Liberalism, or progressivism, is a wide one-way road that leads to destruction.  Gas prices are high* because liberals are opposed to every practical source of energy,* including offshore oil drilling* and oil production in Alaska.*  Electricity is expensive because liberals are engaged in a war on coal.*  It's nearly impossible to run a business because of all the red tape generated by the EPA, IRS, ADA, EEOC, NLRB, and of course, Obamacare.  New York City has bedbugs because liberals got DDT banned in the 1970's.*  Unemployment is high because the minimum wage is too high,* and because it's easier just to live on food stamps and "disability" checks.*  Millions of children have never met their fathers, because the welfare state rewards illegitimacy.*  Many others have been abandoned* because of the belief that a baby is just a growth or piece of tissue that's part of a woman's body, which she can dispose of as she pleases.*  Over 54 million people have been killed (so far) because of that kind of thinking.*  That's why the Social Security ponzi scheme is falling apart — there are fewer young workers.*  Drunkenness and gluttony are now considered diseases instead of being evidence of bad decisions, because political correctness* has done away with stigma.*  The public schools are mass-producing dimwits who don't speak intelligible English*, can't write a coherent paragraph, don't know American history, don't know the difference between facts and opinions, can't make change without a cash register, and can't multiply or divide without a calculator.*  They are being taught that styrofoam, oil, guns and Christianity are bad,* but animal rights,* car pooling* and Islam* are good.  (Don't bother to bring your lunch to school.*  You can eat out of Big Brother's hand.*)  Billions of dollars are being wasted on solar panels* and windmills,* because of a baseless fear of "global warming"* — even though global warming stopped, all by itself, before the end of the 20th century.*.  The goal of progressivism is the abandonment and destruction of traditions, rules, standards, conventional wisdom, common sense and common knowledge.
This is a copyrighted original compilation, © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart

One glaring example of the Democrats' impact is the over-abundance of homeless bums in big cities, especially on the west coast.

And you would already know all this, except that the so-called news media are now just producing infomercials for big government.*  America is being destroyed from within (much like Detroit or California) by left-wing tax-and-spend socialist Democrats, and here are the results:

Overview articles:

(Scroll down for timely news, or click here.)

This Election is a Referendum on Us.  We have accepted steady erosion of our social compact because it is too arduous to reason with the unreasonable, too frustrating to speak calmly with those who shout, too uncomfortable to speak over the screams of the nihilist tribes.  We have stood by in silence as the fabric of our society unravels, tacitly engaged in a dangerous appeasement with the left. [...] Evidence of this threat abounds.  The public has not only lost trust in government but also in journalists, the judiciary, universities, and medical institutions.  We can't rely on legacy media to report the truth.  Religion is mocked.  Morality has been replaced by shallow, narcissistic virtue signaling and fake empathy.  Patriotism is too often seen as a partisan issue.  "I see you are flying a flag," quips a neighbor.  "I didn't know you were Republican."  Parents are blocked from knowing what transpires in their children's classrooms.  Many universities seem to offer only three majors:  grievance, arrogance, and ignorance.  Officials take our money and spend it to serve their personal ideology without asking our approval.  Words like truth and faith have been hollowed out.  Preferred pronouns become more important than national security.  Gratitude is replaced with resentment.  Good faith dissent is stomped into silence.  DEI has banished meritocracy in the military and many other organizations.  Skepticism against authority — vital to a healthy democracy — is rebuffed with cancellation.  Is this the country we want to live in?

America Has Its First Show Trial.  Everything the Left touches it destroys.  The Justice Department and the American legal system are only the most immediate examples.  Here are 25 other examples:
  [#1]   Universities.
  [#2]   High schools.
  [#3]   Elementary schools.
  [#4]   Children's innocence.
  [#5]   Marriage and family.
  [#6]   Children who say they are the other sex.
  [#7]   Journalism.
  [#8]   Women's psychological health.
  [#9]   Black life.
  [#10]   Black-white relations.
  [#11]   Art.
  [#12]   Music.
  [#13]   Architecture.
  [#14]   The military.
  [#15]   The FBI.
  [#16]   The CDC and NIH.
  [#17]   The American Medical Association and most other medical associations.
  [#18]   Medical schools.
  [#19]   Free speech.
  [#20]   Women's sports.
  [#21]   The border.
  [#22]   Religion.
  [#23]   The economy.
  [#24]   Fighting crime.
  [#25]   America's major cities.

The Editor says...
That looks like a long list, but #1, #2, and #3 are the same; #11, #12 and #13 are the same; and #24 and #25 are almost the same.

The Editor continues...
The list in the article above is informative, but over the last year or two, I have compiled my own list of things that have been ruined for everybody by socialist Democrat busybodies:
  •   Public schools
  •   Singing the national anthem [1] [2]
  •   The reasonable assumption that everybody in America should speak English
  •   The reasonable assumption that nobody crosses the international border with impunity
  •   The reasonable assumption that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections
  •   The expectation of civility and decorum in public places
  •   The reasonable assumption that the results of presidential elections will be accepted by all parties
  •   The circus [3] [4] [5]
  •   Columbus Day
  •   The Boy Scouts
  •   Animal crackers [6] [7]
  •   Statues of historical figures
  •   Aunt Jemima [8] [9]
  •   "Merry Christmas"
  •   Six Flags [10] [11]   (Not that I care; nor do I care about Bud Light.)
  •   Public libraries [12] [13]
  •   Harmless depictions of cartoon violence
  •   Locally-owned radio stations with local announcers
  •   Television
  •   Restrooms in public places
Others have compiled similar lists: [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]

Tyranny by Any Other Name Still Stinks.  One of the peculiarities of our own time is that so many people remain blind to the totalitarianism growing and spreading around them.  Western governments have seized the authority to tell us what is true and what must be censored as harmful "disinformation."  They openly spy on our phone calls, read our emails, record every Internet search and keyboard click on our computers, and monitor our social media conversations.  They tell us which "politically correct" words we must use and which words are outlawed for inciting "hate."  They have criminalized reading from parts of the Bible or acting with religious conviction.  They insist on manipulating the value of money and rigging markets in ways that confiscate the meager savings of the have-nots and further enrich the well-to-do.  Corporations and government ministers work together to spread the same propaganda.  Mainstream news media operate as compliant mouthpieces for the State.  Banks discriminate against customers due to their personal beliefs.  Companies fire employees for not being sufficiently "woke."  Prosecutors contort statutes into weapons that can be used to punish innocent people for their political speech.

The Bezmenov Plan:  Is America now in the Last Stage?  [Scroll down]  And it's not hard to recognize the plan being followed is parallel to the blueprint plan revealed forty years ago by Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who explained the four stages of communist subversion:  1) Demoralization, 2) Disorientation, 3) Crisis, and 4) Normalization.  The United States has been under prolonged internal attacks of demoralization for several generations, through the educational system and the culture which have delivered messaging that disparages the United States and derides traditional values.  The second stage, known as disorientation, is most successful after a large portion of the population has been demoralized.  Covid-19 brought about disorientation through mask mandates, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of best medical practices of preventative and therapeutic treatments.  Another important part of disorientation that was inflicted on America at that time was the ginned-up racism after the death of George Floyd, which triggered rioting, looting, and destruction of several billion dollars' worth of property and the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

We Must Have Courage To Take Back Our Country.  Fifty years ago, the seeds of our destruction were planted with the beginning of the social justice movement, the anti-war movement, identity politics, and alternatives promoted as equal to or superior to intact nuclear families.  We were told, "Do your thing," without regard for society's needs.  A new version of communism stormed our shores, led by teachers' unions, free love, and blaming whites for every wrong imaginable.  We must scream against this lie at the top of our lungs before, collectively, we forget who we are.  No one will be able to skirt unscathed what's coming.  There's an undeniable feeling among conservatives that we lack the necessary will to retain our Republic.  J6 demonstrated the unrestrained power of government to assert supremacy over its citizens.  Millions have been cowed from speaking out against the gathering darkness, and our government shows little regard for respecting the Constitution.  What's happening to Trump in Manhattan is breathtaking.  Yet, as far as Democrats are concerned, this is only the beginning.

This is the Stupidest, Most Venal Leadership Class in History.  Let's examine the results of your "work", since your boy, Clinton, Rhodes scholar and corporatist stooge, took power in '92:
  [#1]   Clinton's blithe handing over of manufacturing to China created homelessness. [...]
  [#3]   You have allowed the cartels, Asian and Mexican, to take over in every single state.  In Arizona, they own the governor and the government. [...]
  [#7]   In D.C., where you live, only 19% of high school graduates can do math and only 35% can write or read English.
  [#8]   You've made food insanely expensive because of your grovelling to the climate cult which has made energy prices soar, when we have enough energy to be independent. [...]
  [#11]   You foisted Obama on us who doubled the debt, more debt than every other President combined.
  [#12]   Then you inflicted Covid on us, which was deliberate, to destroy Trump.  Another $10 Trillion in debt.  Millions of small businesses destroyed.
  [#13]   Then you lied and cheated and stole 2020, which has been proved many times over, and foisted a sick, mean, thief on us, (whose corrupt disgusting son sold us out to the worst regimes on earth), and who added $3 Trillion to the debt in 2023 alone.  You then boast of a recovering economy which is just flat-out stupid.
  [#14]   And then came Ukraine, a war which you started out of sheer vanity and self-importance, giving your corrupt associates at NATO something to do and shifted hundreds of billions of dollars into a failed state, failed because of you.

No, Supporting Trump Is Not 'Idol Worship'.  Do you want to know why Trump-supporters feel as strongly as they do?  Because in their hearts, they believe that if Trump had remained as the 45th president of the United States through to the present day, the following would not have happened:
  [#1]   A tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan, with 9,000 Americans reportedly left behind along with billions of dollars of equipment that appears to have made it to...
  [#2]   Hamas in Gaza, that then perpetrated a historic massacre and subsequent attacks in Israel with the help of...
  [#3]   Iran, who recently received billions of dollars via frozen assets thanks to the Biden administration. [...]
  [#4]   And of course there's the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has so far led to more than 500,000 deaths and, as of September 2023, more than $75 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to a corrupt regime.
  [#5]   Let's not forget record-setting opioid deaths in the United States, likely impacted by...
  [#6]   Uncontrolled immigration (including drug cartels) at America's borders that is contributing to a...
  [#7]   Rise in crime as millions of illegal aliens are flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border.  That also leads to...
  [#8]   Rising costs for taxpayers, who are already struggling to pay for homes, health insurance, food, gas, and oil heat in the northeast.

The Editor says...
Moreover, the price of gasoline is twice what it should be, because Joe Biden, from his first day in office, has choked off the domestic supply of petroleum in every way he can.  And the price of Diet Coke has doubled since Joe Biden was installed in the White House.

Our Establishment's Alternate Realities.  Leftwing journalists and activists, and even Democratic politicians, who all supported defunding the police, now cannot escape the resulting street violence and unleashed murderous predations.  Everyone knows the culprit is the post-George Floyd effort — with Biden administration complicity — to defund the police, end cash bail, institutionalize catch-and-release of criminals, and show more sympathy toward victimizers than victims.  Yet neither state nor local officials nor Joe Biden himself even admits to a crime wave.  The more the public is attacked and avoids major downtowns, the more it polls furor over the crime wave.  The more our officials, in gaslighting style, claim such alarm is all in our collective heads, the more they themselves are attacked by the very criminals their policies empowered.

Even Starbucks Is Failing in Crime-Ridden San Francisco.  First, Whole Foods closed and now Starbucks is shuttering a slew of locations in San Francisco.  The Seattle coffee giant announced Tuesday that it would close seven of its 59 locations in the city, effective Oct. 22.  The city's "doom loop" is speeding up.  Starbucks didn't mention crime in its official reason for leaving the City by the Bay.  "There are several factors Starbucks considers when tasked with the tough decision of closing a store, but it is all part of ensuring a healthy store portfolio," Jessica Borton, Starbucks' regional vice president for Northern California, said in a statement to district managers.  That corporate-speak doesn't say much, but it's hard not to think that crime and the city's deteriorating street conditions didn't play a major factor in this wide-scale shutdown.  Starbucks has been known to jump into woke causes, then dodge woke consequences.  It's not surprising to see the coffee chain go mum on the crime issue.

