving socialist state.  Bernie Sanders expressed admiration for socialism there years ago.  But Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him have created widespread starvation, hyperinflation and a refugee nightmare for millions of Venezuelans and Colombia and Brazil.  Maduro would be one of those laughable Peter Sellers movie characters if his military wasn't running over protesters in the streets of Venezuela, a large, resource-rich country of 32 million about the size of Texas and Arizona combined.

Russian 'democratic fraud' vs American hybrid war.  Venezuela is Trump's first new foreign "war," the only major conflict he did not inherit from the Obama administration.  "War" is in quotes because no military forces are likely to be involved.  This is the peculiar characteristic of what appears to be an American version of "hybrid war" using only sanctions, diplomacy, information operations, and proxies.  Why it has evolved is easy to explain.  A new Cold Hybrid War has been raging for some time, though its existence has been played down for years to preserve the fiction of a Global World Order.  Some of its most intense chapters are now coming to light.

Hey, Mazie Hirono!  Who Do You Work For?  Who is pulling your strings?  Surely, it's not the people of Hawaii or the rest of the country.  Your father left the family when you were very young, and your mom managed to bring you and your two siblings to Hawaii.  She supported the family by working long hours to put a roof over your head and food on the table.  In spite, of your meager surroundings, you managed to get yourself a fine education at the University of Hawaii and prestigious Georgetown Law School.  One would expect gratitude for the opportunity this country offered you, but instead you shamefully and ungratefully had the gall to state to your staff that "people are getting screwed in this country every single second, minute, hour of the day."

Ilhan Omar blames US for Venezuela crisis.  Rep. Ilhan Omar blamed the US for the political turmoil in Venezuela, saying we "helped lead the devastation" through the use of sanctions.  "A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela and we have sort of set the stage for where we are arriving today," the Minnesota congresswoman said during an interview Wednesday [5/1/2019] with Democracy Now!.  "This particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States."  The freshman Democrat added that there are "finally" members of Congress who agree with what she said.

The Editor says...
The situation in Venezuela is entirely the fault of socialism and a ruthless socialist dictator, which, in my opinion, is exactly what Ilhan Omar would become, if given the chance.

Joe Biden is the canary in the coal mine for today's feuding Democrats.  In recent times Republican and Democratic parties have stumbled in apparent dysfunction.  The tea party rebellion bubbled up to split GOP adherents because Republican leadership in Washington lost its conservative focus and seemed more interested in going along to get along.  Also, ideological purity became important.  In 2016, that resulted in a lifelong, pro-choice Democrat named Donald Trump cleverly capturing GOP leadership and the White House with long-term party ramifications yet to be determined.  Nowadays, Democrats are experiencing their own divisive, left-handed rebellion over deep dissatisfaction with the progress of progressive ideas in the hands of House leadership, all of whom are in their late seventies.

Here's How to Tell if Scientists are Exaggerating.  Let's call it:  "The Principle of Comparative Difficulty" (PCD): if an easier task is too difficult to accomplish, then a harder one certainly is too. [...] The PCD exposes Darwinian braggadocio to a very much deeper level.  I'm a biochemist.  Biochemistry is the study of the molecular and cellular foundation of life.  Back in Darwin's day the cell was thought to be a simple jelly called protoplasm.  Yet modern biochemists have discovered to their surprise that the cell is chock-full of sophisticated machines — actual machines, made of molecules.  Like the machines of our everyday world (say, a lawn mower), cellular machines consist of many parts that have to cooperate with each other to do their tasks.  Yet, as physicist David Snoke and I have shown, Darwin's mechanism of random mutation and natural selection strains to explain even the very simplest molecular example of cooperation (called a "disulfide bond").  Here's an analogy.  Suppose a lawn mower were stored in a shed that was kept closed by a hook and eye latch.  Darwin's theory struggles mightily to explain even the latch, with just two simple cooperative pieces.  So we're supposed to think it explains the lawn mower?  The PCD lets us easily realize that's ludicrous.

Get Ready for a Paradigm Shift on Russia, Climate Change, Everything You Think You Know.  It may now sound ridiculous, but Nikita Khrushchev once told America "we will bury you" and Washington believed him.  For years the intelligence community thought the U.S.S.R. was on the verge of overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest economy before the Soviets unexpectedly collapsed.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book, Secrecy: the American Experience, tries to explain how such a tremendous intelligence misjudgment could take place.

A Democrat disaster looms with their nominating convention.  The Democrats are setting themselves up for a possible, even probable, disaster at their nominating convention in Milwaukee, July 13-16, 2020.  The party that created the concept of "superdelegates" to rein in their crazies may have outsmarted themselves by allowing them to vote only in the second or later ballots.  As the field evolves and Joe Biden's still undeclared candidacy appears to be chaotic, the party elders (the ones with big money fundraising capabilities) are very worried that socialist Bernie Sanders will walk away with the nomination and lose to Donald Trump in a landslide.

Russia Collusion Peddlers Will Turn on Each Other.  Now that the Mueller Report has been published, what further investigations is Attorney General William Barr likely to pursue?  [Video clip]

Trump Guilty of Obstructing a Coup d'état.  The scurrilous anti-Trump innuendoes and outright lies spread by a weaponized FBI, CIA, State Dept. and various other federal agencies amounts to an attempted coup against America's duly elected president.  Such blatant treason cannot be allowed to go unpunished.  Nor can the two-tiered "justice" system We the People currently suffer under be allowed to stand.  If we no longer have rule of law in the United States then we are no longer a free republic.

What Really Caused the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire?  Following the horrifying fire that badly damaged one of the world's great treasures, the mainstream media is pushing the storyline that the fire that ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was caused by an "electrical short circuit."  But the story in the Daily Mail lacks any evidence to back up that claim. [...] "Investigators" brought in to determine the cause of the tragic blaze have not yet been given access to the burned-out cathedral.  Nevertheless they are already announcing the results of their investigation.  Even as the embers were still glowing on the day of the fire, French prosecutors were ruling out arson.

What 'Free Money' Means to Me.  Officials in Stockton, Calif., a hard-pressed agricultural and industrial city 75 miles northeast of San Jose, are enjoying the glow of media attention from their ongoing, first-in-America program to provide residents with a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. [...] This is about more than helping a few residents in a mid-size city pay medical bills, buy groceries, repair the car, or spend the weekend in the Sierra foothills gambling at the Jackson Rancheria Indian casino (there are no limits on how the money is spent, after all).  It's about setting the stage for a national political "discussion" that might eventually involve large, direct taxpayer payments to lower-income residents.  The research and storytelling will be used to soften us up for the hard sell, which will come in various state or federal proposals, and will sometimes be linked to plans for reparations.

Four Members of Congress Have Lifetime ACU Conservative Rating of 100%.  According to the 48th edition of the American Conservative Union's (ACU) Ratings of Congress report, Representatives Dave Brat (R-Va.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) have maintained a 100% lifetime conservative rating.  Although 11 other members of Congress also received a 100% rating for 2018, they have not maintained it for their entire careers in Congress.  Of those 11, only Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was awarded 100% for both 2017 and 2018.  The ACU rates elected officials by defining conservatism, as detailed in both its report and website, and taking into account their stances on specific types of legislation.

The Internet Erupts With Speculation About Who Started The Notre Dame Fire.  Ever careful to watch for false-flags and conspiracy theory concerns, video is emerging of a Gilets-Jaunes in black clothes at one of the two towers half an hour after the start of the fire at Notre-Dame.  [Video clip]  One definite way to disenfranchise the yellow vests — as they crush French autocracy — would be to set them up as the fall-guys for this national disaster.  Surely that is not possible! [...] In the end, there are only two options.  Either this was an accident, or someone intentionally started the fire.  And if the fire was intentionally started, obviously someone had a motive for doing so.

Reeducation Digest #1.  As a public service for long-time viewers of CNN and MSNBC who were shocked to discover that the two-year long narrative of Trump-Russia collusion was a total and complete hoax, the following tidbits may help in your red-pill journey. [...]

Let me tell you about 'White Privilege'.  I'm an adult white man living in the United States of America in 2019 and I feel absolutely no white privilege at all.  None.  I worked hard all my life at my chosen profession.  I didn't come from a family of money.  I had many menial jobs as a teen and young man until I was able to work my way into the career I wanted to have.  I hated social climbing and office politics so I didn't engage in it.  Whatever I achieved I got through hard work, talent, and perseverance.  No one ever gave me anything that I didn't earn.

Candace Owens:  The anti-Ocasio-Cortez.  It has been a long time since a person as young as Candace Owens appeared on the political scene who is as brilliant, grounded, and quick-thinking as she is. [...] Owens's grace and class are the antithesis of Ocasio-Cortez's empty-headed, ditzy meanderings.  Owens's videos are all worth watching, and her performance on Tuesday [4/9/2019] in front of the House Oversight Committee was spectacular.  She put the Democrats on that committee to shame, especially Jerrold Nadler and Ted Lieu.  Both of them tried their best to humiliate her, to use her as a prop in their latest narrative that Trump is responsible for a make-believe rise of white nationalism and white supremacy.  The two of them are imbecilic at best.  Their focus on "white nationalism" is nonsense, but that is all the Democrats have now:  nonsense.

Report: Lori Loughlin Thought The Feds Were Bluffing, Now "Freaking Out" About Having To Do Time In Prison.  [Scroll down]  Loughlin has now been dropped from and edited out of her current show, a frontier drama on the Hallmark Channel.  Her character apparently isn't minor, either; she plays the town mayor.  It would have been much easier for producers to leave the episodes they've already completed alone and just write her out of future ones, but apparently Loughlin has already reached a level of such O.J.-esque ignominy that they can't bear to have her onscreen.  They can add her back in five to 10 seasons from now, I guess.

Democratic socialism is the scenic route to serfdom.  In his 1944 book "The Road to Serfdom," Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek argued that socialist economic planning resulted not just in accumulating losses of economic efficiency but "the very destruction of freedom itself."  History was kind to Hayek's worldview.  The United Kingdom, Sweden, and India tested socialistic planning without sustained repression.  But people in the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cambodia and Cuba were not so lucky.  Natural experiments between socialism and capitalism in East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea, and Hong Kong and China, bore out the link between economic liberty and personal freedom.  Upon reunification, for example, GDP per capita in East Germany was one-third of the West German level, and the latter did not require the East's Stasi or emigration restrictions.