What the Left Did to Our Country.  [Scroll down]  What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism.  The border is not porous but nonexistent.  Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences.  Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian "war of all against all," where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must.  The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become pre-civilizational — there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.  The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade.  Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.  Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.  In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist.  Nothing escapes it — not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness?  [Scroll down]  Like Britain from 1939 to 1940, America is in existential danger.  The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border — and immigration law with it.  Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.  China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity.  Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function Covid virus that killed a million Americans.  President Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages.  No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.  In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.  Our military is thousands of recruits short.  It lacks sufficient munitions.  Following Biden's humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul.  Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine. [...] The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized.  Ideology, politics, and race — not the law — more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.  The downtowns of our once majestic major cities are becoming unlivable.  They are mired in refuse and trash, violent crime and homelessness.

Sorry, DC — Too Many Americans Remember.  [Scroll down]  Conversely, we could boil down all of the various Machiavellian plans being unfurled today by Western governments seeking our surrender into a single order:  forget.  Forget your history and your ancestors' sacrifices.  Forget your religious convictions.  Forget your natural rights and freedoms.  Forget the importance of personal liberty, property, and privacy.  Forget the sanctified bonds of marriage.  Forget the unbreakable bonds of families.  Forget the sacred duties of parents.  Forget that forced experimental medical treatments are crimes against humanity.  Forget that climate cultists were warning about global cooling just years before warning about global warming.  Forget that one-world-government types who wish to control all farming methods and hydrocarbon energies have depended on climate models that have been consistently wrong.  Forget that race relations had drastically improved during the last century before the callous race-hustlers re-emerged with new intensity to divide human beings again.  Forget that paper money backed by gold once had value.  Forget that warrantless government surveillance is a sign of tyranny.  Forget that J6 election protesters have been persecuted as "insurrectionists" while Antifa and Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists have been protected from prosecution.  Forget the lies told to justify earlier wars so that new lies can be told to justify the next.  Forget that a government's legitimacy comes from the people's consent.

The quiet riot against insanity in America is gaining strength.  How have we gone from America's low-inflation, high tax revenue, full employment economy, with an expanding middle class, energy independence and rock solid military to the kowtowing disaster of the last two years?  The only possible conclusion is that this is a long-term and well-planned operation to kneecap America.  Accepting that the most prosperous nation on earth is suddenly falling into poverty, crime and wokeness, and our citizens are happily voting for more, requires a level of insane thinking that is unprecedented, yet we now have...
  •   Ballot counting machines that can't count ballots
  •   Judges who refuse to judge
  •   Anti-American American presidents
  •   Prosecutors who don't prosecute
  •   Peaceful protests labeled as domestic terrorism and domestic terrorists labeled as peaceful protestors
  •   Representatives who don't represent
  •   Corporations that don't seek profit
  •   Banks that don't protect their depositors' money
  •   News reporters who don't report the news [...]
  •   Teachers who don't teach, advocating graphic books on sex for children too young to understand sex
  •   Psychologists and physicians encouraging dysphoria insanity in vulnerable children — while keeping parents clueless
  •   Men playing women's sports and assaulting girls in their locker rooms
  •   Doctors who don't heal, promoting vaccines that kill
  •   Groups demanding reparations from people whose ancestors mistreated their ancestors
  •   Free speech that isn't free

Dissecting Obama.  Not so long ago, America had a great economy, the lowest unemployment ever for a range of demographic groups, energy independence, an increasingly secure southern border, a strong international profile, and no new wars.  It had freedom.  It had national pride.  And all because it had a highly skilled president of unabashed patriotism who was devoted to the best interests of his people.  Now we're being readied to eat bugs while our overlords dine on steaks.  To live in "fifteen-minute cities" while they fly to conferences in Fiji.  To tighten our belts to prevent rising sea levels while they luxuriate in sea-level mansions in Malibu and Martha's Vineyard.  In a direct challenge to parental authority, common-sense values, and sensible pedagogical priorities, government schools indoctrinate children in Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology.  To shatter our sense of security and restrict our freedom of movement, Soros prosecutors turn major cities over to violent felons.  Patriots rot in jail for meandering around the Congress for a couple of hours two years ago while young people are encouraged by their teachers to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who have burned houses down.  Blacks who love liberty are smeared as "white supremacists" while Muslims who love jihad are depicted as virtuous victims.  Then there's what happened during the pandemic.  Churchgoing was banned, violent street protests permitted.  Small businesses were forced to close and went bankrupt; giant chain stores stayed open and reaped record profits.

Critically thinking about what's happening to America.  Let's briefly step back and see several examples of where America's opponents are attacking, and what successes they have had to date.
Target: Standards.  Strategy: Promote relativism., where all points of view are equally valid, and that all truth is relative to the individual.
Target: Religion.  Strategy: Undermine Judeo-Christian beliefs and morality.
Target: Men.  Strategy: Emasculate, feminize and weaken men.  Specifically, this is mostly about "de-privileging" white men.
Target: Women.  Strategy: Defeminize women, dilute the role of mothers, corrupt the definition of "woman," allow men to compete in sports as women, etc.
Target: Families.  Strategy: Redefine what a conventional family is, and undercut its importance. Promote pornography to undermine healthy adult relationships.
Target: Education.  Strategy: Propagandize children.  Emphasize conformity instead of critical thinking.
Target: Initiative.  Strategy: Undermine by awarding participation instead of accomplishment.
Target: Citizens.  Strategy: The collective's rights take priority over individual rights.  Additionally, the planet's rights supersede those of humans.
Target: Economy.  Strategy: Waste enormous sums on foolish political agendas, driven by lobbyists, which are not in the best interest of citizens or the country.
Target: Financial System.  Strategy: Undermine the Dollar on a variety of fronts from bitcoin to CBCD.
Target: Industrialization.  Strategy: Corrupt the electric grid with unreliable, expensive renewable energy, while opposing fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Target: Science.  Strategy: Use apostate "scientists" or "experts" to misdirect real Science analyses, and to confuse the public about what Science is.
Target: Unity.  Strategy: For example, inflame racism to incite discord and distrust among fellow citizens.
Target: Patriotism.  Strategy: Inject WOKE, DEI, CRT, etc. ideologies in our education system to sabotage citizen support for their country.
Target: Propaganda.  Strategy: Utilize mainstream media as a major source of disinformation on societal topics ranging from COVID to climate change.
Target: Free Thought.  Strategy: Trick citizens into questioning their own thoughts by normalizing non-sensical situations (e.g., there are more than two genders, etc.).
Target: Elections.  Strategy: Corrupt the election process so that key legislators are not always elected by citizens. Resist meaningful audits to avoid exposing this.
Target: Border Security.  Strategy: Allow essentially anyone who chooses, to come into the country — including criminals, spies, etc.
Target: Military.  Strategy: Use many of the above tactics to weaken our military.

What's Next for Wokeism?  Twenty-five years ago, I told a friend that we would likely bear witness to the acceptance and even protection of several abhorrent social or political practices.  That came true, but it didn't stop there. [...] During the 1980s and 1990s, the social norms listed below were largely unacceptable; eventually the practices became mainstream through the strident promotion by activists and ineffective pushback by traditional institutions:
  •   Open homosexuality, coupled with the very public promotion of the lifestyle
  •   Gay Marriage
  •   Transgenderism
  •   Sex by consenting children with young adults
  •   Open Borders
  •   Anti-Capitalism
  •   The acceptance of recreational drug use as acceptable behavior
  •   Rampant crime and reduced punishment
  •   Society no longer requires work to live
  •   Single-parent constructs as equal to two-parent families
Take a moment to reread this list.  Nothing surprises us anymore.  History teaches us that radical social change usually ends badly, even for progressives.  All of the above continues to have a significant stigma for many Americans.  There is general agreement that promoting negative moral or societal values can and usually will have a deleterious effect on society.  With no national debate, the redefinition of our country has almost been achieved.  Today, our ability to be shocked must surpass a very high threshold.

Bidenana Republic.  Readers may believe calling America a banana republic is an exaggeration but think about it.  Congress is in the midst of passing what is laughingly called a budget.  Half the money comes from taxpayers.  Half the money is borrowed.  All the money goes to special interests.  The FBI provides the muscle.  In 2016, it investigated Hillary who sent 33,000 emails to a trucking company in Red China.  The FBI granted immunity from prosecution to her staff and helped destroy key evidence.  Jimmy the Weasel Comey said that since she didn't mean to break the law, he would recommend not prosecuting.  He made that recommendation days after his boss, Loretta Lynch, and Bill Clinton had an impromptu 45-minute talk on an airport tarmac.  Clinton said they discussed their grandchildren.  By grandchildren, he meant that vacancy on the Supreme Court.  At the same time, the FBI tried to con a judge into approving wiretapping of Donald Trump.  In a rare act of courage, the judge turned them down in June but in October the judge caved in and the FBI spied.  A lot.  We do not know if the FBI ever stopped spying.  There sure seem to be a lot of leaks about what The Donald is doing.  When the FBI isn't covering up crimes and spying for Democrats and RINOs, it is entrapping civilians.  Democrat Governor Whitmer was in jeopardy of losing her job when an FBI informant convinced four losers to hatch an asinine plot to kidnap her.  This is why many people believe that the FBI and Capitol Police enticed people to enter the Capitol, which was closed to the public at the time, on January 6, 2021.  This allowed Nancy Pelosi and the rest to recast a rally on the National Mall as an insurrection.  This led to a post-presidency impeachment trial.  These people are nuts.  But these people are in power.

The Democrats' Contempt for the American People.  The inflation rate is still hovering around 8-9%, in contrast with the 1.4% when Donald Trump left office.  A record number of people (853) have died at the U.S. southern border in the past 12 months (and those are only the ones we know about and not including the people, including children, that were raped, robbed or killed on the trek through central America to the border).  Fentanyl pouring across the Southern border is killing 100,000 Americans a year.  Crime is way up in all major cities.  North Korea has resumed firing ballistic missiles over Japanese territory and has restarted its nuclear weapons program, both of which had been stopped under the Trump administration.  China has humiliated the United States on U.S. soil and is preparing to invade Taiwan.  Russia, which, according to the Democrat-media storyline, was supposed to be Trump's boss, invaded Ukraine soon after Biden's inane remark that a little invasion might not be a big deal, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and massive economic dislocation around the world, while Trump remains the only president in the past four presidents that has not presided over Russian aggression against a neighbor.  Biden, who criticized Trump for cozying up to dictators, has gone begging the Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, for oil to bring down U.S. gas prices.  Economic experts are once again talking about a major recession in the near future.  Trust in American institutions, including the media, the FBI, etc., is at an all-time low.

How Young Americans Unwittingly Voted to Ruin Their Lives.  In short, it seems that young Americans voted for the people who are ruining their lives.  It is the Left that is primarily responsible for the unprecedented levels of depression and despair among young people.
  •   The Left deprived children of school for nearly two years — for no valid reason.
  •   The Left ensured that young children would not see anyone's face outside their home for nearly two years — again, for no valid reason.
  •   The Left frightens young people about their future — through its hysteria over global warming — in a way that no group ever before frightened young Americans.
  •   The Left has destroyed the healthiest beliefs in a citizen's life — especially in the life of a young citizen:  belief in God and belief in one's country.  God, religion, patriotism, and the national flag have all become objects of mockery.
  •   The Left lies to them about everything — from nonbinary genders to the founding of America to the extent of white racism in the country to opponents of the Left being fascists.
  •   The Left works feverishly to prematurely sexualize children by talking about sex and the nihilistic falsehood of sex being "nonbinary" to children beginning in kindergarten.
  •   The Left encourages taking children as young as 5 years old to observe and participate in "Drag Queen Story Hours" featuring men dressed as women reading and dancing for them, often in a sexualized manner, and then having some of the children do the same.
  •   The Left works feverishly to diminish the authority and stature of parents, the most important people in a young person's life.
  •   The Left has created the unprecedented explosion — not only in America, but in recorded history — of young people who think they are really a member of the opposite sex.
  •   The Left corrupts young people's ability to think clearly by suppressing commonsense dissent.  Everyone knows it is grossly unfair for a man to compete in women's sports.  But if a man says he is a woman, we are supposed to believe it and to assert that it becomes fair.  And any girl or woman who says it is unfair is threatened with expulsion from her team, the end of her chances for a sports scholarship to college and social ostracization.

What Is Conservatism?  Before diving into the fundamentals of conservatism, it may be useful to recognize what it is not.  What I mean is that Republicans should remind themselves what they are opposing in today's political climate.  Consider what the left has affected in recent years:  It has affected the whole of education, beginning with schoolchildren being exposed to a radical and aggressive sexual agenda with sexually explicit reading materials and drag queen story hours all the way up to higher education, where radical ideologies have been normative for decades.  It has tainted confidence in the sciences, with recent years revealing scientific "experts" denying basic biological fact by failing to define a woman, promoting blatant medical propaganda, and squashing medical freedom by threatening, punishing, firing, and silencing opposing voices (even when they are respected experts themselves). [...] It has also affected the economy insofar as it has threatened national energy independence; produced hyperinflation; and, of course, promoted continual dependence on the Federal Reserve.  It long ago infected entertainment via Hollywood, but also more recently infiltrated other arenas by promoting woke sentiments in sports, music, late-night shows, and comedy.  It has produced a culture of death, devised turbulent foreign policies, fostered corrupt alliances, emboldened criminals, weaponized technology companies, tarnished intelligence agencies, and more.  These recent advancements are the direct result of leftist ideology concentrated in the Democrat party.

The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats.  As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America's current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats.  And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us.  The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse.  As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget.  Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years.  Yet the prices of the stuff of life — food, fuel, shelter, energy — are far steeper still than the official rate.  No one is safe from thugs anymore — whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.  The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel — the energy source that runs the nation.  Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil — a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.  We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods.  The labor participation rate is at an all-time low — given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

Our government's executive branch is deliberately destroying liberty.  How are they destroying us?  Let me count the ways.
1.  Electoral Fraud.
    A.  2000 Mules.
    B.  Electoral Insurrection (treason).
2.  Destruction of the Economy
    A.  Funding COVID development ("gain of function") in the Wuhan Lab; deliberate exaggeration of the COVID crisis; and COVID lockdowns.
    B.  Elimination of fossil fuels; creation of energy dependency; intentionally driving up gasoline prices; and pushing for electric cars.
    C.  Deliberately enhancing inflation.
    D.  Inviting unlimited immigration for cheap labor and Democrat voters.
    E.  Climate change hoax.
3.  Destruction of the Family
    A.  Promoting abortion
    B.  Promoting sexual perversion and transgenderism.
    C.  Using public education as a platform for sexual grooming and turning children against their parent's values.
4.  Establishment of Federal Police State
    A.  FBI persecution of Mama Bears as "domestic terrorists."
    B.  Property destruction by government brownshirts.
    C.  COVID lockdown, so the US is becoming "democracy with Chinese characteristics."
    D.  Corrupting the legal system by mob intimidation of the Supreme Court.
    E.  Government censorship of speech; classifying truth as "misinformation".
    F.  Breakdown of law and order.
    G.  Government efforts to disarm the public.
5.  Destruction of the US Military
    A.  Wokism
    B.  Seeking war with Russia and China
    C.  Mandated vaccinations

Imagine the Unimaginable.  Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory.  They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. [...] The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving.  Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels.  Inflation is at a 40-year high.  New cars and homes are unaffordable.  The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.  There is no southern border.  Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination.  None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.  Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded.  District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. [...] Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans.  An American president — in a first — casually warns of food shortages.  Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Biden's COVID Testing Fail.  On Monday, January 10, [...] Joe Biden unilaterally declared that everyone will get up to eight free at-home COVID tests per month, to be covered at no additional charge by insurance companies. [...] COVID tests are notoriously unreliable, and in most cases, unnecessary. [...] We are talking about government creating a new mandate that is actually impossible to either deliver or afford. [...] They didn't acknowledge the fact that this quantity of tests is unavailable.  They didn't provide for the cost; they didn't give the providers, public or private, a chance to research this deliverable and negotiate with manufacturers or deliverers first to see what might be achievable.  The Biden-Harris regime simply didn't think it through at all.  And, for the shrinking percentage of our population who care about the law, it's worth noting that, in addition to being impossible, this order is completely unconstitutional.

The Editor says...
Here's the gold nugget in the article above:  "The Biden-Harris regime simply didn't think it through at all."  Exactly! 
  •   That's why they started printing money and handing out "stimulus" payments to everybody. 
  •   That's why they think it's a good idea to defund the police, while letting violent criminals out of jail because they might catch Covid. 
  •   That's why they encourage (or force) businesses to hire marginally-qualified ethnic minorities, just because they're not white,
  •   That's why they think if they eliminate failing grades it will improve the quality of the public schools. 
  •   That's why they killed the Keystone XL pipeline regardless of its effect on gas prices. 
  •   That's why they opened up the Mexican border. 
  •   That's why they pay unmarried women to reproduce. 
  •   That's why they want everybody to drive an electric car — but please don't recharge it, because electricity is already in short supply. 
  •   That's why they thought it would be okay to remove religion from the public schools. 
  •   That's why they see nothing wrong with using a cell phone or a TV set as a babysitter. 
  •   That's why they think we can eliminate hydrocarbons and get by on solar panels and windmills. 
  •   That's why they elect politicians who promise to create "green jobs," even though there are no such jobs. 
  •   That's why mail-in voting is allowed. 
  •   That's why school teachers are unionized. 
  •   That's why they insist on everyone wearing a useless face mask. 
  •   That's why they celebrate men competing in women's sports, and transvestite sex perverts reading books to little kids at the public library. 
Nobody on the left stops to ask, Where is this going to lead?

The Cruel Progressive Creed Undoing Civilization.  Debt is suffocating us.  Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.  Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both.  The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology.  The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.  The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.  There is no U.S. border; it is an abstract construct that millions will illegally cross in the next few years, ostensibly because they will become future soldiers in the progressive wars for America to come.  The idea of merit that built America is a dirty word, replaced by medieval tribalism of hiring and promotion by superficial appearance.  In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

The collective insanity that's rapidly erasing America.  Many of us older than half a century no longer recognize the country we grew up in.  We have a hard time reconciling that past America with what we see happening today.  America, to our view, was predominantly a place of light, freedom, and joy.  Now, as we witness a massing storm of iniquity, we either don't understand what we're seeing or we choke back the language to describe it because the words all sound too harsh or politically incorrect. [...] This plague on our society has pushed us to many forms of mass hysteria:
  •   We shun those who do not comply with outrageous and unconstitutional mandates.
  •   We blindly believe government officials and their allies in the media, though they have proven time and again that they lie and should not be trusted.
  •   We're emptying our jails of violent offenders while imprisoning law-abiding citizens — sometimes for simply exercising their rights.
  •   We're taking political prisoners like any third-world dictatorship.
  •   We allow our cities to be torched and looted with few repercussions.
  •   We're tearing down our history, our culture, and our traditions in the name of progressivism.
  •   We invite seemingly anyone who wants to enter the country illegally to take our jobs, receive public services, and drag down wages.
  •   Our national debt reaches into the stratosphere while politicians go whistling past the graveyard.
  •   We abort the innocent and defenseless while vigorously defending the guiltiest among us.
  •   We scare our children into radicalism with tales of impending doom due to climate changes that are as old as the earth.
  •   We're wrecking entire industries to "protect the earth" while propping up those same endeavors for our enemies.
  •   We deny biological realities and allow men to use women's facilities and participate in women's activities, provided that they "self-identify" as women.
  •   We subject the military to ideological litmus tests.
  •   We fraudulently change election results while casting those who push for transparency as "conspiracy advocates" and add their names to a list of domestic terrorists.
  •   We allow the government to censor those who oppose the lunacy that passes for public policy.
  •   We teach dependency and hatred at many school districts across the country, and within our colleges and universities.
  •   We accuse, disarm, and punish the law-abiding while acquitting the guilty.
This is the short list of our collective insanity.

The Time Has Come for Reasonable Americans to Stand up and Draw a Line in the Sand.  In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been under nonstop attack by corporate media because he has insisted on following the science and good sense when it comes to keeping his state safe and open for business.  CBS News deceptively edited video of DeSantis answering a question about vaccine rollouts at Publix stores to make it look as if he were dodging a question he answered immediately, clearly, and honestly.  Hollywood productions and Major League Baseball are calling for boycotts of Georgia over their latest voter laws.  Airline companies and Coca-Cola are registering their condemnation.  These entities and the people who run them constantly bemoan the "division" in this country even as they willingly make half of their customer base into automatic enemies with every new statement of protest they register.  They have made what we eat and drink political.  They have made biology political.  They have made flying political.  They have made our national pastime political.

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.  Here are some important things that I didn't know five years ago or now.
  •   There actually is a Deep State, and those who constitute it really do not honor the election results or the will of the people.
  •   There really appear to be lawless elements within the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, and NSA who are not accountable for their crimes and are thus above the law.
  •   The fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, really is unaccountable to the "unwashed masses."
  •   Many of our top military command, along with many in the military-industrial complex, don't always hate wars.  There's a lot of money and many promotions to be made during a time of war.  The last four years saw no new wars and even troops coming home.  For some, that is bad for business.
  •   Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are no longer works of fiction, but prophecies.
  •   George Orwell was righter than Nostradamus.
  •   The news media centers of New York City and Washington, D.C. are not neutral arbitrators of the truth; rather, they uncomfortably resemble TASS and Pravda from the Soviet Union days.
  •   The old robber barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan are starting to look a whole lot better compared to the new robber barons like Dorsey, Zuckerberg, and Bezos.
  •   The United States Supreme Court would actually refuse to hear a legitimate case because it was frightened of violence.
  •   The left insists on conflating and equating evangelical Christians with White supremacists.  This should terrify the Christian community.
  •   Words such as mom, dad, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister are now not words of love and respect, but considered politically incorrect verbiage in Congress.
  •   Censorship, the cancel culture, and becoming a nonperson come from the left, not the right.
  •   The left, not the right, actually is going to try to deny citizens' rights afforded to all in the Bill of Rights.
  •   Violence from the left is regarded as free speech and noble, while violence from the right is classified as sedition and felonious by powerful institutions.
  •   It really is not Republicans vs. Democrats, but globalists vs. nationalists.
  •   The new McCarthyism, blacklists, history re-writers, and re-education camps are coming from the left, not the right.
  •   Fences and barriers are a good thing for our nation's capital but somehow a bad thing for our nation's borders.
  •   Our Founding Fathers of yesteryear would be called "domestic terrorists" by some today.
  •   Presidential elections really can be stolen by corrupting just a handful of precincts in just a handful of states.
  •   Calling into question the validity of the 2016 presidential election is patriotic, while calling into question the validity of the 2020 presidential election is treasonous.