Google's treatment of Kay Coles James is shameful, misguided.  It was bound to happen.  In fact, I'm surprised it took this long for leftists to viciously attack Kay Coles James.  The general strategy since she became president of The Heritage Foundation seems to have been to largely to ignore Mrs. James in an attempt to keep the masses unaware of her effective advocacy of conservative principles.  It was only a matter of time that they no longer would be able to bite their collective tongue and launch an all-out attack on Mrs. James' voice of reason.  But their plan backfired.

The Democratic Party, Not America, Is Experiencing a Civil War.  Contrary to the overheated speculation of so many, the United States is not on the cusp of another civil war.  Sure, things are tense in America's political system.  Things usually are.  Americans are not, however, about to take up arms against each other and hunt down those with whom they disagree.  Instead, what we are experiencing is the very public collapse of our managerial elite and this has resulted in a civil war within the Democratic Party.  To them it must feel like a more widespread conflict since most of our self-styled elite are Democrats.  The good news is this Democratic Party civil war is sure to end in disaster for the Left.  And this can only benefit the American people.

The Democrat-media meltdown over Special Olympics funding is everything we hate about Washington.  The current debate surrounding grant funding for the Special Olympics is an excellent case study of why our country will probably never get out of debt.  In case you missed it, there's been a fair amount of outrage over the Department of Education's budget proposal to cut $18 million in federal grant money to the Special Olympics.  The proposed budget states that "such activities are better supported with other federal, state, local or private funds."

Germany's Refusal To Fund 2 Percent Of Its Defense Is Not The Action Of An Ally.  Bob Gates, perhaps the most farsighted post-Cold War defense secretary, presciently predicted in 2011 "that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense."  Gates, who once rightly understood that the Saudis would fight Iranians to the last American, also essentially hinted the same with regards to Germany and Russia, "nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets."

Earth Hour:  A Dissent.  Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century.  Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.  Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores.  Getting children out of menial labor and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.  Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible.  The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Thomas Sowell Is Right to Predict a Socialist America.  America's size, diversity, and democratic character are precipitating our demise.  The emphasis on equity, a moral foundation that causes envy, will surely lead us to a political ideology, socialism, that is widely known as the "politics of envy."  To conclude, the many characteristics of the American democracy that made it great are simultaneously contributing to its downfall.  As man grows estranged from his ancestors and his institutions, we will look for easy answers in all the wrong places.  Socialism is the lowest hanging fruit to pick for modern man, and we will reach that fruit by trampling our own democratic principles.

The Era of the Private Automobile Is About to Be Over.  Once you think about it, it seems almost inevitable.  No, the age of the automobile is not about to end, but the age of the private ownership of automobiles is passing away, at this very moment. [...] Note that the advances in ride sharing have been produced by private enterprise, not by public entities.  I trust that you do not find that surprising.  In New York, government cannot make the subways function.  You did not expect them to innovate, did you?

What Did the Founders Mean by "Invasion"?  Even by the middle of the 18th century, the English language lacked a widely-used set of standard definitions to English words.  While English dictionaries existed, those that did were widely considered deficient for a variety of reasons. [...] With this background in mind, a firestorm of controversy has recently erupted over what is meant by the word "invasion" that appears in both Article I, Section 8, Clause 15, and Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.  Respectively called the Militia Clause and the Guarantee Clause, these powers were meant to assure that the general government would protect the states from invasions.  However, the two clauses have recently been cited by those who support sending military forces to the southern border to restriction immigration, with some going as far as to suggest that the president has a unilateral power to do so.  It seems reasonable, then, to take a glance back and analyze what the American founders had in mind when they constructed the invasion authority.

Blankenship Is Right:  Sue the Mainstream Media Out of Existence.  [Scroll down]  [S]wamp-bought media hitjobs such as the one perpetrated against [Don] Blankenship prevent anti-establishment candidates from taking office and discourage them from running.  Can we say with certainty that now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have dared accept his nomination by President Trump had he known in advance the flurry of irresponsible reporting on unsubstantiated sexual misconduct allegations to come?  And our concern shouldn't be limited just to these cases:  consider the reckless endangerment of the very lives and careers of the Covington Catholic children by the mainstream media.

Sorry, Sandy, Capitalism Needs No Redemption.  The Industrial Revolution did, in fact, lead to the concentration of capital in the hands of some more successful and innovative individuals, which allowed some of them to create large businesses that flourished (and many more that failed), particularly in places like America.  The country's framework of laws allowed free markets to exist relatively unimpeded.  Without this "ideology of capital," where the profit motive drove success for many individuals and companies, there would have been no mechanism to create the economies of scale necessary for producers to provide larger quantities of higher quality goods and services.  That, in turn, led to the lower prices which made those goods and services more desirable and attainable among more consumers in a competitive marketplace.  The net effect of this economic system has been wealth creation such that the world has never seen, a more robust economic marketplace, and the exponential betterment of human well-being.  To grasp this doesn't require an economics degree, but only the most basic understanding of how the principles of supply and demand guide economic progress in a free market of voluntary, reciprocal exchanges of value.

What Trump does not do.  When Democrats lost to a non-politician in 2016, they could not swallow the failure and began to degrade their opponent's victory (by manufacturing "Russia collusion"), insult people who voted for the winner (calling them racist), and assassinate the character of the winner (calling him a dictator).  To make the case for the third act, they invented a story that Donald Trump likes dictators and wants to be one and will not leave office if not elected in 2020.  But his actions show the opposite.  Trump does not want to be a king or a dictator, while his predecessors behaved as if they wanted to be.  To demonstrate this fact, I will provide examples of what Trump has not done and what King Barack H. Obama and King George W. Bush did. [...]

Time to Embrace the 'American's Creed'.  If today's politicians, at all levels of government but especially members of the United States Congress, strongly embraced and let the "American's Creed" guide their daily actions and decisions, it would certainly be in the best interests of America.  Such a "lifestyle" should help overcome, one hopes in a major way, the terribly bitter and divisive political environment that presently exists in America.

Uncle Joe Biden Meets Hollywood McCarthyism — and Folds.  Mike Pence, one of the finest and most decent guys around, is shunned and cast out by an entire sector of America.  His candid and well-lived Christianity is an affront to those who are the very living example of the characteristics they falsely attribute to him.  Why is Pence so reviled?  Well, it's because he not only talks the Christian talk; he walks the walk.

Inviting Self-Professed Socialist Democrats to Venezuela.  It's an obscenity to allow the "Socialist Democrats", who are really propped-up "Justice Democrats," to continue spouting their socialist ideals on society as long as the good citizens of Venezuela are having to rummage, dog-like, through street garbage for scraps to eat and collecting sewer water for their children.  AOC, Omar and company are equivalent to the socialist Venezuelan politicians who converge nightly in Caracas steak houses while the people they were elected to serve slowly starve to death in the dark.  If these Justice Democrats dared try to extoll the virtues of socialism in the streets of Venezuela the way they do in America, they'd be torn apart limb by limb.

Hey Ilhan!  Hey Alexandria!  Venezuela's democratic president wants you to come to Venezuela to see some socialism.  In the past, lefties have flocked to political pilgrimages to newly created socialist countries to drink in the collectivism and praise the new regimes.  It happened in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade sugar cane-cutting harvest, it happened in Nicaragua with the Sandalistas (ain't that right, Bill de Blasio), and it certainly happened in Venezuela during the salad days of socialist Hugo Chavez (until socialized Cuban Castrocare actually killed him in 2013).  Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell, and Dial Joe-4-Oil Kennedy were all in, and don't think they weren't loud about it.  Well, now a new invitation has been issued to the current defenders of socialism, from Venezuela's democratically elected president, Juan Guaido.

Trump's Anti-Socialist Strength Could Turn Venezuelan-Americans Into Republicans for Decades.  Ernesto Ackerman watched the horror play out in Venezuela this weekend on a large screen on the stage of a rally he had helped organize in support of the country's opposition leader, Juan Guaido.  The event was initially meant to bring Venezuelans in the city together to coincide with the protests back home.  It ended up being something very different.  "A killing of civilians without arms, burning the humanitarian help, we are dealing with the genocide," the Venezuelan-American activist said as they watched the violence play out in real time.

Don't conscript women into combat.  A federal district judge presumed last Friday to overturn U.S. Supreme Court precedent on a long-dormant topic — the military draft.  The judge, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the current requirement that only men and not women register for the draft at age 18 through the Selective Service system is not "substantially related to Congress's objective of raising and supporting armies."  There's plenty to debate here.  Is the ruling legally sound?  Should Selective Service exist?  When is conscription morally defensible, if ever?  How are women in combat affecting troop readiness and morale?

Three Cheers for the Labor Market.  If your prospects are tapped out in the place you are, then move.  Go where the action is.  That isn't always easy.  Neither is being disabled or a convicted felon trying to make a new life for himself.  Nobody's asking you to take a Conestoga wagon through Indian country to homestead a farm in the western territories.  Just get on with it.

All News Is Bad News.  America is a country in trouble, of course, what with a gay black actor faking a mugging by racist white folk, and women claiming rape when hard hats whistle (they get twenty years minimum for whistling twice, life in jail for a long wolf whistle).  America is also in trouble when a Muslim woman goes over to Syria, gets married three or four times, is widowed three or four times, then wants to return and watch TV in Alabama.  Even worse is the fact that an intellectual congresswoman called AOC wants to do away with airplane travel to save the planet and take away all of Jeff Bezos' money.

Sorry, Pope Francis, your sex abuse speech was a disgraceful display of excuses and evasions.  Pope Francis's closing address to the Vatican Summit on Child Protection was a disgraceful display of excuses and evasions.  He began with an extended meditation on how a "great number of" abuse cases are "committed within families."  He urged the assembled bishops to focus on "other forms of abuse" experienced by "child soldiers," "starving children," "child victims of war" and "refugee children."  He laid out an agenda that, bizarrely, focused on matters have nothing to do with clerical abuse (such as combating "sexual tourism").  And, most shamefully of all, he lashed out at those demanding that bishops who covered up abuse and silenced victims be held to account, declaring that the church must "rise above" those who "exploit, for various interests, the very tragedy experienced by the little ones."

If We Can't Cut Entitlements, What Can We Do?  Thanks to the overspending of Congress and successive presidential administrations, America's debt totals $22 trillion, and it is projected to grow faster and larger in the years to come. [...] We must deal with the drivers of our future debt:  Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  But for those who think it is not politically feasible to tackle entitlements, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently published a report with a broader range of suggestions.  They include limiting highway and transit funding to expected revenues (translation: don't spend more than you collect), eliminating Head Start, and creating a federal value-added tax (VAT).  Disappointingly, many of the CBO's alternatives are meant to grow government revenue rather than shrink government expenditures.

Trump Should Just Let the Democrats Self-Destruct.  President Trump has demanded that Ilhan Omar voluntarily resign.  The idea of impeachment of another Muslim Democratic congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) is also being actively promoted.  The events surrounding Ilhan Omar, of course, are a shame for America.  The anti-Semitic focus of her recent statements is obvious.  However, this does not mean that President Trump has an urgent need to intervene in the process of natural political selection and demand the resignation of an anti-Semitic congresswoman.  Trump's intervention in the natural self-destruction of the Democratic Party is a strategic mistake.

Hey, Democrats, I've lived in a socialist country with income 'equality' and it was miserable.  [A]s Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of us who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony.  After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.  My family left post-Mao Communist China in the mid-1980s precisely because there was so much equality to go around.  As a child, I lived in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China.  Everyone in my city was equal in having no running hot water, no modern toilet facilities, no refrigerator, no washer, no dryer, and no color television.  Imagine a world without Whole Foods, Safeway and Walmart, or the plethora of products stocked on their shelves.  Imagine no Vitamin Water, no Gatorade, no Starbucks, no Panera Bread, no candy bars and no sea salt potato chips.  Now imagine instead being allotted food stamps from the government, indicating how much your family can eat.

The Whole Lot of Them Are Bat-Crazy.  In his SOTU address, the President showed deep compassion for African Americans, for Hispanic Americans, for women — for all the groups that the liars and real haters allege he disdains.  All the haters who accuse this President falsely of racism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and all are self-serving liars who themselves view every person with bigotry, identifying each by gender, race, sexual preference, religion.  That is what their Identity Politics is all about:  "Vote for me because I am your Identity, too, or will try to change myself to be."  Stacey Abrams was the perfect Democrat counterpoint:  not Caucasian, not male, and still whining about losing.  The Loser as counterfoil to Make America Great Again.

Look Upon the Media's 'Life of the Mind'.  [Scroll down]  The primary mission of the media today is not to inform dispassionately but, like Charles Boyer, to convince the public that it cannot trust the evidence of its own senses, observations, or experiences, and is in fact losing its collective mind unless it undergoes an immediate attitude readjustment and gets with the program.  Many of the reporters and commentators can't help themselves.  As Ben Rhodes famously observed, they're small children who literally know nothing, and thus are prime receptacles for all kinds of counterfactual nonsense.  (The myth of manmade climate change is a prime example, since it is so easily countermanded by a simple glance back at history.)  Others are simply careerists, busily building their "brands."  The news business is no longer a calling, nor even a profession, but a trade once again, this time not in service to the truth but to the Narrative.

How Venezuela Struck It Poor.  Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s:  It produced more than 10 percent of the world's crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbors Brazil and Colombia — and not far behind that of the United States.  At the time, Venezuela was eager to diversify beyond just oil and avoid the so-called resource curse, a common phenomenon in which easy money from commodities such as oil and gold leads governments to neglect other productive parts of their economies. [...] Such success makes the sorry state of Venezuela's oil industry today, not to mention that of the country at large, all the more surprising — and tragic.

No gray areas are left anywhere:  The lesson of Ralph Northam's fall.  It's hard to recall a politician who has so quickly and starkly been exposed as a cipher who ascended to a major office almost by accident (any Democrat would have won in Virginia in 2017).  So there won't be a lot of tears for Ralph Northam, but the controversy consuming him is disturbing nonetheless for what it portends about the drift of our political culture.  It is increasingly frenzied, unforgiving and irrational, and only likely to get more so.

A Digital Iron Curtain Descends Over The Internet.  A centralized environment will be inherently collectivist.  It's impossible for it to be anything else.  And when a handful of companies control the internet, they become its political and cultural weak point.  Any government or totalitarian movement that can compromise them will control the internet.  If we want an open internet, then we must once again envision it as a chaotic environment of competitive companies, none of whom can get so big that they hold its future and ours in their hands.

It's Time to Get Real About Our Enemies.  There is more to #TheResistance than the political panic inspired by the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).  They are riding a monster not of their own making.  In order to survive, they are providing cover and normalization of something not at all normal.  Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words "hysteria" and "Trump derangement syndrome."  These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening.  The mass hysteria is a goal and a tactic, whipped up by cool-headed, purposeful people.  It was not caused by Trump's tweets or orange coloring.  It has everything to do with a long game to change our country.  The exaggerated, weird loathing of President Trump and all Republicans — that flies in the face of our peace and prosperity — is the daily work of thousands of professional leftists.

Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she's proposing asset forfeiture.  In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap'n Crunch.

Battle of the Brainless:  Justin Trudeau vs.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Sorry Americans; I know you like to finish first in everything but in this contest you lose.  The Canadian PM is hands down less intelligent than the newly elected representative from New York.  It is true AOC's airhead statements are becoming more and more bizarre, but the things she comes out with show a lack of education and the fact she is a committed socialist who has never learned the truth about socialism.  Trudeau, on the other hand, says things that no person above the age of five and of average intelligence would ever say.

Harry Reid Exposes Greatest Liberal Scam of All-Time.  The U.S. government is partially shut down over the wall.  But it's all a massive liberal scam.  A Ponzi scheme.  Pure fraud.  Bernie Madoff couldn't come up with a better scam.  Because the same liberal politicians and donors who scream about the "racism" and "immorality" and "ineffectiveness" of a wall all live behind walls.  President Trump needs to buy TV infomercial time and run a 30-minute TV show in a Ross Perot fashion — featuring aerial views of the mansions and estates of liberals, protected by walls, gates, and armed guards.  You know, the exact same protections they don't want you and me or our children to have.  Exhibit A is Harry Reid, the Democratic former Senate Majority Leader from my home state of Nevada.

Do intellectuals oppose religion?
Is Religion Anti-Intellectual?  Should you believe in a God?  All the discord and vitriol in our culture boils down to how you would answer.  Border walls, gay marriage, abortion, national defense, school choice — where you stand on these issues and the myriad others comprising our daily tussle is for the most part defined by how you answer this question.

Why is the Vatican standing up for the Venezuelan dictatorship?  Look at it this way:  can you imagine Pope John Paul II sending in his diplomats to legitimize the military dictatorship of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski while it was in its showdown with Solidarity?  Pope John Paul was with the democrats all along, and as they won freedom with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, the Vatican in the end played a pivotal role for freedom.  Poland, as a matter of fact, is one of the few countries in Europe where Catholicism is still significantly practiced.  No such luck in Venezuela.  The battle lines have been drawn, and the first Latin pope and his Vatican bureaucrats have picked the bad guy, the ruling dictatorship, over the suffering people, all in the phony name of preserving peace, something whose potential came and went years ago.

Congress Is Not a Coequal Branch of Government — It's Supreme.  The notion of coequality of the branches is a myth that has been popularized over the past half century, during the rise of the imperial presidency, as a way to boost the executive's standing in the eyes of the public.  There are three main reasons that Congress is supreme.  First, Congress can get itself involved in the actions of the other branches.  It can override presidential vetoes.  It can deny appointments to the executive and judicial branches.  It can impeach officers of the executive and judicial branches.  It can set legislative and judicial pay.  It also has wide discretion in determining the size and shape of the executive and judicial branches.  Every executive department and indeed every officer except the president and vice president are creations of Congress.  And Congress also has total authority to design the court system as it sees fit.

More Populist, More Conservative.  It's not the free market that is financializing the American economy and empowering Wall Street's leveraged buyouts of American businesses.  It's the federal government's preferential tax treatment of corporate debt and guarantee of "too big to fail" bailouts.  It's not the "invisible hand" giving investment income preferential tax treatment over workers' wages, even though in a globalized economy that discrepancy can incentivize American investors to create jobs overseas instead of here.  It's not Adam Smith who simultaneously ended vocational tracking in American high schools while flooding college campuses with students and borrowed dollars that would have been better off elsewhere.  Nor did Milton Friedman make it unprofitable for residential real-estate developers to build anything other than mid-rise apartments and McMansions.  That's federal and state policymakers.  It wasn't capitalism that stripped religion from public schools and, indeed, the public square, denying working communities a source of social capital and solidarity they depended on.  That was a group of activist courts.

Sen. Cruz:  Democrats Forcing Partial Government Shutdown To Appease Their Base.  Senator Ted Cruz is blaming the partial government shutdown on what he calls the most radical and extreme members of the Democrat Party.  During an interview with the Daily Caller Friday [1/11/2019], the Texas lawmaker said Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being held captive by far-left Democrats.  He claimed Democrats are filled with hatred and anger for President Trump and are politicizing the shutdown.

What was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing, making a third Democratic response to Trump's wall speech?  The Trump speech started as a duel between Trump, who spoke out about a border wall last night, and not one, but two Democratic responders.  That had a precedent in how a State of the Union address response goes to the other party, but the Democrats couldn't even agree on a single responder.  They had a pair of them, hoping to hog more camera time, perhaps, but it came at a cost of a unified message.  Nancy Pelosi, who leads the House, was a logical response agent, but Democrats went and put New York Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer up there as well.  The result, as they stared out at the TV cameras together, all botoxed and heavily made up, was "American Gothic," except maybe with oily game show hosts instead of farmers.

Schumer and Pelosi's response to Trump's address becomes instant meme sensation on Twitter.  The Democratic leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, gave their response Tuesday to President Trump's prime-time Oval Office speech that called for border security.  Pelosi said Mr. Trump had "chosen fear.  We want to start with the facts," while Schumer said "We don't govern by temper tantrum" in their joint televised statement.  The lawmakers' stoic appearance standing at the same podium in front of a row of flags made for perfect meme material — and Twitter users quickly noticed — comparing them to everything from the famous painting "American Gothic" to angry parents and Bond villains.

Creep Show:  Pelosi and Schumer Freak Out Viewers:  Blank Stares, Scowls and Crazy Eyes Consume Dem Response.  President Trump held a national address the perils of open borders and illegal immigration on Tuesday.  Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi delivered the response.  Big mistake.