The Time for Talking with the Left is Long, Long Past.  Conservatives must accept this hard reality and avoid the aforementioned instinctive, very human but in this case deadly habit:  projection. [...] Their no-holds-barred attitude is apparent to all with eyes to see.  They have
  •   continually attacked us traditionalists and fomented unrest at our political events while accusing us of authoring violence;
  •   visited career and reputational destruction upon those who dare speak unfashionable truths while accusing those truth-tellers of intolerance;
  •   used government agencies such as the IRS and FBI to persecute us while accusing us of endangering the republic;
  •   played the identity politics card and demonized whites while accusing conservatives of being divisive, racist and bigoted;
  •   conspired with foreign powers to undermine our nation while accusing us of treasonous behavior;
  •   enabled China, an imperialistic foe and a clear and present danger to our country;
  •   endeavored to steal an election after having wrongly accused conservatives of thus doing in 2016;
  •   abetted an invasion of our nation in order to raise an alien electoral army that can help them seize power;
  •   mismanaged a pandemic and caused death while using it as a pretext for stripping our liberties, "locking down" the country and destroying people's livelihoods;
  •   corrupted our children with perversion and scarred their bodies, minds and souls;
  •   facilitated the murder of the unborn while accusing us of indifference to the vulnerable;
  •   prosecuted conservatives on trumped up charges while shielding their co-ideologists from justice;
  •   called truth "hateful" or "misinformation" and censored it via Big Tech while presenting convenient lies as "fact";
  •   encouraged violent mobs to create mayhem and attempted to strip the imperiled of the capacity for self-defense while sometimes being protected themselves by armed details;
  •   attacked our history and heroes and destroyed our cultural heritage while effecting their own "Year Zero," dystopian transformation;
  •   indoctrinated the young in schools to transform them into foot soldiers in the leftist campaign of civilizational rape;
  •   attacked our nation's foundational faith, Christianity, while spreading corruptive moral relativism and destructive theologies; and
  •   degraded society with perverted science while accusing us of scientific obscurantism.

Revolution 2020.  [Scroll down]  The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v.  Board of Education, which outlawed state-directed segregation, also gave impetus to all manner of efforts to re-form society by legal-administrative force.  The decision itself eliminated any chance that this could be done in a disinterested manner.  It was not based on the plain, unequivocal meaning of the 14th Amendment's "equal protection of the laws."  Back in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan had dissented from Plessy, arguing that any state establishment of racial preference whatever, regardless of its character or intention, violates those words.  But Thurgood Marshall based his decision on "science" — that is, on the variable opinions of the credentialed class.  A sociologist by the name of Kenneth Clark claimed he had proven that Negro children could feel and learn normally only in a racially mixed environment.  (The "black is beautiful" movement began countering this immediately.)  Quickly, "scientific" conventional wisdom made "benign" or "remedial discrimination" by race official U.S. government policy.  The Brown decision's reliance on "science" also confused legally established segregation with the segregation that results from personal choices.  This confusion was the basis for Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in "public accommodations" on the basis of race.  Thenceforth, Civil rights law was no longer about removing legal barriers to personal choices.  It had begun forcing personal choices.  The Supreme Court's approval of the law as a mere regulation of interstate commerce was thin pretense.  The Act turned out to be the little law that ate the Constitution and poisoned American society.  It was passed primarily by Republican votes.  Democrats, seeing the empowerment of a historic Republican constituency in the South as potential disaster, scrambled to avert it by out-pandering Republicans, while describing any reticence on their part as racial animosity and ascribing whatever ailed Negroes to the Republicans' racism.  Quickly, the dynamics of politics turned "civil rights" into a ruinous socioeconomic scam.

America needs a New Declaration of Equal Justice under the Law.  What has been allowed to grow in the American cultural and political petri dish over the last two generations is a mixture whose contagious influence is as harmful as it is riddled with absurdities.  A partial list would include: an unequal two-tiered justice system; open borders; preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens; the dominance of political correctness and its de facto censorship of free expression; fake news; rewriting history; the 1619 project; renaming Columbus Day; the abolition of traditions of every size and shape; destruction of American historical monuments; trampling the American flag and other symbols of democracy; the eradication of family values while celebrating and elevating relationships counterproductive to procreation — an imperative for any civilization that wants to survive; election fraud and dismantlement of the electoral process; an attempted coup that would have nullified the Constitution and the peoples' sovereignty; a baseless and wasteful impeachment; the disgraceful character assassination of nominees to the Supreme Court; the pervasive infiltration of education with academics hostile to America; the adoption safe spaces and the prohibition of trigger words on college campuses; union control and influence on public school educational curricula whose net effect dumbs down students and often paints America as the great villain.

Resisting the Totalitarian Power of Politicization.  [Scroll down]  Consider a schoolteacher who will not bow to the ugly utilitarian aims of the Common Core, but who teaches great poetry for its own sake.  The automatism of her fellow teachers and her superiors will move to crush her.  Consider the secretary who declines to post a rainbow flag on the wall beside her.  The machine lurches into action.  Consider the curator of a small museum, who exhibits paintings he believes are beautiful and powerful, without regard to the sex or the race of the painters.  Juggernaut comes a-rolling.  The system is perpetually hungry.  It must be so because lies evacuate the soul.  The more you feed, the emptier and hungrier you become.  To the totalitarian mind, all things must be politicized; no region of life may remain untouched, unabsorbed, undevoured.  Choirs, knitting groups, groceries, elementary schools, day-care centers, libraries, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, congregations, bowling leagues, fast-food joints, department stores, florist shops, delicatessens, marriages, flirtation, love poetry — all must go down the vast assimilating gullet of Jabba the State, who belches up emptiness and rages for more.

The Democratic Descent into Madness:  Super Tuesday Edition.  The Democratic Party [...] has pushed some of the worst ideas and most destructive policies ever seen, including its defense of slavery and the Confederacy during the Civil War; the creation of the KKK to harass and kill former slaves; the enactment of an intricate web of laws throughout the South to prevent former slaves and their descendants from exercising their full rights as citizens; calling in armed soldiers to prevent black kids from attending state college; using "progressive" policies to destroy great cities across the country (Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco among them); passing off a serial sexual predator as a champion defender of women; attempting to destroy the U.S. healthcare industry while lying through their teeth about it; nominating Hillary Clinton as its candidate for President; using the power of the federal government to spy on the rival party's presidential candidate; and Chuck Schumer. [...] This is a party that needs to be punished.  And the only way to punish a political party is to take away as much of its power as possible.

Why Are Liberal Cities Such a Mess?  Many major U.S. cities run by liberal Democrats are in rough shape.  They are afflicted by the problems of homelessness, violent crime, gangs, and unemployment to a far greater degree than the country as a whole.  Liberal cities are governed by the guiding tenets of softness, misplaced "compassion," and individual unaccountability.  Examples include:
  •   Hands-off policing style (NYC has long since abandoned the highly successful stop-and-frisk practices of the Giuliani years that led to low street crime).
  •   Sanctuary cities, which give rise to higher incidents of crime, poverty, unemployment, and the wasting of taxpayer-funded public resources because of the undocumented population's draining effect on the community.
  •   The inexplicable decision of cities like Boston to no longer prosecute crimes such as shoplifting and breaking and entering, leading to urban stores not being able to remain open and be profitable (thus denying the community of a valuable resource).
  •   Widespread locally approved abuse of the SNAP/EBT program, allowing its acceptance for alcohol and other nonessential items.
  •   Explicit sanctioning of sleeping on the street or other common public areas and unrestricted public loitering.
Liberal policies have worked almost perfectly to degrade the quality of inner-city life for their residents to the point of abject unacceptability.

In the age of leftism:
  Canada elects a substitute drama teacher for prime minister.
  Calling someone an "illegal alien" (a legal term), carries a fine of up to $250,000.
  Teachers are required to present LGBT content to junior high school kids.
  Illegal aliens can obtain driver's licenses.
  A sharia law Islamist who married her brother to circumvent American laws is now an American congresswoman.
  A woman who fabricated a lie to gain entry to Harvard is at the top of the Democratic presidential candidacy polls.
  A man who endorsed the American Communist Party is running for president of the United States.
  In a time of surging stocks, record employment, record female work participation, and economic prosperity in the most capitalist country in the world, capitalism is scorned.

Future Belongs to Those Who Oppose Drag Queen Story Hours.  A new kind of debate is now raging inside conservativism.  In times past, we discussed the strategic and tactical options by which we might work toward common goals inside the existing political framework.  Today, the framework itself is in question.  What is being discussed is the classical liberal foundation of the American political system.  Indeed, both left and right have worked inside this framework for much of our nation's history.  Rarely have we faced such a challenge to the way America resolves its problems.  However, liberalism is in crisis.  Our society is in shambles and drifting steadily leftward.  The most outlandish behaviors — political correctness, transgenderism and Satanism — are being mainstreamed.

Fruits yet to be harvested:
Do You Understand that Democrats will Destroy America?  The Green New Deal, renewed regulations, Medicare for All, free college, as well as the 70-90% tax rates proposed by Democrats, will tank the stock market and US economic growth, leading to higher unemployment and reduced wage gains.  All these programs require higher taxes and not just the soak the rich fantasy of the 70-90% rates.  Most of the Democratic candidates have pledged to roll back the 2017 Republican tax cuts that fueled the renewal of economic growth in the US.  Open borders will flood the US with poverty stricken immigrants and their competition for jobs will depress wages.  The social welfare needs of the immigrants will skyrocket government expenditures.  So while taxes receipts are falling due to slower economic growth rates, expenditures will be rising, leading to increased government debt and consequently higher interest rates.  If the Federal Reserve tries to keep interest rates low to prevent a deepening recession, then the increase in the money supply and the expanding deficit will eventually destroy the value of the dollar.

Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity.  Consider what has changed already.  In the 19th century, blasphemy was a crime.  In the Roaring '20s the "vices" of booze and gambling were outlawed.  Now they are major sources of state revenue.  Divorce was a rarity.  Now half of all marriages are dissolved.  After the sexual revolution of the '60s, births out of wedlock rocketed to where 40 percent of all children are born without a father in the home, as are half of Hispanics and 70 percent of all black children.  Pornography, which used to bring a prison term, today dominates cable TV. Marijuana, once a social scourge, is the hot new product.  And Sen. Kamala Harris wants prostitution legalized.  In the lifetime of many Americans, homosexuality and abortion were still scandalous crimes.  They are now cherished constitutional rights.  Yet, Mayor Pete's assertion — that God made him gay, and God intended that he live his life this way, and that this life is moral and good — is another milestone on the road to a new America.

Why Do Most People in This Country Work, while Others Never Will?  [Scroll down]  In President Obama's home town, the south and west side neighborhoods of Chicago had long been decimated by the long-term effects of a stream of uninterrupted rule by Democratic mayors.  The people left behind in these neighborhoods long ago gave up hope of a better life and have been inevitably forced to rely on public assistance and making money in the underground economy, including an unlawful drug trade dominated by violent gangs.  The overwhelming loss of high-paying and often unionized manufacturing jobs previously located in these neighborhoods had devastating and permanently detrimental effects and was the main reason behind their rapid decline.  The Democrats focus on addressing the grievances of their coalition of constituent interest groups with the unfortunate effect of further dividing the American people by providing these groups with special privileges and extra attention.

Anarchy is Swallowing Up the Social Order.  [D]espite increased government controls of everyday life in education, policing and citizen surveillance (don't forget those traffic tickets based on surveillance cameras), and dictation of many aspects of everyday living, we do not observe increasing order.  We observe increasing social anarchy.  Let's look at a somewhat truncated list of what we have endured and are enduring as a society.  We have seen horrible onslaughts as follows:  the Fort Hood jihad massacre, the Boston Bombing jihad massacre, the San Bernardino jihad massacre, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, riots in Berkeley, Ferguson, and Baltimore, cop shootings in Dallas and New York City, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Las Vegas massacre, the Texas church massacre, the Florida HS massacre, the Chattanooga recruiting station attack, and the jihad attack in Garland, TX against Pamela Geller.  We see anarchy further revealed by regular and frequent breakdowns of mass transit systems in metropolitan New York City and elsewhere and massive infiltration of our country by illegals (reminiscent of flooding in of Germanic tribes leading to collapse of the Roman Empire).  The anarchy occasioned by mass illegal immigration is encouraged by sanctuary cities with the avowed policy of protecting illegals, even those with multiple illegal border crossings, from apprehension by ICE.  Also, there is a drug use and abuse health crisis of epidemic proportions.  Further, the family in America is also being ripped to shreds as the number of children born outside of the marriage bond was 5% in 1960 and is 40% for the last few years.

What a Socialist Really Wants.  Now we have the remarkable spectacle of Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world, being reduced to poverty and hunger by a dimwitted socialist junta.  The whole thing is a public spectacle, like botched plastic surgery on a movie star.  The socialists in charge have all the answers.  They know what you need better than you do.  Unfortunately, that turns out to be every tragic, stupid outcome imaginable.  How does any other country dare to discuss socialism?