Pelosi, Schumer spark laughs on social media for 'angry parents' rebuttal to Trump address.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., triggered plenty of laughs on social media Tuesday night [1/8/2019] for their rebuttal to President Donald Trump's address from the Oval Office.  During his address, Trump called the conflict at the southern border a "crisis of the heart and the crisis of the soul" and repeated his request for $5.7 billion for a steel barrier.  Meanwhile, Pelosi and Schumer stood firm with their position that the government shutdown must end in order to continue talks about border funding.  However, folks on Twitter drew more attention to the serious tone of the Democrats' remarks and had some fun at their expense.

The Internet wasted no time roasting Schumer and Pelosi.  The Democratic response to President Trump's speech by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi quickly got ripped apart online, as jokesters mocked the way they spoke while standing close together behind a small podium wearing scowls.  "Yikes.  I like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi but they gotta work on the whole 'not looking like villains from the next bond movie' thing next time," said Twitter user Dan Luke.  "Why are Chuck and Nancy every pair of white suburban parents who just witnessed you shotgun a coors light while home for break?" Twitter user Zachary Miller wrote with a screenshot of the pair.  "We trusted you with Dad's car because we thought you could be responsible with it, but we see now you're not ready," Vulture writer Kathryn VanArendonk joked.

Pelosi, Schumer say Democrats should get 'equal airtime' after Trump address.  Democratic leaders on Monday night [1/7/2019] called for equal airtime in response to President Donald Trump's primetime address to the nation on southern border security scheduled for Tuesday evening.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that since Trump's speech will be broadcast, the other side of the aisle should have their fair share of broadcast time, too.

The Editor says...
The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader were attempting to elevate their status to that of the President by demanding equal media coverage.  In reality, they were in no position to demand any such thing.  Moreover (in hindsight), the message delivered during their "equal time," and the way they delivered it, was a public relations fiasco.

The Coming Democratic Disillusion.  By the seventh year of his presidency, when some 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq every month and gas on average cost $2.80 per gallon, George W. Bush was about as popular as Donald Trump is today.  And in 2007, as we all remember, Pelosi's Democrats set about enacting universal health care and ending the war in Iraq.  Fooled you!  Actually, the victories of the 110th Congress were much more modest:  a minimum wage increase, lobbying reform, and a ban of incandescent light bulbs.

Keep It Closed for Two Years.  I don't know about you, but I am enjoying the 25% Government shutdown.  I really am.  This is the closest we ever may come to demonstrating how much of our Government is wasteful, unnecessary, duplicative, and pointless.  As but one example — only from the 25% now shut down — we simply do not need a federal Department of Education.  States and municipalities can and should run education at the local level.  Under conservatives, a federal Education Department — at best — does nothing that justifies its existence; under liberals, it works to destroy civil rights and the national culture.

Anti-Semitic doctor who threatened Jewish patients should lose medical license.  Anti-Semitism should not be tolerated in any setting — least of all in an environment where medical personnel take a pledge to provide care and comfort to patients.  But that's exactly what's at the center of a controversial case unfolding in Ohio.  Physician Lara Kollab, a first-year resident at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, took part in social media rants that included anti-Semitic hate speech and dangerous threats.  In her tweets, Kollab referred to Jewish people as dogs, downplayed the Holocaust, and said she was brutally unsympathetic about it.  She said Allah will kill the Jews and threatened to purposely give all the (derogatory term for Jews) the wrong meds.  This behavior is abhorrent and dangerous.

Stereotypes are often accurate.  Almost any belief about almost any group has been considered a "stereotype" in empirical studies.  It is, however, logically impossible for all group beliefs to be inaccurate.  This would make it "inaccurate" to believe that two groups differ or that they do not differ.  Alternatively, perhaps stereotypes are only inaccurate group beliefs, and so therefore accurate beliefs are not stereotypes.  If this were true, one would first have to empirically establish that the belief is inaccurate — otherwise, it would not be a stereotype.  The rarity of such demonstrations would mean that there are few known stereotypes.  Increasing recognition of these logical problems has led many modern reviews to abandon "inaccuracy" as a core definitional component of stereotypes (see Jussim et al, 2016 for a review).  Nonetheless, an emphasis on inaccuracy remains, which is broadly inconsistent with empirical research.

Dems unprepared for a partial government shutdown that lasts for months and months.  Conventional wisdom among the media and politician branches of the Democratic Party holds that President Trump and the Republicans will pay a serious price for the very partial (25%) "government shutdown" as it drags on.  The passage of a House budget bill with not even one dollar, as Speaker Pelosi averred, is supposed to increase pressure on President Trump in their view.  They seem to believe that the public so loves visiting national parks in the middle of the winter — one of the few aspects of the 25% of the federal government that affects ordinary voters — that Republicans will crack under public pressure.

The Editor says...
There is no point in having national parks, national monuments and national museums if we don't have international borders.

Why Trump Shouldn't Cave On Border Wall, By The Numbers.  Despite all the hand-wringing about a government shutdown, President Donald Trump still has a strong hand.  The amount he's asking for is a relative pittance.  And the shutdown is exposing how useless much of the federal government is. [...] According to various news accounts, federal agencies sent about 400,000 "nonessential" workers home during the shutdown.  (Another 400,000 "essential" workers are putting in hours without pay.)  Not counting the Postal Service (which is self-funded) and the military, there are about 1.7 million federal workers.  That means that at least one quarter of the entire federal workforce is "nonessential."

False Flag Destroys Roy Moore — Why No Apology?  Reid Hoffman is not yet a household name, but as co-founder of the business platform LinkedIn, he is in the crosshairs of conservatives as an enemy of the people.  Hoffman's sin is funding the organization that faked a "Russian bot" infiltration that piled on the misery of Judge Roy Moore's ill-fated campaign in Alabama for the U.S. Senate.  Alt-left billionaire Hoffman gave American Engagement Technologies (AET) $750,000, with $100,000 earmarked for offshoot cybersecurity firm New Knowledge.  It, in turn, fabricated 1,000 Russian-sounding Twitter accounts to follow Moore and discredit his campaign.  Oh, but not satisfied with the Twitter disinformation campaign, the company went further, creating fake Facebook pages urging Alabama conservatives to support a "write-in" candidate instead of Moore.

Shut the doors of Government.  And leave them closed.  The continued shutdown of the government is good to the extent the government is shut down.  Most estimates are that about 25 percent of the U.S. Government shut down.  The good ends there.  A better shutdown would be, perhaps all of it.  Then a return to some kind of federal system.  No.  There is no federals system now.  There is a corrupt national system.

The Real Reason Why Fewer Americans Think Religion Matters.  Religions make moral proclamations that transcend individual belief and cultural consensus.  They also make moral claims that require our submission.  Unsurprisingly, as America shifts toward moral autonomy, fewer Americans rely on religious systems that make transcendent, unchanging, ethical claims and demands.

The Fed Must Repeal Its Disastrous Rate Increases.  With the stock market falling another 8 percent in the wake of the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates earlier this month, it's now clear that the biggest threat to the Trump economic boom is the Fed itself.  At a time of strong growth, wage gains, and record low unemployment, Fed policies have created one of the most dangerous deflation cycles in decades.  Falling prices — which we are seeing now in farm products, oil, silver, copper, iron, and so on — can be as destructive to growth as inflation was in the 1970s.  The job of the Fed is to keep prices stable, yet this year prices of all commodities are down 12 percent — with most of that decline following the two disastrous rate increases, first in September and then another one a week before Christmas.

7 Presidents Who Were Tougher Than Trump on the Media.  [President] Trump regularly tweets about "fake news."  He has doubled down on the view that overly critical news outlets are the "enemy of the American people."  He talked about more stringent libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, threatened the broadcast license of certain networks, and the Trump White House pulled the press pass for CNN personality Jim Acosta after a confrontation at a press conference.  But so far he hasn't taken government action, as Roosevelt and other past presidents have.

In DC a single day is a "prolonged shutdown".  Today is the sixth day of the government shutdown.  The first four days were scheduled days off.  The first two were Saturday and Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, which President Trump decreed as a day off for federal workers, and Christmas.  On Wednesday morning [12/26/2018] — barely three hours into the first actual workday in the shutdown by Congress — Politico reported, "Federal workforce starts to feel pinch of prolonged shutdown."  If federal workers cannot last a single day under these circumstances, maybe we should replace them with adults.

The Editor says...
If federal workers are "non-essential personnel" whose services we can do without for a few weeks, their jobs should be eliminated.

Brandon Smith:  The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda.  I believe according to the evidence that the central banks are motivated by ideological zealotry with the core purpose of total global centralization of economic and political power into the hands of a select group of elitists.  This agenda is really just a modern "reboot" of feudalism or totalitarianism.  They sometimes refer to the plan in public as the "new world order," or the "global economic reset." I often refer to the encompassing ideology as "globalism" for the sake of expediency.  To attain this goal, central bankers must influence mass psychology using traumatic events.  Fear opens doors to centralization of power.  This is simply a fact of social behavior and history.  The more afraid a population is, the more willing they will be to give up freedoms in exchange for safety and security.  Therefore, the most effective weapon at the disposal of the globalists and their central banking counterparts is engineered economic crisis — a weapon that can, if allowed, destroy entire civilizations almost as fast as a nuclear war, while still keeping most of the expensive infrastructure intact.  Beyond that, economic crisis is also a weapon that can influence a population to embrace even greater enslavement while viewing their slave masters as saviors rather than villains.

Americans' faith in faith is failing.  Although Americans' church attendance is declining and they believe its importance in national life is dwindling, nearly three-quarters of them maintain that faith is important to them.  After one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, Gallup is reporting that a large majority of Americans (72 percent) say religion is important and 51 percent say it's very important.

The Editor says...
God does not expect you to have faith in faith.  He expects you to have faith in Him, because He has paid for your sin through the sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ.  Faith in candles and statues and beads and incense and stained glass and organ music and regular church attendance is of no value.

I did not vote for Jim Mattis.  General Jim Mattis decided to quit as secretary of defense in protest to the president's decision to withdraw our 2,000 troops from Syria has flipped the switch in Washington back to hawk.  After warning us for three years that President Donald John Trump would lead us to three or four wars, the Washington Establishment is angry that we are not going to war with Russia and Iran in Syria.

If a Green Beret Is a War Criminal, then So Is Obama.  One would think that in war the duty of a soldier is to kill the enemy before he kills you or your fellow soldiers.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different in that the enemy doesn't usually obey the rules of war, like wearing uniforms and rank insignia, and there are no "front lines" per se, only improvised explosive devices and sniper fire from second-floor windows or civilians used as human shields.  That is where Mathew Golsteyn found himself in 2010 when the Green Beret killed a Taliban bomb-maker who had killed two Marines, Sgt. Jeremy R. McQueary and Lance Cpl.  Raymon A. Johnson, in a war where only one side obeys the rules and the other is trapped by rules of engagement that make no sense and an Obama administration treating the whole thing as a law enforcement matter.

Democracy, Deliberation, and the Internet.  For 2500 years a consistent criticism of giving political power to the masses has been the question of competence.  To critics like Socrates and Plato, the knowledge of history, philosophy, and facts necessary for governing are beyond the abilities of the average citizen.  Hoi polloi had to spend their time making a living rather than studying these disciplines, or they were by nature driven more by their self-interest, appetites, and passions than by the rational search for knowledge of the true and good.  Thus from Plato's Republic to today's progressive technocrats, some form of technocracy has been preferable to rule by the "low-information" voting masses.  In the last few decades, the explosion of information instantly available on the internet has made this fear of giving political power to the uninformed more urgent in an age of "fake news."  Has the availability of an astonishing volume of information worsened the dangers of ignorance to governing, or has it provided a means of correcting it?

It Didn't Start With Hillary.  I'm always amazed at the number of people who have no knowledge of The Venona Papers.  Now, I grant you that reading some of the books and articles put out about them can be an eye-rubbing, mind-stultifying experience.  The mental effort to focus on the analysis, and to follow the logical reasoning of those who've spent years identifying those agents and their enablers can be hard.

Wanna Make Your Community Unaffordable?  Fill It with Government Workers.  There's no industry to speak of in the D.C. area; even more than Los Angeles, it's a one-industry town and in this case that industry is government, which (unlike Hollywood) creates not one cent of wealth but sure knows how to spend other people's money.  Accordingly, housing prices have soared, transforming places like Falls Church, Va., and Silver Spring, Md., into fancy bedroom communities.

When Does Trump Say, 'Enough Is Enough!'?  So what if Trump personally paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet?  Obama's campaign, not him personally, paid Reverend Wright hush money during the 2008 campaign and I don't recall any special counsel investigations or Congressional hearings into campaign finance violations.

Obama's Big Campaign Finance Violation That Everyone Wants to Forget Will Redeem Trump.  It appears all the pundits are out and claiming President Trump should be impeached because of his former attorney Michael Cohen's statements that allegedly implicate him in campaign finance violations. [...] It's strange that Barack Obama was hit by the SEC with one of the biggest campaign finance violation fees ever levied but no one called for his impeachment.

More about Obama's fundraising scandals.

Vandals, or Militants?  The origin of the present protest is not the price of bread but an increase in gasoline taxes.  Yet, with gasoline now occupying a central place in our way of life as bread once did, there is at least some link between the two eruptions.  And Louis XVI was guilty by inattention, just as Emmanuel Macron the First, France's president, seems strangely indifferent to public sentiment.  To enact policies that raise gasoline prices — already the highest in Europe — on the eve of the year-end holidays and without offering a justification, was a major political error.  Macron's mistake was made worse by the justification given after the uprising:  the government explained to skeptical citizens that the new tax was actually an ecological measure, and therefore justified, since the goal was not to add to the state's coffers but to help fight climate change.  Obviously no one believes this excuse, including the government that issued it, or so we must hope.

It's Time to Move Corruptible Bureaucrats Out of D.C. and into Flyover Country.  Today, D.C. is awash in expensive restaurants, some with Michelin stars even, and most of them have private dining rooms.  Dinner parties in those spaces abound, and if you're a foreign agent, or one of the FBI's gang of spooks, you want to get inside the "private" rooms, either physically (get one of your own invited to the table) or electronically.  The proliferation of expensive eateries requires money, as do private schools and costly colleges and universities, which are important to Washington parents.  A smart friend pointed out to me that you can't pay for all this with a government bureaucrat's salary.  Not even with two.  But they do pay for it, and the restaurants.  That means extra income from somewhere.  Writing books and blogs and op-eds doesn't come close to generating enough cash.

The Editor says...
If we move all the corruptible bureaucrats to Abilene or Salt Lake City, the lobbyists will move there, too, and then we'll have two centers of corruption.  Location isn't the problem.  The overgrown centralized government that prints and spends money is the problem.

Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.  Former CBS chief Les Moonves's career had already ended in disgrace for repeated instances of alleged sexual harassment and assault uncovered last summer by The New Yorker.  Yet until this week the board that fired him for preying on women was planning to beg His Majesty's forgiveness for decoupling him from his kingdom, pressing into his hands a $120 million payoff.  Maybe not anymore.  The New York Times, with the cooperation of a washed-up talent manager who, at 75, decided to open his mouth about Moonves, reported on how the triangular sex trade works in Hollywood.

What Is Saudi Arabia to Us?  [Scroll down]  In other words, what is going on, including murder, is a purely dynastic power play.  But that is Saudi Arabia's nice side.  The fundamental reality is that this is a slave society, (the Arabic word for black man is the word for slave) which considers work something that inferiors do for superiors, prizes idleness, and practices cruelty as a means of asserting superiority.  Everyone knows that women, treated as property, end up disproportionately in the harems of the wealthy.  But few stop to think that this custom dooms the majority of Saudi men to lives without legitimate sex, never mind families. [...] The ultra-puritanical Wahhabi sect, which authorized the House of Saud to take power by murdering non-Wahhabis, is inexorably interwoven with the Saudi power structure.  No doubt, many believe its teachings.  And yes, Wahhabis pay for radical mosques throughout the world, America very much included.  But hypocritical corruption is at its core.  Fly first class from Riyadh to Paris or London.  Watch the women with Burqas step onto the plane.  Off comes the headgear.  On take-off, they doff the Burqas, revealing Dior fashions with plunging necklines.  And the booze flows.

Give Thanks for What Remains of Free Speech.  Free speech is increasingly imperiled as nations around the world turn to authoritarianism, which comes packaged as everything from iron-fisted dictatorial rule to coercive "progressivism."  One thing every brand of authoritarianism has in common is speech codes.  Dissenting ideas dilute authority, so they must be suppressed.  We should be thankful for the free speech that remains, and rise from our Thanksgiving tables prepared to fight for it.  Our political speech is soggy with endless calls to "fight" for various "rights," few of which bear any resemblance to what America's founders considered to be inalienable rights.  One important clue to their thinking is that rights were seen as something an unjust government could take away from citizens by force, not something benevolent governments present to citizens as a gift.

Media Hysteria Over Nationalism is Democrat Revisionist History.  No, President Macron:  nationalism isn't treason — it's necessary to a free and thriving nation.  Americans who are serious about their freedom should be ecstatic that the question of the importance of nationalism is enjoying a renaissance, after laying dormant under the four U.S. presidents before President Trump.  In the wake of Trump's declaration last month that he's a nationalist, it's been astounding to observe the revisionist history, historical ignorance, and flat-out lies Democrats, the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex), and members of the NeverTrump CMIC (Conservative Media Industrial Complex) have been willing to propagate.

The Medical Industrial Complex.  Our dysfunctional system combines the greed of capitalism with the corruption of socialism — the worst of both worlds.  Companies raise prices to what the market will bear.  But since third-party payers — both public money and private insurance — grotesquely distort the market, companies charge exorbitant prices that a natural, normal market would never abide.  In a natural market, where individuals chose, nobody ever opts to pay $4,000 for a drug when a competitor charges $125 for the same drug.  But in this distorted market, where groups — insurance and government bureaucracies — make the choices, such waste happens regularly.  In our The Twilight Zone, the company does not go out of business but the country, slowly, does.

It's Not What Happens Next.  It's What Won't Happen.  [Scroll down]  First, there will be no big ticket legislative packages going through.  No major immigration reform supporting the highest priorities of either party.  No new tax cuts, but also no tax increases.  No new gun control legislation.  The fact is, these folks will be lucky if they can name a new Post Office.  The President isn't going to be impeached.  The Democrats would need to round up every one of their members in the House to get the ball rolling and too many of them are on record saying that would be too extreme.  And even if they managed it in the House there is zero chance of a conviction in the Senate.  Donald Trump will finish his first term at a minimum.  The wall isn't going to be finished.  That's somehow become a badge of honor among Democrats, despite being one of the most doable solutions to immigration problems imaginable.

Birthright and the Angry Election.  President Trump wants tomorrow's [11/6/2018] election to be about the "caravan" of asylum seekers coming to the U.S. through Mexico and the false accusations made against Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation proceedings.  A lot of people are angry about those things.  For the Democrats, this election is all about anger:  anger at Trump for beating Clinton two years ago, anger at his attempts to control immigration, and anger at his success in making the economy robust at the expense of some of their pet programs.  Inevitably the election is a referendum on Trump.

Are You Better Off Than You Were Two Years Ago?  President Reagan won a landslide election in 1980 when he asked voters a simple question:  "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"  Voters knew they weren't.  Midterm voters should be asking themselves that same question now, before casting their ballots next Tuesday.  Only this time, the answer is yes.

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety.  Megyn Kelly will probably go into opulent seclusion and find herself disinvited from ceremonial appearances and speaking events, guillotined as a racist, with no more sympathy than a once privileged, beheaded Bourbon.

Annoy Liberals By Refusing To Care About Their Stupid Fake Outrages.  In the current convulsion, our moral and intellectual betters who make up our glorious elite are in a fake frenzy because Third World thugs are acting like Third World thugs. [...] Chopping up political opponents is generally a bad thing, though I will not hold my breath waiting for the libs to, for example, cancel their holidays in Havana because the Castro clan has butchered tens of thousands of people for preferring freedom to tyranny.

The Kingdom and the Power.  [Jamal] Khashoggi was a legal permanent resident of the United States, a Washington figure with a huge network of contacts, and a Washington Post columnist.  Any harm to him — including "merely" his kidnapping and disappearance into prison or the holding of a show trial — would inevitably become a cause célèbre and damage relations with the United States.  It would also inevitably damage Mohammed bin Salman's own reputation.  So the decision to act against Khashoggi was a revelation of ignorance about the United States, impulsiveness, brutality, or all three.  In the shadow of the Khashoggi killing we can now see the forcible detention of Lebanon's prime minister, Sa'ad Hariri, last year as a prelude.  It too revealed a thuggish approach and a remarkable lack of understanding of how such events would be viewed in the outside world.  It is perhaps not coincidental that MbS, rare among Saudi princes, has spent his entire life in the kingdom and never lived or attended school in the West.