It is not Mr. Trump who is dividing America.  When Barack Obama commandeered one seventh of the U.S. economy in the name of making health insurance available to a small minority of Americans who did not have it, and he did so through political chicanery, with no support from the Republicans, and against the wishes of the majority of Americans, that was divisive.  When Mr. Obama tried to force schools to allow males who "identified as" females to use women's bathrooms (and vice versa), and he did so with no public debate of the matter and in the complete absence of credible scientific evidence that a biological male can in any psychologically healthy sense claim to identify as a female, that was divisive.  When white students at our best colleges (and even recruits to the U.S. Army) are taught that they have enjoyed undeserved advantages because they happen to have been born white in a nation founded and peopled mostly by whites, that's divisive.  And when our political and economic institutions are vilified as expressions of "white supremacy" because they were developed predominantly by the white majority, that's divisive.

The Pitiful Roots of Anti-Americanism.  The Progressives' failure is not a failure to enact their agenda.  They have dominated America politically for the past century.  FDR gave us really big government, and the federal government has become a scandal of fraud, waste, and abuse — a scandal that even the Big Government Press cannot keep hidden from us.  LBJ declared War on Poverty — and that war was lost.  Instead of eliminating poverty, the War on Poverty has made poverty more pathological, creating an underclass, often now described as "permanent," living on government handouts.  Even the Progressives' anti-Americanism was given free rein with the election of Barack Obama, who shared their obsession with "fundamentally transforming" America.  Yet wave after wave of electoral victory has not made American Progressives happy.  Whenever the voters put the Progressives in charge, the result is governmental metastasis and social catastrophe — by necessity.  The left is simply wrong about how things work.  It is easy to come up with programs that defy common sense.  It is also possible to use governmental power to impose those programs on society.  But the power of government can't make them work.

The Worst-Run States Have This One Thing In Common.  Four of the five worst-run states all have one thing in common — and it's exactly what you think it is.  That's right, states with the worst fiscal condition — according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — are almost universally run by Democrats.

Guns Aren't the Problem.  The Collapse of the Morality You Mock is the Problem.  God is not mocked and our society has been mocking him for some time.  From the collapse of the family; to a culture of death that champions abortion on demand; to a growing hostility towards people of faith; to championing deviancy while normalcy is defined a deviant; to attacks on the two parent, heterosexual nuclear household; to porn culture, our society is rotten and these things happen in rotting societies.  This has always been under the surface.  Now it is boiling out because God has handed us over to ourselves. [...] We have determined that mothers and fathers are interchangeable or don't even matter.  We have determined that sexual expression is the height of society.  We have determined that humanity and personhood are severable.  Frankly, even lax European cultures have less of a culture of death than we do.  We stand almost alone in the West in liberal abortion policy.

Minnesota Democrats wage war on God, faith and American history.  The further we've moved away from God in our schools, the more he's been replaced by the extreme indoctrination of our kids with teaching and programs that completely undercut what families teach their children at home.  Nobody seems to care that parents are offended that many schools are no longer interested in partnering with them and instead are undermining them as the primary authority in the lives of their children.  Political correctness has infected schools to the point where priorities are out of whack.  Our schools lack the security they desperately need, teachers are underpaid, and yet politicians ignore these real issues and, instead, pick fights with people of faith.

How Americans Got Hoodwinked.  [Scroll down]  By the 1980s, an entire new generation was disoriented.  School and media had turned young minds toward an ideology at odds with America's founding principles and values.  Americans progressively lost their moral bearings and their identity as Americans.  Marxist activists and other crusaders for a collectivist nation had by now taken positions of leadership in academia, government, and church.  Public schools were beginning to pit students against their parents and filling their heads with ideas calculated to undermine the core values of their country and heritage.  Americans who got all their news from the mainstream press or TV were unaware that a culture war had broken out across the country.  Mainstream media reporters, allegedly on the side of truth, were either ignorant or complicit.

Socialism's Gateway Drug.  There's open talk of a divorce between individualists and collectivists; i.e., a separation of the US into at least two separate countries.  Can chaos be far behind when so many see the corruption from top to bottom, and are giving up belief in The Great Experiment? [...] The corruption in government is not just for enrichment or power.  It's to sow the seeds of WHY BOTHER? among the population. [...] The flood of third-world immigrants is not just for "diversity".  It's to sow the seeds of violent civil unrest as the natives of America and Europe finally resist at the 11th hour. [...] The deficit spending of every Western government is not just to buy votes.  It's second-level intent is to sow the seeds of an inevitable financial collapse, leading to societal chaos. [...] Look around you at what's happening.  Look at everything — every single thing — the Left does, in the context of trying to precipitate chaos.

Has Giving Leftists What They Want Made America Better?  In 1962, the United States Supreme Court gave leftists what they wanted:  the removal of prayer from public schools.  So how has that worked out for us?  Since prayer was removed from schools in 1962, out-of-wedlock births for girls 15-19 years old has tripled.  Violent crimes have increased tenfold.  Single-parent female-headed households have grown from 5 million in 1962 to 12 million and growing.  Sexually transmitted diseases in kids 10-14 years old has skyrocketed, increasing 257% since 1962.  Fifteen-year-olds having sex since 1962 is up 1,000%.  For decades, divorce rates were declining.  Since 1962, divorce rates have increased 117%, making America number one in the world for divorce.

Of Course Children Prefer Liberalism.  Liberals knew well what they were doing as they worked for decades at destroying the family.  As generations of Americans have been raised in broken homes — often by broken people — it makes it easier to make them wards of the state.  After all, if you don't have parents who care much or provide much for you, why not look to Uncle Sam and his trillions?  One of the great lies of modern liberalism — perhaps the great lie — is that the world owes us something, and it's up to us to do whatever it takes to get it.  If one has the "right" to do whatever one wishes in the sexual realm, why take responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy?  And if we don't have to worry about sex leading to children, why get married at all?  And if we want to get married, why can't we define what is marriage?

Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.  [Scroll down]  This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s.  A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.  This era saw the beginnings of an identity politics that inverted the color-blind aspirations of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into an obsession with race, ethnicity, gender, and now sexual preference.  And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values.  As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

Anarchy Is Swallowing Up the Social Order.  [Scroll down]  Thus, despite increased government controls of everyday life in education, policing, and citizen surveillance (don't forget those traffic tickets based on surveillance cameras), we observe increasing social anarchy. [...] We see regular and frequent breakdowns of mass transit systems in metropolitan New York City and elsewhere, massive infiltration of our country by illegals (reminiscent of flooding in of Germanic tribes leading to collapse of the Roman Empire), and the drug use epidemic.  We see thirty-one "gender designations" by the City of New York with male and female demoted to being only two of the thirty-one.  Recently the mayor of Oakland, Calif. notified 1,000 illegal alien felons (yes, felons — not just nice men and women scrambling to make a living) that ICE was coming for them.  These developments suggest that anarchy is rife.  Thus, we see that the scope of government has grown and become more intrusive, but at the same time, anarchy seems to be racing forward at warp speed.  The leftists seem to think the anarchy is growing because government, despite its growth, has not been growing big enough or fast enough.  According to their thinking, growth in government power is the answer to anarchy.

Another Liberal-Created Failure.  According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation.  By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.  Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. [... But] shutting down mental hospitals didn't turn out the way advocates promised.  Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings).  They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless. [...] Many innocent people have been assaulted, robbed and murdered by mentally ill people.  Businesspeople and their customers have had to cope with the nuisance created by the mentally ill.

The Left Is Reaping the Whirlwind of the Culture They Made.  [Scroll down]  It seems clear to me the sheriff was speaking about rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.  I am a First Amendment purist and don't want to see expression censored in any way.  And I don't argue that there's a straight line between any specific cultural creation and bad acts.  But surely, a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.

A Time for War.  Civil War.  It's here.  Now.  Thankfully this is not yet the blood in the streets kind of war, but war it is. [...] Examples of the current battles in the war:
    Racialism, black lives matter, NFL kneeling, and the war on being white.
    The new feminism, and the war on being male.
    The new feminism, and the war on the unborn.
    Turning sex into a cesspool.  Weinstein, Hollywood, preying on children, rampant unfaithfulness, broken families, transgenderism.
    Turning race baiting and sex allegation into weapons of mass destruction.
    Environmental catastrophism.
    Health care control.
    Spending our grandchildren's money.
    Allowing immigration to strangle what's left of our institutions.
    Pretending radical Islam is okay, but Judeo-Christian culture is not.
    Teaching that socialism is just another form of government and not a failure.
    Teaching that our country is inherently evil, and must be changed throughout.
There are many others.  But the important thing to understand is every one of these major battles is going on simultaneously.

No, I Am Not a Moron but Half the Country is Deranged.  Of all the crises plaguing the nation, who would ever consider gender identity and potty access as the most pressing issues yet we now have the unthinkable occurring.  Men allowed to enter ladies bathrooms whenever they like and dogs getting their own bathrooms at JFK airport.  Criminals getting their sex change operations paid for by taxpayers while in prison.  Transgender former males winning female sporting events ('quel surprise') like wrestling or weightlifting.  The language we all learned from day one has become weaponized by the gender militants in our Marxist academia.

The 6 Big Ways Liberals Are Destroying America's Culture.  [#1] The Politicization Of Everything:  Want to watch football?  There are players protesting the flag.  Turn on a Hollywood awards ceremony?  There are actors making political statements.  Want to go to the bathroom in peace?  Well, first, we need to know if you're okay with sharing it with someone who feels like the opposite gender today.  You're just a regular person telling an off-color joke you heard?  Better be careful; that could turn into a front page scandal if the wrong group gets offended.  Want to buy a Halloween costume for your kid?  Well, you better make sure it's someone of the same race or people will be upset.  Want to go on a date?  If you date someone of the same race, you may be racist.  Ready to marry your honey?  Then you better support gay marriage or you're a homophobe.  I can remember a time in America where you could just live your life without paying attention to politics at all if you wanted and that was a good thing.  Remember that old saying?  Never discuss race, religion or politics in polite company?  Well, because of liberals, you don't have a choice anymore.

How the Left Devalues American Citizenship.  In his relentless effort to devalue what it means to be an American, Obama exempted citizenship applicants from a major part of the Oath of Allegiance.  Applicants no longer have to pledge to defend our country. [...] While illegals are not official citizens, outrageously, they receive benefits unavailable to citizens — free attorneys, college tuition, checks, abortions, and more.  Democrats and fake news media are working to guilt-trip Americans into gifting illegals the right to vote (some are already voting).  So, illegals don't desire or need no stinkin' U.S. citizenship.  Obama's illegals have no desire to assimilate.

Dear Democrats:  Does Trump do anything that's not racist?  [Scroll down]  When you don't enforce immigration laws, you will get more illegal immigration.  When you don't hold people to account on sexual abuse like Bill Clinton, you will get more sexual abuse.  When you have a secret slush fund to pay off claims for congressmen and no disclosure, you will get more claims.  When you allow people like Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and Holder to lie to Congress with no repercussions, you will get more liars, and when you have a secretary of state who repeatedly lies and violates securities laws — who enriches her family and foundation with her political position, who repeatedly lies and not only doesn't get penalized, but gets rewarded with a presidential nomination — you will get more political corruption.

Rhode Island, Connecticut and Illinois are the 'worst possible states to live in' (but Louisiana and Mississippi aren't much better).  If you live in Illinois, Connecticut or Rhode Island, the chances are you know someone who is not happy.  Not happy at all.  Around a quarter of the population living in these regions have described them each as the 'worst possible state to live in', according to a Gallup survey.  The map data doesn't explain the nature of the residents' grievances.