Just in time for Halloween:  Democrat-led voter intimidation!  If we have learned anything about liberals, it is that they will do nearly anything to gain power.  This election season their strategy is all about enhancing turnout by ginning up their base with hateful negative messaging, divisive identity politics, demonization of president Trump, and threats of violence.  Witness the perfectly timed hit job on Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, designed to scuttle his confirmation or at least whip up an anti-Trump frenzy and perhaps separate the supposedly fragile "suburban white female voter bloc" from the Republican Party.  In recent days, another exquisitely orchestrated assault on the president's border policies, a "caravan" of "migrants," is headed toward our southern border from Honduras, gathering human and political momentum with each mile.  Is the media hysteria over the death of an obscure Saudi journalist meant to embarrass Donald Trump, who has been cozying up to the Saudis lately as a regional counterbalance to Iran?  Even the curiously scheduled Sixty Minutes interview of the president last weekend appeared to be designed by the left as a game-changing hatchet job, although, fortunately, it did not turn out quite as they had planned.

It's Past Time For Pope Francis To Come Clean, But Instead He's Burying Himself.  As news about the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal spreads, public confidence in Pope Francis' handling of the matter has plummeted.  A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that six in ten American Catholics say the pope is doing an "only fair" or "poor" job of managing the scandal.  That is almost double the share who said he was doing a poor job earlier this year, and triple the share who said this in 2015.  The lack of confidence is also broadly based — both Catholic women and men, young and old, and church-attending or not, have grown increasingly critical of this pontiff.

Bring on More Kavanaughs!  No man or woman — let alone their children — should be forced to endure the slanders that Brett Kavanaugh and his family experienced in the past three weeks.  If good and decent people of talent and brains now decide to run and hide in fear of a similar onslaught, it would be disastrous for the United States and for our future.  Surrender to that onslaught, giving a victory to the bullies and McCarthyites of the Left who want to end all opposition and dissent, and have been working most intensely for the past decade to undo the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is unthinkable.  They cannot be allowed to cement their hold on power.  No, now is not the time to hide.  Now is not the time for Americans who believe in the Constitution, in freedom, in the rule of law, in the presumption of innocence, of freedom of speech, of limited government, of due process, of the right to bear arms (rights all delineated clearly in the Bill of Rights) to shirk their responsibilities and hide from the assault of the smear machine of the Left.

Liberalism:  An Intrinsically Uncivil Ideology.  When Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder occupied positions of power in the federal government, they would often lecture conservatives on the virtues of civility and dialogue.  To counter Rush Limbaugh and the power of talk radio in the 1990s, rattled liberals once proposed "civility" boards, recruiting such models of civility as Paul Begala to serve on the "Penn Commission," an undertaking so stupid it didn't even last Bill Clinton's presidency.  In power, liberals peddle self-serving babble about "civility"; out of power — witness Hillary's recent pitiful interview and Eric Holder's endorsement of kicking conservatives — they peddle self-serving babble about the need to suspend civility.

Kavanaugh May Change Election Map.  This is impetuous, but I think the electoral map has changed with the Kavanaugh decision.  The Democrats avoided direct confrontation and tried to sandbag the nominee by a late allegation of sexual assault from 30 years before.  They gambled that whipping up post-Weinstein militant-feminist support would induce the president to say something outrageous that would split his party and drench him in another momentary shower of confected outrage, such as during the partial migration ban, the Charlottesville imputations of softness toward Nazis and the Klan, the Helsinki comments, and the detention of abandoned minors of illegal immigrants at the southern borders.  This would be the biggest such explosion yet and would leave the Supreme Court vacancy unfilled, assure control of the House for the Democrats, and possibly the Senate, and facilitate grid-lock and continued distractions about impeachment for another two years.

Vatican Cardinal:  Pope Francis Is 'Ice-Cold, Cunning Machiavellian'.  The German progressive weekly Der Spiegel has ended its love affair with the pope, declaring that the Church's sex abuse crisis is "increasingly about Pope Francis."  In a stunning cover article titled "The Silence of the Shepherds," the magazine blasts the pope for his unwillingness to answer direct questions regarding what he knew about the serial homosexual abuse by U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and when he knew it.

Hillary Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh and the Art of Trolling.  One of the dominant features of our time is that more and more people define themselves by what they hate.  For many partisans, what motivates them the most isn't support for their side's policies but their hatred of the other party.  Most Republicans didn't vote for Donald Trump; they voted against Hillary Clinton.  Most Democrats didn't vote for Clinton; they voted against Trump.  This dynamic doesn't just apply to presidential candidates.  It saturates both parties and both sides of the culture war, and it even distorts how we process basic facts.  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just came out with a report on how people will misinterpret objective data — in this case on climate change — if there's any hint that the data came from a Republican or Democratic source.  The moment Democrats saw a Republican logo, the ability to interpret a chart went out the window for many of them, and vice versa.

Video of Americans yutes talking about their problems should kill off any hope you have left.  Here's the background — President Trump said during a speech that now is the best time to be a young person in America, because of his presidency.  OK, kind of a spurious claim, but let's run with it.  So, the BBC goes out and talks to American yutes and asks them if they feel fortunate.  [Video clip]  It's unbelievable the level of ignorance you have to operate under to believe that the problems of young people are worse than ever before.

I Really Don't Feel Like Submitting To Socialist Tyranny.  Do You?  Allow me to unleash that which leftist nincompoops fear the most, besides gainful employment and their mom walking into their room at night unannounced while they are interacting with their computer/girlfriend.  Math.  Let's take the richest man ever was, Jeff Bezos.  He's got a net worth of at least $150 billion.  It not in actual dollars, though, unless he has the world's biggest mattress.  It's mostly in Amazon stock.  We'll just leave aside the inconvenient issue of what would happen to Amazon's stock value if it were "seized" and nationalized and just assume he's got a big pit full of dollar bills.  We take all that and split it among the 330 million Americans and everyone gets... $454.55.  Congrats.  Everyone gets one payment on their 2015 Toyota Camry.

When funerals become politics.  Sixteen years ago, on the eve of the 2002 midterm elections, and at a time when the United States was beginning to divide over the Afghanistan intervention and a looming Iraq war, Sen. Paul Wellstone, Minnesota Democrat, tragically died in a plane accident.  Mr. Wellstone's Minnesota funeral was meant to be a commemoration of a life of public servant well lived.  But the funeral service was soon hijacked by partisan speakers and ended up a loud and often grating political pep rally.  The message to mourners of all beliefs and persuasions was to translate their grief into votes for progressive candidates like Mr. Wellstone.  Popular discontent over news of the politicalized funeral may well have explained why, two weeks later, the in-power Republicans actually picked up seats in George W. Bush's first midterm election.

Trump and His Enemies.  The United States is now like Egypt, in that the armed forces are the only respected institution left standing.  A narrow majority disapprove of the president, and steadily larger majorities are doubtful of the judiciary, despise the Congress, loathe the academy, and detest the national media.  In a democracy, somebody will pay for this, and it is unlikely to be Donald John Trump, the principal accuser of the others.

Kavanaugh confirmation chaos offers a preview of what life would be like if Dems ran the government.  Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to the Supreme Court was set for its second day Wednesday [9/5/2018], after the unhinged left was on full display on the opening day Tuesday.  Partisan rancor reigned as outbursts, interruptions, protests, and juvenile political stunts broke out when opponents of the nomination attempted to highjack the day's proceedings.  Each Trump-hating Democrat on the committee took his or her turn flaunting the left's radical anti-freedom agenda, as the American people got a glimpse of what life would look like if Democrats were entrusted with control of government.

Leading U.S. Exorcist:  Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is Demonic, Likely to Get Worse.  In a recent interview, a world-renowned exorcist said the sex abuse scandal currently rocking the Catholic Church is demonic in nature and likely to get worse before it gets better.  "We are in for a long storm," said Father Gary Thomas, the exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, California.  Fr. Thomas' training in Rome was the subject of the 2010 book The Rite:  The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio.  The book was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins in 2011.  "It's only going to get worse," Father Gary Thomas told the National Catholic Register's Patti Armstrong.  "But as bad as it is, it has to come out.  It is unacceptable."

The Audacity of Obama.  Few things could be more embarrassing than giving Barack Obama a prize for "ethics in government," as the University of Illinois did on Friday [9/7/2018]. [...] The media has made a great deal of Donald Trump's personal moral failings and fabrications.  The funny thing is, his exaggerations and braggadocio don't affect our lives.  But when Barack Obama told us that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it," knowing full well that this was untrue, he defrauded every American.  And when he and his staff knowingly misinformed the media about the nature of the Iran Deal, he made every American (and every Middle Easterner) less safe. [...] And now that Donald Trump has waved that wand, sparking the economy, renegotiating trade deals, bring America to the point that — for the first time in history — the Department of Labor reported more jobs available than people looking for work.  Obama wants you to believe it was all his doing.

Journalists Celebrate Bob Woodward's Trump-Bashing Book After Trashing His Reputation For Years.  The mainstream press is rushing to defend Bob Woodward after President Trump attacked him over his new book.  That's funny, because journalists themselves had been saying far worse things about Woodward for more than a decade.

Catholic clergy in the news:
The Catholic Scandal Is More About Power Than About Sex.  A sociopathic cardinal and kingmaker caught retrospectively with his pants down is big news.  That the pope knew and covered for him is even bigger.  So the torrent of coverage is inescapable.  You have already read the sorry details about "Uncle Ted," his beach house sleepovers with seminarians, the cuddling and groping, all while Theodore McCarrick moved up the clerical ladder, reaping power and influence.  Then appeared Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò of Kosovo, former apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C., to finger a bevy of hierarchs in color-coded zucchettos who protected and advanced him.  Worse, he stated that Pope Francis had been aware of McCarrick's sexual history.  The pope who should have cashiered a serial predator made him a trusted advisor instead.  It is a blockbuster story.  But where does it lead?

The Scandal of Left-Wing Journalists Covering a Left-Wing Pope.  Last year, my wife and I visited Italy for the first time.  In Rome, we arranged for a guide to take us through the Vatican.  I envisioned an elderly gentleman, but our guide turned out to be an attractive young woman who, I soon decided, was a practicing Catholic.  At one point, she asked me guardedly what I thought of Pope Francis.  I'm not a Catholic, I said, so it's probably none of my business.  But I don't like him.  He seems to care more about left-wing politics than about Christianity.  When it comes to politics and economics, he is ignorant; he should stick to theology.  She discreetly kept silent, but I was pretty sure she agreed.

The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.  It is not the first time such allegations have been made, but it may be the first time the allegations have been so exhaustively detailed, including the naming of priests and their alleged victims.  In Ireland, where Pope Francis visited last week and issued another apology (but took no responsibility) for un-priestly behavior, more stories surfaced detailing what happened to unwed mothers and their babies seven decades ago in a home created for girls and women who became pregnant out of wedlock.  The girls and women were abused, their babies either buried in the home's yard, or forcibly taken from them to be adopted, all this from a church that claims to be "pro-life."

Two Funerals and a Missing Cardinal.  Pope Francis was under attack for failing to act on countless documented cases of sex abuse within the Catholic Church.  The Vatican's ex-ambassador to Washington, Archbishop Carlo Viganò, fired the first salvo, detailing the misconduct of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick and Cardinal Donald Wuerl and calling on the pope to resign.  Ricochet had the best wrap-up of the crisis in the church and the Lavender Mafia flourishing under Pope Francis. [...] There are calls for Cardinal Wuerl to resign and he appears to have gone missing, with rumors that he was spirited out of the country to avoid prosecution.  Certainly all this turmoil in our justice system and the Church is unsettling.  But it's a useful reminder that in all hierarchies, sooner or later, the mission of the organization becomes the protection of the hierarchy, not the stated mission, and every now and then, a thorough housecleaning is in order.

They Destroy Everything They Touch.  The Pope has a bigger agenda," said Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, in an interview about bombshell allegations about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  "He's got to get on with other things of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church.  We're not going to go down a rabbit hole on this."  And in that quote, which Cupich has protested was taken out of context (it wasn't), Cupich showed a sad reality, which is that the Catholic Church is the latest in a long line of exceptional institutions of Western civilization brought into deep decline by the infiltration of the cultural Marxist/postmodern Left.  The "rabbit hole" Cupich refers to is a testimony released Saturday by Archbishop Carlo Viganò, a distinguished Vatican veteran who had served as the papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, which included a scathing critique of Pope Francis.

The Coming Global Middle-Class Majority:  Thank Capitalism, Not Socialism, For The Boom.  Capitalism has failed.  Socialism is ascendant.  That's a common message we get from the media these days.  Which is funny, because capitalism in the last few decades has had the most revolutionary impact on improving human lives in history.

Is the Pope a Catholic?  No one can have much to add to NRO's coverage of the crisis in the Catholic Church.  Michael Brendan Dougherty, Kathryn Lopez, and other colleagues have covered all the shocking events fully and with a kind of angry or hurt conscientiousness: the nature and extent of the sexual abuse; the quiet shuttling of pedophile priests from one parish to another; the legalistic bullying and manipulation of victims and their families; the placing of the Church's political and financial interests above justice and charity; the fact that bishops showed greater concern, even tenderness, towards clerical abusers than towards those they abused; and the repeated assurances that these abuses were being corrected when in fact they were being concealed and smoothed over.  These revelations have been deeply disturbing, and anyone predicting them a few years ago would have been dismissed — as indeed some critics of the bishops were dismissed — as dealing in fantasies of sexual perversion and blasphemy.  Despite the sensational nature of the revelations, however, we all had the eerie sense that there might be worse to come.

How The Pederasty Cover-Up Will Make Civil War Within The Catholic Church.  Sixteen years ago, reporters at The Boston Globe conducted an extensive investigation of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.  Not long thereafter, reporters elsewhere detailed similar abuse in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the like.  The word used in the press to describe what had been going on was pedophilia, which is a misnomer deliberately employed to cover up what journalists then considered and still consider now an inconvenient aspect of the truth.

The sneering contempt of Pope Francis.  On Saturday night [8/25/2018] a document with the stark heading "Testimony" appeared online.  In this dossier Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, accused the pope of reversing sanctions imposed upon the disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI.  He also alleged, among other things, that various curial insiders attempted to hamper Benedict's own internal investigation of McCarrick, that under Francis the cardinal served as a kingmaker who was responsible for the appointments of various eminent bishops who are close allies of the pope, and that all of this was quid pro quo for McCarrick's quiet masterminding of Francis' own election.  Viganò ended by calling upon the pope to resign.  It is almost impossible to the overstate the significance of this letter.  If Viganò is lying, he is guilty of one of the greatest slanders in the history of the Church.  If he is telling the truth, the Eternal City is mired in filth unseen since the days of the Borgias, and Francis is among the worst wretches who has ever besmirched the Chair of Peter.

Should the Pope Resign?  Many years ago in the early 1980s I was drawn ever so transiently into the bureaucratic intricacies of the Roman Catholic Church in America.  There was a saintly priest at Indiana University, Fr. James Higgins, who was driven from the university's Newman Center to a parish some 20 miles away from campus.  The archbishop of Indianapolis replaced him by two utter lightweights.  Their homilies had nothing to do with Catholic doctrine and much to do with their Yoga classes, interpersonal relationships of an odd sort, and, in one instance, the thrill of approaching a cliff and questioning whether to jump or not.  I looked over at my young children and decided I would drive 40 miles every Sunday rather than wait for the idiot to jump.  The more I looked into the plight of Fr. Higgins the more I discovered the early glimmerings of the full-blown crisis that confronts the Church today.  The sex scandal and its decades-long cover-up now confronting the Church is the most serious crisis that the Church has faced since the Protestant eruption of centuries ago.  The boys who took over from Fr. Higgins were planted on campus by a corpulent, luxury-loving archbishop, whose interests were worldly rather than spiritual and, incidentally, not very sophisticated.

Why Are We in Media Hell?  [Scroll down]  So, for instance, Senator John McCain dies.  For the record, the man was a heroic patriot with whom I often disagreed. [...] Either pay tribute, say Rest in Peace, or keep your mouth shut.  Nothing else is required.  And this is how we all behave — for about five minutes.  By the sixth minute, however, the reactions on the news channels and social networks have turned predictably vicious.  Some can't get out of their own heads long enough to silence their political snarling.  Others use their tributes to McCain to make nasty comparisons to the living.  Still others start attacking the way some paid their respects.

Prayers for the souls of hundreds of thousands of children that died because of McCain.  The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the world's biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years older than the next one, Holland's VOC which existed maybe 100 years.  It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the world.  Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a country.  For that matter, it effectively owns many a country.  There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before there could ever be an investigation.  Multiple popes have promised exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened.  It would upset the business model too much.  And most faithful still believe their priests are decent men, anyway.  Yes, there's that word again, 'decent'.  If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because he's been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets transferred to another parish.  They've been doing this for 1,500 years, they got it down.  And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness.  While the Church gets ever richer.

The Catholic Church is beyond redemption.  The new round of revelations involves pornographic episodes of sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses.  (The situation in Philadelphia, the state's largest diocese, was separately documented in a 2005 grand-jury report.)  On top of that, the leading figure from that 2002 convention in Dallas, the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, is accused of sexually assaulting two children in addition to carrying on a series of exploitative sexual relationships with adult seminarians — relationships that had been an open secret among his colleagues.  And just last week The [New York] Post revealed that the Archdiocese of New York has paid out close to $60 million to sex-abuse victims in the last two years.  The rot is not exclusive to the United States.

The Unmasking of The Weekly Standard.  Barack Obama really owes Bill Kristol — big time.  First, had Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives not pushed for a deadly, prolonged war in Iraq after September 11, there would be no President Obama. [...] Second, Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard, just gave political cover to Obama's most unforgivable scandal:  The weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to target Donald Trump's presidential campaign and violate the constitutional rights of private U.S. citizens.

It's Not Just CIA's Brennan:  No Former Spy Should Have Access To Nation's Secrets.  Maybe former CIA Director John Brennan's loss of his security clearance and subsequent public meltdown is doing us all a favor.  Increasingly, many wonder:  Why should anyone have access to U.S. state secrets when they leave government?

Incrementalism:
List of Qualified Conditions for Medical Marijuana Use in Minnesota Grows.  Minnesota residents with autism or obstructive sleep apnea can now qualify for the state's medical marijuana program.  Those additions are effective Wednesday [8/1/2018], marking the latest expansion of the program that launched in 2015.  Minnesota lawmakers passed one of the nation's most restrictive medical marijuana laws in 2014, banning the plant form and restricting its use to patients with just a handful of serious conditions.  Patients with intractable pain were added to the fold in 2016.  The state allowed residents suffering post-traumatic stress disorder to buy the medication starting last summer.

The Editor says...
Next, they'l be adding those who have been triggered and victimized by microaggressions, the poor folks who have been addressed by the wrong pronoun, and the unfortunate fellow with no sound from his left stereo speaker.  They all need the healing power of medical marijuana!  What a sad generation of helpless, spineless, godless, lost people.

How Support For Socialism Arises From Ingratitude.  The free market took off at about the time the American experiment in liberty got going.  Before that time, life for virtually everyone was like a bad dream they could not wake up from.  People lived tired, dirty, hungry, downtrodden, and at the mercy of their circumstances.  You don't have to trace very far back in your family line to reach a time when your own people would have found the ease, affluence, and expansiveness of the life you lead totally astonishing.  Would they also be astonished by your lack of gratitude for what the free market has given you?  Or would they find you celebrating the free market and the gifts it provides?

And They Wonder Why We're Angry.  When the interpreters regained control of the House in 2006 — much as they seek it now — they immediately deregulated the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the guidance of House leader Barney Frank.  The lack of oversight over these massive federal government loan operators caused the massive economic collapse robbing the people of more than six trillion dollars in home values.  Home values in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas did not drop.  To this day, the suburbs of D.C. remain among the ten wealthiest counties in America.  There was no great recession in Washington, D.C.  The housing crisis and recession were strapped by the interpreters to the political corpse of President Bush, and the super-populist interpreter President Barack Obama was ushered into power.  Attempts to criticize or limit his political actions were regularly interpreted as racist.