Timely news and commentary:

No one should believe economists — they are apologists for bad policies.  Here are some of the actual Biden, Harris policies that led to high inflation:  Doling out massive amounts of taxpayer money to buy votes when the economy was already rapidly growing.  There is no excuse for running a $2 trillion deficit this year, in a supposedly growing economy.  They're just masking the problems.  Flooding the United States with millions of illegals because Biden and Harris reversed Trump's policies and ignored the law.  Issuing massive amounts of new regulations is clearly inflationary.  Blocking pipelines and drilling on federal lands while publicly seeking to destroy companies that use natural resources to produce reasonably priced energy causes inflation in the U.S. and throughout the world.  Forcing people and businesses to buy expensive health insurance policies instead of fostering freedom of choice.  The media and other Democrats intentionally lie and claim that Obamacare has made health insurance more affordable; the truth is that prices have skyrocketed for 14 years because of the Affordable Care Act.  Throwing money at colleges for 60 years has certainly added to inflation.  Then, we had a president who dictatorially paid off the loans using other people's money and debt, which is also inflationary.  Forcing car companies to make expensive electric cars and trucks that people don't want is obviously inflationary.  It raises the prices of gas-powered cars, which covers the losses and all the capital investments.

Confected emergencies and the new world order.  [Scroll down]  Without the "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" ("DIE") emergency, would we have tolerated the sexualisation, feminisation, and castration of our children?  Would we have tolerated men punching women in boxing rings for televised sport?  Would we have tolerated gangs of thugs targetting and raping vulnerable young women, or beheading those of us who criticise their beliefs, or the blasphemy laws protecting them?  Would we have tolerated the placement of rapists in women's prisons, or boys in girls' changing rooms, or men as heads of rape crisis centres?  Would we have tolerated men in dresses, with no ability or interest in war fighting or operational readiness, commanding our military forces?

Biden and Harris Raided Medicare to Fund Green New Deal:  Premiums Are Now Set to Spike.  When Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act during the days they controlled all of Washington, D.C., it ignited a chain reaction that led to higher Medicare costs for America's senior citizens.  "Nearly two years after its passage, the IRA has diverted nearly $260 billion from the projected Medicare 'savings' to pay for special interest handouts like large tax credits for costly electric vehicles, enormous subsidies paid to big health insurer-PBM corporations, and funding health care programs for illegal immigrants," Ron Fitzwater, Chief Executive Officer of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Missouri Times.  "The Biden-Harris administration is not protecting Medicare; they're stealing from it," he wrote.

Is Obama connected to the Dem panic about Hegseth as Defense Secretary?  The military is both America's last and first line of defense against foreign enemies inside and outside of America's borders — and for decades now, the Democrats have been chipping away at it.  Democrats have demoralized the military by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam (we won the Tet offensive), Iraq (we'd won until Obama pulled us out, leaving a vacuum for ISIS and Iran), and Afghanistan (we were at least maintaining until Biden gave us the most humiliating retreat in American history).  Democrats have structurally weakened the military by focusing on climate change, not defense.  And Democrats have corrupted the military at a core level by bringing racial identity politics to what was once the best-integrated institution in America and by flooding it with people who have a deviant sexual agenda.  Pete Hegseth promises to stand against all of that.

Tariffs, Inflation, and the Donkey that Cried Wolf.  [Scroll down]  Why is it that the Democrats object to the inflationary aspect of tariffs, and they never object to the inflationary effect of anything else they advocate?  Over the past four years, the Democrats have caused the costs of diesel fuel and gasoline to jump by fifty to a hundred percent.  That was inflationary.  Did the Democrats ever apologize for that?  Over the past four years, they also printed hundreds of billions of dollars in fiat money to give to illegal aliens, green energy companies, weapons systems for Ukraine, and big city bailouts through such pork-laden programs as the Inflation Reduction Act.  This was all inflationary, but it didn't stop them.  They fought to close coal plants and spend mints building worthless wind turbines and solar panel farms, producing the least efficient and therefore most expensive energy possible for our overtaxed electric grid.  This increased cost of energy has driven up the cost of manufacturing, the cost of refrigeration, the cost of cooking — everything from foods and beverages to manufactured goods has gone up because of the Biden-Harris war on energy.  That's inflationary.  But that didn't stop the Democrats from advocating such policies, did it?

Blue City Blues.  In reading through the stories of problems in America's larger cities, one notices commonalities.  When cities make the news for all the wrong reasons, those covering them often mention their leaders.  The 25 largest cities in America all have Democrat mayors, and as of 2023, over 85% of the largest American cities are mostly populated by and led by Democrats.  That stands to reason.  The colleges and universities that are turning out people with advanced degrees have faculties that are overwhelmingly left-of-center.  The high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools likewise have faculties that lean left.

Not what Trump was — but what Harris wasn't.  I received a Facebook message written by an old friend whom I went to high school with back in the Midwest. [...] My friend's comments accentuated the fact that wealthy liberals (especially in the D.C. area) have for so long been isolated from real America that they don't know what most Americans are feeling these days.  For the last three-plus years, we've dealt with the Biden-Harris Administration giving their blessing to boys in the girls' locker room, regular folks having to buy only half a tank of gas to have enough money left over to buy lunch, or reading about unvetted immigrants killing and raping our citizens while feeding at the government trough.

What Trump's astonishing comeback means.  Prosperity and improved public morale were reversed when COVID-19 struck and riots erupted in the wake of the death at police hands of a black drug abuser called George Floyd.  Even though these riots were promoted by Democrats, a chaos-averse public turned to a familiar and seemingly less divisive figure, Joe Biden, whom voters judged more likely to bring back order and stability.  Trump's refusal to accept that he lost helped Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia and led to a riot by Trump supporters at the nation's Capitol.  In January 2021, it seemed a good bet that he was a spent political force.  But then Biden enthusiastically smashed his promises of centrist government and normalcy and pushed an agenda of unregenerate leftism.  He threw open the southern border, flooding communities across the country with unvetted migrants from around the world.  He stoked historically high inflation with massive debt-financed spending, which eroded everyone's paychecks, especially those at the bottom of the income scale.  In addition to the greater costs of their own groceries, housing, and transportation, voters had to pay for all those items being showered by Democrats on to Biden's illegal immigrants.

With a True Vote Count, Trump Wins in a Landslide .  Many feel that the November 5 election should rightly be a referendum on corruption and misuse of power, specifically the Biden-Harris abuse of power that may be unparalleled in America's long history.  Consider:
  •   The exposure of massive corruption and compromise of the Biden family — during and after the time Joe Biden served as vice president — including tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments, and notably from entities with connections to America's number one enemy, the CCP.
  •   The adoption of an open border policy that enabled as many as 20 million illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. during the four-year Biden-Harris term, overwhelming our health and education welfare system, escalating the risk of terrorist attack on our soil, and increasing the likelihood of massive election irregularity.
  •   The two-tiered justice system on display in the political prosecution of Donald Trump, the arrest and imprisonment of J6 protestors — many of whom committed no crime — and the instigation of open season lawfare and jail sentences on most everyone on Trump's team from his first term. [...]
  •   The out-of-control deficit spending, money-printing and borrowing, pushes the U.S. ever closer to insolvency and the demise of the dollar, while having the immediate effect of spurring inflation in energy and food prices — with the greatest burden on the poor and lower class, many of whom now find the essentials of everyday living unaffordable.

Corporations, Childless Cat Women, and Politicians.  We are in the midst of a profound cultural shift whose implications we refuse to look at because too much of the establishment is invested in consumerist lifestyle libertinism.  One reason all societies up to our day were interested in and regulated marriage is that it was the way by which societies perpetuated themselves — and societies had an interest in survival.  Only in our time has that instinct of self-preservation been subverted by constant claims of "autonomous individualism," an isolated individualism that results in even natural things like the man-woman relationship and marriage becoming suspect.  If all this "social progress" was leading to greater general happiness and "joy," that's not apparent on the streets of America.  Depression and suicide among minors are growing.  Marriage is delayed or deferred until one of the latest points in life on record.

Chaos and Crime:  Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies.  Upon being inaugurated, one of the responsibilities Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed was to keep the American homeland secure and safeguard our sovereign borders.  Nearly four years later, looking at the catastrophic, unprecedented border crisis that has unfolded on their watch, can anyone say with a straight face they have fulfilled that obligation?  The answer, unequivocally, is no — and Americans are the ones paying the price.  From the beginning, Biden, Harris, and other key officials in their administration were determined to end President Donald Trump's effective border security policies — regardless of the consequences.  They also refused to enforce long-standing immigration laws that administrations of both parties have enforced.  According to a new report by my committee, the incoming Biden-Harris team was warned by current and former Department of Homeland Security law enforcement during the presidential transition of what would happen if they embarked on this path — and yet, they chose to do so anyway.

Canada is disintegrating.  What happens in a country without cultural conservatism?  Look no further than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.  In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed to a fawning New York Times that, "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.  There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other — but there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada."  Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country's historic identity to shreds.  The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration.  Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up.  Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.

2024: Voting by Facts, Not Feelings.  When Harris and Biden stepped into office in 2021, they inherited Trump's 1.4% inflation rate.  They quickly exploded the overall inflation rate to 19.75 by passing the American Rescue Plan Act.  Then, in August 2022, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act because of Kamala's tie-breaking vote.  That act authorized $891 billion in additional spending, massively increasing inflation.  Harris's philosophy of restricting gas and oil production had a substantial detrimental effect on American consumers.  The national average cost of gasoline under Kamala rose 47%.  Americans paid $2.28 per gallon under Trump, but that same gallon would cost $3.35 today.  Under Kamala, filling up a 20-gallon gas tank would cost Americans $67; under Trump, it would cost only $45.60, or $21.40 less.  The increase in fuel costs put incredible hardships on truckers who ship various goods across the country.  The unnecessary increase had a catastrophic domino effect.  Groceries became more expensive by 20%, electricity went up 28%, and rent went up 21%.  Nearly everything Americans purchased became far more costly.

Our Current Government Is No Longer Constitutional.  A recent Wall Street Journal editorial tells us that notwithstanding the proven sheer impracticality of it, the new greenhouse gas emissions rules that the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated require that battery-powered and plug-in hybrid vehicles constitute 32% of new automobile sales by 2027, and 71% by 2032.  Never mind that EVs are vastly inferior to gasoline-powered vehicles and extremely dangerous because they catch fire in minor accidents.  Still, coal, gas, and nuclear are out, and wind and solar are in.  The hills are alive with solar and wind farms, but what do they plan for when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing?  Where can you find a charging station when you need one, how long will it take to charge your EV, and how far can you drive before you next charge?  Since one terrorist with a .22 rifle can take out a substation, we might want to contemplate life without electricity.

Drug Costs Explode As Kamalanomics Massively Backfires.  Go to Kamala Harris' campaign website and among the very short list of alleged achievements is this:  "She cast the deciding vote to lower drug prices and cap insulin prices for our seniors."  The only problem is that drug costs for seniors have skyrocketed since Harris signed that bill.  Harris is pointing to the criminally misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act," which got zero Republican votes, and which was supposed to lower the cost of prescription drugs by giving, as Harris puts it, "Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma."  When George W. Bush established Medicare Part D, he let private insurers negotiate with drug companies over prices and then compete for seniors' business.  The result was a program that cost both seniors and taxpayers far less than government bureaucrats had expected, offered seniors a wide range of options, and had premiums that barely budged for more than a decade.

"You've got to take responsibility for what happened in your administration.".  Oops!  The above quote may be Kamala Harris's most devastating, grievous error in her sit-down with Bret Baier last night.  We can be sure that those words escaped her mouth before she realized what she was saying. [...] With that quote, she admitted that she and Biden are indeed responsible for
  [#1]   The horrific withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  [#2]   The mind-numbing, tragic consequences of their open border.  At least ten million migrants have entered the country unvetted, thousands of criminals among them.  Sex- and human-trafficking has exploded as a result.  So has crime across the board.
  [#3]   The war in Ukraine — millions lives lost there.
  [#4]   The Hamas attack on Israel, due to their obvious anti-Israel bias.
  [#5]   The irresponsible spending that gave us the highest inflation in decades.
  [#6]   The evisceration of our military with DIE and transgenderism.
  [#7]   the gift of billions of dollars to Iran that has funded the subsequent terrorism against Israel.
  [#8]   The lawfare unleashed on Trump, all of it manufactured out of whole cloth to take him off the board.
  [#9]   The weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, etc. that has led to peaceful protesters being imprisoned for exercising their First Amendment rights.
  [#10]   The fact that Joe Biden is owned by the Chinese Communist Party — he owes his wealth to them.
  [#11]   The administration's disastrous response to the hurricanes.
By her standard, Harris must "take responsibility" for all of the above.

The U.S. government [is] now effectively a criminal organization.  Think of the millions of illegal aliens, many of them criminals, allowed to cross our border in recent years.  Countless numbers of whom have been given cell phones, pre-loaded credit cards, driver's licenses, and been transported around the country and put up in nice hotels.  Or sent to 'battleground states.'  For some reason.  Coincidence, I'm sure.  The government doesn't want you to think about the staggering amount of crime, sex-trafficking, and fentanyl that has come across the border with them.  Mention this, and you will likely be accused of racism, xenophobia ... or of spreading 'misinformation.'

Communists Out of the Closet.  [An earlier] article described the Cloward-Piven Crisis strategy that Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two radical Columbia University professors, dreamed up.  Their first target was the welfare system.  They hoped that signing up every person eligible for every public service would overwhelm the system and cause its collapse.  In the ashes, they would then suggest the solution:  a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.  (Note that such proposals have been added to Biden spending bills but were stripped out).  They went on to target voting and were the authors of the National Voter Registration Act (i.e., Motor Voter).  That law made voter roll maintenance much harder while making non-citizen voting much easier.  Since then, the Crisis strategy has expanded into virtually every area of our lives.  Almost everything we are witnessing in our nation today is part of it.  From tidal waves of illegal immigration (don't call them "migrants," which is leftist terminology; they are illegal aliens), the fentanyl crisis, suicides at record numbers (especially among the young and members of the military), to the war on energy, the war on morality and sexuality, the War on White America and the War on Black America (yes there is one of those too) — everywhere you turn the Left has put our nation at war with itself, with the ultimate goal of overwhelming it to the point that the entire society degenerates into chaos and civil war.  That end goal will provide the pretext for the powers that be to declare martial law, seize our guns and take over by force if necessary.

The 2020 Theft Saved This Country.  First let's state the obvious:  of course Trump won in 2020.  The statistics are overwhelming.  Leftists often try to use statistics to "prove" racial discrimination in all sorts of situations.  For some reason, they don't seem to have the same desires and statistical certitude regarding the overwhelming statistical evidence that Trump won.  Combine this with the truckload of obvious — and unexplainable — shenanigans across many states and it is clear the rightful winner was Trump. [...] If Trump's win had been acknowledged he would have been President the last 3.5 years.  A whole lot of bad things in this country and across the globe wouldn't have happened.  But they did.  But these actions and their results have acted as a catalyst to real change.

Ideological Excrement Has Poisoned the West.  The West has seen the destruction of marriage, and now even the destruction of the human being as male or female, promoted as progress, both in the name of equality.  Constant disestablishment of norms recognized by nearly every civilization, all in the name of "equality," is an attempt to create civilizational sanctification achieved by ceaseless flagellation deemed necessitated by a radicalized definition of "equality."  But the endless punishment of a given culture's norms only leads to wounding and hardened scarification of the individual's and society's conscience, their innate sense of moral order.  The never-ending revolution in the name of "equality," the constant wounding and amputation of foundational principles only leads to sickness and to the great equalizer of death, be it individual or collective.

How Biden, Harris and Granholm Made a Looming Grid Crisis Immeasurably Worse.  Last May — that's [M]ay of 2023, not this year — I wrote a story at Forbes about the looming crisis in the US power grid due to a shortage of high-capacity power transformers and their mucked-up supply chains.  At the time, it was a crisis that had been developing for more than 2 years — since late 2020.  It was a rising issue the U.S. Department of Energy, led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm, was about to make immensely worse by forcing manufacturers and power companies to comply with new, completely unneeded efficiency standard imposed on products that already function at well over 99% efficiency.  Republicans in congress were becoming increasingly alarmed by the DOE effort, which would exacerbate the supply issue by forcing makers of these scarce transformers to retool entire factories and create entirely new components in order to comply.

Natural Disasters and Unnatural Expectations.  Hurricanes can be predicted; the devastation they leave behind often cannot.  Hurricane Helene left some people on its path alone, while causing devastating flooding for others. [...] Sure, there are charities, more than ever, in some places.  But charities exist on donations, and many such donations have dried up in recent years, as DEI/ESG policies have encouraged corporate donors to shift their corporate donations away from traditional charities toward other, more politically-directed nonprofits. [...] In fact, the biggest disaster in the country for the past four years hasn't been caused by Mother Nature at all, it's been caused by the abandonment of our borders by Basement Joe Biden and Border Czar Kamala Harris.  There's been a shift in the way that charities work in the United States; too many of them now focus on sheltering and feeding the tens of millions of illegal aliens and "refugees" that clutter our cities, big and small.  Many hotels and motels have no vacancies, because they're full up with Latin Americans, Africans, Haitians, and Asians, who walked here, drove here, or were flown in by the Biden-Harris regime, over the past four years.

CNN gets all puppet-y again.  It is not fear: [...] To tell the public about how disastrous it is that Biden and Harris have built up the finances of Russia, Iran, and non-state terrorists with high energy prices.  [¶] To tell the people how much more dangerous the world has been since they took office.  [¶] To tell people how they kept schools and businesses closed due to the COVID lies of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and a host of other bad actors.  [¶] To tell the people that Democrats fired people who chose not to take a COVID vaccine.  [¶] To tell people how Democrats are willing to damage women's sports.  [¶] To tell people that Biden and Harris have weaponized the Justice Department by going after him, Catholics, parents, pro-life people, Elon Musk, and other Trump supporters.

Progressivism: An Arrogant and Deadly Worldview.  After Lyndon Johnson declared "war on poverty," the federal government spent trillions of dollars only to make Americans relatively poorer while greatly increasing wealth inequality.  Four decades after the creation of the Department of Education, American children have never performed so poorly on standardized tests.  Barack Obama and the Democrats insisted on "saving" Americans from high medical costs by nationalizing health care — only to give us a broken hospital system that is even more costly.  Anything the government touches turns into an inefficient and poorly run enterprise, which is why so many Americans correctly feared that Obamacare would create the medical equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service or the local DMV.  In turn, "the best boys from the best colleges" have turned postal employees and Department of Motor Vehicle personnel into essential workers for registering voters and collecting ballots.

Economic Collapse In Slow Motion.  The commercial real estate market is in the doldrums across much of the U.S., but it is especially bad in some places.  Like Minneapolis. [...] Why are Minneapolis's problems so acute?  Because of crime.  Formerly a low-crime city, the George Floyd riots and accompanying attacks on law enforcement have caused a dramatic increase in the rate of serious crime.  That has caused businesses, as well as individuals, to avoid the city.  With leases continuing to expire, there is no reason to think the downward trends have bottomed out.  The City of Minneapolis, meanwhile, is exploring ways of redeveloping George Floyd Square in a manner that will, in the mayor's words, "honor the life of George Floyd, and point toward a more equitable future."  Somehow, I don't think that is the focus that the city needs if it is to recover economically.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris owe the world an apology for the perils they've created.  If President Biden had any decency, he'd limit his United Nations speech Tuesday to two words:  I'm sorry.  Kamala Harris should echo that.  Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates once warned (all too rightly) that Biden had been "wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades."  Over the past four years, Joe and Kam have continued that pattern, leaving the world facing its most perilous threats in decades.  Start with the disastrous bugout from Afghanistan, executed in blatant defiance of every military adviser and the plan left in place by the Trump team.  That bugout enabled the Taliban to triumphantly retake control of the country, humiliating America and seizing billions in weaponry our forces left behind — erasing all the progress made in 20 years of fighting.  Worse, it sent the message that Washington can't be trusted as an ally, that aggressors could get away with almost anything.

The Grim Specter Haunting America.  Many of us have experienced our malaise firsthand.  If we haven't, friends and family have.  If they've been spared, it's in every news report: rampant suicides, addictions, homelessness, unpunished violent crime, a border clobbered by hordes of criminals and terrorists, towns inundated with illegal immigrants dropped at their doorsteps and draining their public services, intra-familial murder with parents killing children and children killing parents, the elderly beaten by hoodlums, children changing their gender, drag queens enticing our kids.  Our streets aren't safe, our schools aren't safe, our malls aren't safe, and our presidential candidates aren't safe.  We send our loving, mentally intact children off to college only for them to return politically and culturally radicalized, addicted to drugs, and treated with medications for a long list of entirely new mental conditions.

Kamalism Will Destroy America.  The 2020 riots showed Kamalism in action.  The regime's paramilitary operation, BLM and Antifa among others, sparked the fire that lit the riots; the regime's intellectuals justified them; corporations and foundations funded them; the media covered them over; politicians fanned the flames; and the regime's justice apparatus, including Kamala herself, freed law breakers.  Even the military got into the act, denying Trump needed resources.  According to Kamalism, it's fine for boys to compete against girls in school sports.  A child can have an abortion or sex change without parental consent.  And it is somehow impossible to know what a woman is.  This is all obviously insane.  But it gets worse — much worse.  Under Kamalism we usher in millions of illegal immigrants with cultures different from our own and then insist on not assimilating them.  The regime's military is increasingly focused on racial and gender quotas at the expense of military readiness.  Kamalism also wants to put an end to the traditional mother/father family.  Kamalism plays Americans for foolish children in need of close supervision, which can only be provided by their "betters": the destructive Left.

The Catastrophic Costs of Government-Dictated Green Energy.  All the energy related problems we have experienced in recent years, which have been a lot:  high gasoline prices, higher heating bills, higher electricity bills, and unreliable electricity, which is a huge problem we need to talk much more about, are the result of government-dictated green energy.  And its very simple.  When you shackle the most cost effective and scalable source of energy, fossil fuels, and you subsidize unreliable solar and wind, that wouldn't otherwise be competitive, energy necessarily becomes more expensive, less reliable and less secure.  So again, it's very simple.  Unfortunately the current administration and many others are engaged in a denial campaign blaming our energy problems on everything but their own policies.

ABC's Trump fact check blows up.  Those blue cities also tend to harass and prosecute officers for doing their jobs, while simultaneously denying them necessary and constitutional tools like stop and frisk, so in self-defense remaining officers tend to do as little as possible, and particularly avoid contact with black criminals, who tend to commit the most crimes, largely against honest black people.  Citizens quickly learn the police aren't going to respond to calls for service, even 911 calls, and even if they do, they're not going to solve any crimes, so they quit making reports.  Criminals, knowing the police are pretty much going to ignore them and people aren't going to report their crimes are delighted, and do things they wouldn't think of doing in communities with fully functional criminal justice systems.  Ending bail and refusing to prosecute criminals doesn't help.  Those same blue cities, knowing crime rates are at obscene, politically deadly, levels do all they can to cover up, and have long since stopped reporting to the FBI.  The politicians of any city with out-of-control crime rates tend to avoid talking about them, but blue cities, unable to admit their beliefs and policies are insane and encourage crime, are particularly unwilling to admit the truth.