Pope Francis collectivizes the guilt.  I am sure the holy father means well, and I am sure he is doing the best he can with his limited socialist background.  But his letter to the faithful on the massive Church scandal out of Pennsylvania alone leaves a lot to be desired.  The pope rightly condemned the abuses by priests of minors and seminarians, criticized the bishops who covered it up, and condemned the culture of "clericalism" — that weird belief among some clerics that they can do anything they like and get away with it, simply because they are clerics entrusted with powers from God. [...] But then his socialist orientation got the better of him.  He made it a matter not of individual guilt, but of collective guilt, societal guilt, something we all are part of and must atone for.  This is a big tenet of liberation theology and similar lines of lefty thought.  Society is guilty.

The Catholic Church's Homosexual Problem.  According to Cardinal Raymond Burke, "It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.  There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this.  Now it seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root.  It is of course a tendency that is disordered."  If you're surprised to hear this candid admission, you're not alone.  As Cardinal Burke observed, "There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this."  Yes, it was fine to talk about Catholicism's problem with pedophilia.  It was fine to discuss sexual scandals in broad terms.  But it was basically forbidden to connect them directly to homosexuality.

An Open Letter to the Catholic Bishops.  Last week, a Pennsylvania grand jury reported that several hundred Catholics priests might be predators.  The Catholic Church is losing the moral high ground by failing to recognize and report on these offenders.  Individuals who commit crimes are not real priests; they are criminals who have no place in the Catholic Church.  If proven guilty, they must face criminal justice.  These issues could have been resolved in 2002, when the church appointed a lay-independent commission.  The commission's chairman was Governor Frank Keating (former Oklahoma governor), a highly competent executive and former FBI agent.  He was the right man at the right time to expose wrongdoers and refer them to the prosecutors.  Keating began with an open mind, but quickly realized that some of the accusations were true and that the bishops covered them up.  It also became evident that the bishops did not have the moral courage to permanently resolve the crisis and expose the predators.

Why Hasn't Pope Francis Removed Cardinal Donald Wuerl?  On Tuesday afternoon [8/14/2018], the Pennsylvania attorney general released a shocking and sickening grand jury report documenting hundreds of cases of sexual crimes against minors committed by Catholic clergy in six Catholic dioceses over the course of 70 years, mostly before the sex-abuse crisis rocked the Boston archdiocese in 2002.  We've read enough of the report that we cannot fathom why Cardinal Wuerl, who served as bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, has not resigned or been removed by Pope Francis yet.

The Devil Resides In The Vatican.  Before his death in 2016, the Vatican's chief exorcist for over a quarter century, Father Gabriele Amorth, observed, "The Devil resides in the Vatican, and you can see the consequences."  We are seeing the consequences now from Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. all the way up to the College of Cardinals.  Fr.  Amorth described "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon."  The Pennsylvania grand jury report relates one instance of ritualized, satanic abuse of a young boy by four priests.  There is some ambiguity regarding the precise nature of the incident owing to page-long redactions in the report. [...] Fortunately most of the 301 priests listed in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report are now dead, and many have been dead for decades.

Vatican Cardinal: 'Homosexual Culture' In The Church Part Of Abuse Crisis.  Cardinal Raymond Burke has called upon Pope Francis to clean up what he calls a "homosexual culture" in the Church that has contributed to the sex abuse crisis.  As noted by Matt Walsh and other Catholic commentators, roughly 80% of the sexual abuse victims in the Catholic Church were male, many of them being postpubescent.  Recently-ousted Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexual relations with both adult males and minors; far too often, he preyed on male seminarians entering the priesthood.

In the face of horror, the Catholic Church is worried about PR.  They read like scenes from a Marquis de Sade novel. [...] Yet the blockbuster grand-jury report on abuse in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania is credible, deeply researched and all too real.  The findings — that 300 predatory priests victimized 1,000 children over seven decades — mark a crisis of still-unfathomable scale in the American church.  It involves clerical fathers who gravely sinned against their children and against the Father in heaven, and others who averted their eyes or made excuses or covered up the sins.  The most painful aspect of all this is the blasé response of many American hierarchs and especially those, like Washington Archbishop Donald Cardinal Wuerl, who are implicated in the report.  Wuerl and his colleagues have treated the report as a PR headache rather than a moral and spiritual wake-up call.

The Shame of the Church.  The release yesterday [8/14/2018] of a state grand jury report on the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses only serves to confirm — as if further confirmation were necessary — that there is a deep moral rot in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, and one that will not be easily eradicated.

The Catholic Church's Rotherham.  'We are deeply saddened."  So begin the many perfunctory statements of many Catholic bishops today in response to the Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailing how priests in that state abused children and how bishops shuffled these priests around. [...] What exactly are they sorry about?  Soon the bishops are telling us about a chance for "renewal" after the promised implementation of new policies.  They tell us about "overcoming challenges" in the Church.  Or they use the phrase "a few bad apples."  I find it impossible not to notice that these expressions of sorrow never arrive before the courts, the state attorneys general, or the local press arrive on the scene.  That fact gives you another idea about what causes the bishops' sorrow.

Open Offices are the Communism Of Seating Arrangements.  It starts noble enough.  You're plugging along, working on a presentation or analyzing some numbers, then someone pops in with a question about a project that involves both of you.  Instantly, you're out of the zone and stuck trying to get back in it.  Or maybe your coworker is on a roll, performing a complicated task requiring a number of steps that must be performed in a specific order, and you pop over to his desk to discuss a project and pull him out of his work.  Either way, someone is getting hit, and not with the rhythm.  No one argues that the cube farm is the ideal working arrangement.  It does afford some privacy, with its small fences, but it also makes it easy for you to interrupt your coworkers and for them to do the same to you.

Conservative Confusion About Who and What We're Fighting.  [T]hink about who will take over the leadership of crucial committees if the Democrats flip enough seats to regain a majority in the House:  Adam Schiff will probably become the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — Adam Schiff!  Before we go any further, think about that.  This buffoon is still braying about Russian collusion even as he covers up the crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Schiff's first order of business as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be to halt any ongoing investigations into Obama administration abuses of power — particularly the illegal deployment of the FBI, CIA, and IRS against domestic political opponents of the Democratic Party, including the Trump presidential campaign.  Schiff will likewise close down all inquiries into Mrs. Clinton's copious catalogue of crimes.

Kremlin Eyes U.S. Power Grid as Pols Take a Powder.  In the last two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security held four briefings, including one in New York City on July 31, warning that Russian hackers are already practicing how to throw the switch and cause a blackout in the United States.  We'd have no lights, no gas at the pump, no life support in hospitals, no mass transit, no food supply.  Yet nearly all Washington pols are ignoring the danger.

The Profound Impact of the Superficial.  Stephen Josephson, a therapist who specializes in "First World problems," told me that when he asks kids what they want to be when they grow up, the most common response is "rich and famous."  He added that those kids are at risk of depression.  "Everyone wants to be rich," said the American billionaire David Siegel, who sells "luxury" timeshare units on credit to middle- and working-class customers.  "If they can't be rich, they want to feel rich — and, if they don't want to feel rich, then they're probably dead." [...] He followed it up with the surprising insight that "money doesn't make you happy.  It just makes you unhappy in a good section of town."  If everybody knows that money doesn't bring us happiness, why do we devote our lives to trying to get more of it?

A pernicious example of anti-American propaganda:
Time to retire the Blue Angels.  Seafair has always brought a festive mood to the Puget Sound region.  No one can deny the excitement of the Navy's Blue Angels roaring overhead.  Yet I find their annual visit in poor taste.  Given the many worthwhile activities taking place during Seafair, I wonder why it is necessary to use the Blue Angels as part of the celebration.  The Blue Angels certainly provide entertainment; but do we really need this type of diversion?

The Editor says...
The article above apparently appeared in the Seattle newspaper, since it was on their web site.  It is not surprising that someone in Seattle would be opposed to an exhibition of America's military strength, because Seattle, from what I hear, is full of America-hating hippies.  The Blue Angels air show is a recruiting tool for the Navy.  It inspires young men and women to consider military aviation as a goal — and it's not a career that just anyone can enter.  Moreover, there is no wasted talent:  everyone involved in the Blue Angels air show is combat ready, and combat-ready pilots have to practice sometime, so they might as well let everybody watch.  Let the Communist spies get a good look at them, too, and imagine what it would be like to be under attack by guys like the Blue Angels.  The whimpering Seattle hippies probably don't appreciate the noise generated by fighter jets, but I can assure you that's the sound of freedom.

Are we giving fighter jets to a friend or foe?  Is Turkey still a friend to keep close, or an enemy to keep closer?  On Wednesday [8/1/2018], the Treasury Department sanctioned Turkish officials over the country's detention of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, on flimsy charges.  It's the latest incident in deteriorating relations with the NATO ally, complicating matters far beyond the captive pastor.  When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was still considered a model ally, Turkey became a partner in a 2001 program launched by Lockheed Martin to manufacture the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jet, designed to consolidate the West's air superiority in battle.

Allen West: 'Pursuit of Happiness' Means Equal Opportunity, Not Equal Outcomes.  Retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West, a senior fellow with the Media Research Center and a former congressman, told the National Conservative Student Conference Tuesday [7/31/2018] that they will not be successful in life if they whine, insulate themselves from the reality of the world, and fear taking risks.  He also stressed that the "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution means equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes, the latter an ideology pushed by socialists, such as New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Either John Podesta was quite a Russian dupe, or ...  Was John Podesta a Russian dupe?  At a minimum, he was a Russian dupe, based on information from a long, interesting article today titled "How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies," from Politico magazine.  Politico points out that the very firm that Podesta was involved with, Rusnano USA (via its Joule subsidiary), is the likely new vehicle for Russian spying these days, effectively replacing the now shuttered Russian consulate in San Francisco. [...] Rusnano, eh?  That's the one former Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was involved with, though Politico doesn't mention it.

Milking the System.  Why should children under the age of 5 in a country like Britain be in receipt of free milk, mostly through the intermediary of their mothers?  Milk, after all, is one of the cheapest of commodities, so cheap that its producers are constantly complaining of its price, and the problem seems to be that of overproduction rather than of scarcity. [...] Do people who mostly possess televisions whose screens are the size of many found in art cinemas really need to be given free milk?  And if they do, because they have expended whatever money they have on subscriptions to cable television, what does this say about their sense of priorities, and the culture in which they developed their priorities?  Moreover, one might have hoped that women who really could not afford the cost of milk (than which practically nothing is cheaper) would hold off having babies until they could scrape together the price of a pint or two.

NATO's Challenge Is Germany, Not America.  Does NATO still protect the West?  Does it prevent destructive European feuding?  D