Car Insurance up a Whopping 55% in Biden-Harris Admin's America.  Car insurance rates have skyrocketed under the leadership of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and Americans are feeling the squeeze.  Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that car insurance prices rose 55 percent from January 2021 — when Biden and Harris first took office — to July 2024 — the last year of their first term.  [Advertisement]  Once again, their policies are to blame.  As Breitbart News previously reported, Americans' auto insurance rates are rapidly rising due to the pro-migration policies of Biden and Harris, putting millions of these new migrant drivers — "often without driver training or English language lessons" — on the road, increasing risk.  [Advertisement]  As Breitbart News detailed, "Since 2021, Biden has imported roughly ten million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants.  The huge inflow has stalled wages and raised housing costs and has also imposed many other civic and social costs on ordinary Americans."  [Advertisement]

Who's Ready for World War Three?  Americans broadly remain blissfully oblivious regarding how close to World War Three we are and have been since early 2022.  Repeated warnings from U.S. military and intelligence leaders about this dire state of affairs, which this newsletter reported in detail, with looming war against Russia, or China, or Iran — or worst of all, Russia, China and Iran — have fallen on deaf ears.  Not to mention that, given the parlous state of America's military, amid recruiting and retention problems, shortages of weapons and munitions, plus the anemic condition of our defense industrial base, the Pentagon would be hard-pressed to prevail in even one major theater war, while it would almost certainly lose, probably fast, when confronted by three of them at once.  This alarming strategic situation keeps failing to register with the public, even in an election year.  Americans seem not to care that World War Three looms, while the Biden-Harris administration, whoever is actually running it, is eager to distract the public from the geopolitical catastrophe they've sleepwalked America into, while allowing our military to further degrade.

Tolerance is where nations go to die.  We are tolerating our kids being indoctrinated instead of educated in our schools.  We are tolerating the mutilation of their genitalia, and the consequent theft of their sexual health in their adult years[,] often aided and abetted by their "educators."  We tolerated lockdowns and the mandatory introduction of experimental mRNA vaccines into our bodies.  And being told we couldn't attend the weddings or funerals of our loved ones.  And it appears highly likely that we are going to tolerate the ruination of our economy, as we are tolerating the destruction of our urban areas.  It seems a near certainty that we will tolerate the demise of the nuclear family, as we are halfway there already.  In fact, odds are, we will tolerate the utter dissolution of our society, and the death of America herself, as we have tolerated an open Southern border.

The US Is Spiraling Down the Doom-Loop Drain Hole Rapidly Now.  First, we hit a level of debt years ago that seemed astonishing at the time when the national debt topped one-trillion dollars for the first time in over 200 years of being a nation.  Recently, we hit the insane level where just the deficit that adds to the debt each year hit one-trillion dollars a year.  We, then, soared almost immediately right past that to where we had a trillion-dollar deficit more than twice a year.  And now, today, we finally hit the outer limits where just the annual interest on the debt is a trillion dollars.  If anyone thinks we are not caught in a debt doom loop, consider this: we can only pay that interest by taking out more debt just for debt service.  So, we're forced to take out a trillion in new debt each year just to cover the interest on the old debt, and that amount is growing quickly.

New poll: 81% say cost of food is rising faster than income.  According to a new poll from a D.C-based nonprofit No Kid Hungry, the number of Texans negatively affected by grocery store prices continues to increase, with a vast majority (81%) reporting that food costs are outpacing their incomes, and around half (49%) revealing that they've either cut back on meat consumption, or given it up altogether to remain in budget.  The second statistic is exaggerated among lower-income families making less than $50k, with children in the public school system, where it goes from around one-out-of-two to almost three-out-of-four (71%).  These survey results echo an earlier poll, conducted this past spring in New York, where almost nine-out-of-ten (85%) respondents said food prices were accelerating past their incomes; [...]

The Debate at the Kitchen Table.  If the dryer or oven breaks, and costs a couple hundred to fix, versus two or three times that to replace, that was always a difficult debate, but we knew how to have it, how to weigh the pros and cons of getting a few more years out of it versus just getting a new one.  But today, with the tyrannical climate hoax — based restrictions that the federal government has placed on household appliances, whole new issues, and incredibly higher costs, must be factored in.  If your gas furnace or central air unit breaks today, there's the one price to just repair it, which is higher every year, of course.  But now there's something new:  new refrigerant mandates, and the double phase furnace mandate about to kick in, mean that if you replace it today, it will cost a lot, but if you wait a couple years, the replacement will cost twice as much as that — because the Biden-Harris regime has banned the perfectly functional, affordable technologies that have worked well for decades, and mandated high-end versions instead, for both manufacture and sale.

It is a joke when journalists claim they care about journalistic integrity.  Trump handed off a rapidly growing economy, not a disaster, with extremely low inflation and a fairly secure border, yet somehow he must be defeated.  Trump did not put out a fictional dossier to destroy his political opponent.  That was Hillary and the DNC.  Trump did not use the FBI to spy on and lie about his political opponent.  That was Obama and Biden.  Trump did not illegally spy on and jail journalists.  That was Biden and Obama.  Biden, Harris took a rapidly growing economy and low inflation and destroyed the purchasing power of Americans, especially the poor and middle class.  Biden, Harris took a relatively peaceful world and destroyed it by building up the finances of Iran and Russia.  Biden, Harris took a fairly secure border and opened it up, decimating cities and towns throughout the U.S.

It's Not the Fed That's Causing Inflation.  In their first week in January 2021, Joe and Kamala cut off every source of oil within their jurisdiction.  In the very next month, three things happened: our domestic production of oil plunged from 13.1 million barrels per day to 9.7, oil prices doubled from $55 to $110 per barrel, and the monthly inflation rate leaped from 1.4 percent to 9.6 percent.  The red-herring inflation chart they offer shows inflation peaking six months later, which distracts from the fact that their action was the sole cause of inflation.  It is a "trailing average" chart.  It takes the 9.6-percent monthly rate and averages it with the previous 11 months, which averaged 1.8 percent, and so on.  Thus, the peak of inflation appears to happen six months after it actually peaked.  A monthly chart would show the truth: that the reduction of oil supply was the direct cause of inflation.

A Harris Victory in 2024 Would Make the U.S. a One-Party State.  The election of 2024 will be epochal for the United States.  It will be as impactful on the course of the nation as the election of 1860 and the ensuing Civil War.  This November's election will determine whether the U.S. remains a viable constitutional republic or becomes a one-party state.  If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the result will be the realization of President Obama's intent, voiced in his famous 2008 remark, to "fundamentally transform" the United States.  Thus, the election is important for all Americans, particularly the voting public, to be aware that should Harris win, then 2024 is likely to be the last free, fair, and competitive election in the U.S.  If she does win, then the U.S. by 2028 will be a one-party country, with the Democrats in permanent control, as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or Hawaii are at the state level today.

Rising traffic deaths are the result of woke policies.  The number of traffic-related deaths, adjusted for population growth, remained relatively static for decades until 2014, when that number jumped by 20% and started a trend upwards. 2014 also marked a change in practice by the IMPD (Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department) and many law enforcement agencies around the country following Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri.  Michael Brown was killed while attacking police officer Darren Wilson.  The early narrative was that he was shot while surrendering to the officer with his hands raised in the air.  Despite being counterfactual, the early narrative was powerful and unrelenting.  Subsequent public pressure caused police agencies to pull back from police initiating traffic stops and other common law enforcement practices.  This rollback of law enforcement was termed "the Ferguson Effect."  The IMPD fell in line.

Kamala Harris caused America's inflation nightmare; here's how.  Two years on, it's time we rename the Inflation Reduction Act as the Inflation Expansion Act.  The Inflation Expansion Act (IEA), passed two years ago, marks a significant turning point in the economic policy of the United States.  Spearheaded by Kamala Harris, whose decisive vote in the Senate enabled the bill's passage, it has wreaked havoc on the American economy.  Its effects are palpable: inflation has surged, energy prices have skyrocketed, and the cost of living has become increasingly unaffordable.  The Biden-Harris administration's ironically-titled "Build Back Better" agenda, which underpins the IEA, has exacerbated these issues.  From an economic standpoint, the IEA's purported goal was to reduce the deficit by $58 billion.  Instead, it has resulted in an alarming deficit increase of over $796 billion.

Here's The Real Story Of How America's Squatter Epidemic All Began.  There's a squatter epidemic taking place in cities across America.  With lax eviction laws and back-logged court systems, blue cities have empowered a whole cottage industry of housing crime.  Professional squatters use fake leases to turn nice properties into trap houses.  Often, they turn to violence to keep the owners off "their" property.  And good luck getting an eviction, which can take years to rule on let alone enforce.  If squatters can show they've resided in a property for as little as 30 days, it's almost impossible to get them out.  From the smallest apartment to the grandest estate, no one is immune.  How did we get here?

The politics of police defunding.  The "defund the police" campaign that started over four years ago has done catastrophic damage to our country.  In the wake of said campaign, a number of politicians — including President Joe Biden — have pushed for the removal of funds from police forces, diverting them elsewhere in an effort to "teach a lesson," as it were.  However, the real lesson came in the backfire of the campaign.  Thousands of officers, particularly in New York, have left their posts as a result of the lack of support and many still believe that, even in the aftermath of this with a massive increase in crime, it's still the "right move" when it comes to the concerns of their community.  Tell that to Oakland.  The California city has seen a massive number of criminal acts over the past few days, including shootings and a hit-and-run incident, along with robberies and much more.

America: A Nation Committing Suicide.  It is the business of politicians to aspire to power, to tell us that our problems are because of the other party, and to divert our attention from where it should be — on ourselves.  If we so focus, many I believe will conclude it is hard to see a future for a nation with fewer and fewer children, greater and greater government and debt, and less and less economic growth.  Per the Congressional Budget Office, growth of the U.S. population averaged 0.9% per year from 1974 to 2023.  It projects from 2024 to 2054 it will be half that — 0.4% per year.  For a population to hold steady, to not shrink, the average fertility rate must be 2.1 children per woman.  We have fallen well below this to 1.67, and CBO projects it will stay there.  The implications are an aging population, with fewer and fewer of working age and an increasing burden of the expenses of an aging population — greater retirement costs and health care costs.

The Editor says...
Whose fault is that?  Which party supports homosexuality, gender confusion, abortion, and feminism?

'Joy' and 'Hope' in Kamala Harris's America:  Car Insurance Prices up 54%.  Americans are having a hard time finding the "joy" and "hope" that Democrat elites touted during their August convention, as they struggle to pay their bills while the cost of goods skyrockets.  This includes car insurance prices, which, under Vice President Kamala Harris's watch, rose 54 percent.

Do People Vote on What They Know or How They Feel?  As I have written previously, when liberals govern, things are worse for low-income minority families than elsewhere:
  •   Nearly half the homeless people in the country now live in California.
  •   The New York City school system is among the most segregated in the country; and San Francisco ranks up there as well.
  •   In Washington D.C., black students attend schools with 55 percent higher poverty rates than white students and score an average of 5 grades lower on achievement tests.

The Editor says...
And what about Atlanta and Chicago and Baltimore?  More of the same.  Electing a black mayor doesn't solve anything.

Economic prosperity and environmental protection.  [T]he Biden-Harris administration's environmental policies have been defined by regulatory overreach and economic disruption; their approach to climate change and environmental protection has often been characterized by stringent regulations and ambitious goals that have led to increased energy costs and economic uncertainty.  These policies have placed undue burdens on businesses and working-class Americans, who have borne the brunt of higher energy prices and reduced economic opportunities.  Kamala Harris, as the Democrat nominee, will continue these policies, exacerbating the economic challenges faced by many Americans.  The expansion of regulatory frameworks and the push for aggressive climate agendas threaten to stifle economic growth and job creation, undermining the progress made during Trump's presidency.

Same Pig, Different Lipstick:  Covid and the Green Revolution.  Green Revolution practices have caused serious environmental harm.  Aquifers are being depleted as irrigation water is pumped from the ground faster than rain recharges it.  Unimaginable amounts of fertile soil have been washed or blown away.  Fertilizers and pesticides pollute soil, air, and water beyond the agricultural lands themselves, including rivers and oceans.  Converting forests, grasslands, and wetlands into farmland has destroyed much wildlife/game habitat and lessened atmospheric carbon uptake.  Consequently, the natural resources needed to produce food have been degraded, portending eventual, widespread crop failure and food shortages.  Economic and social damage has also been done.  Green Revolution inputs were too costly for small farmers.  Therefore, they couldn't compete against larger, well-capitalized, or debt-leveraged growers, whose higher yields glutted markets and depressed prices.

Here is an example of what 60 years of Great Society anti-poverty programs can yield.  For the last 60 years, Democrats have claimed that their war on poverty and all their handouts helped lift people up.  Instead, it encouraged single parenthood and single parenthood is the greatest indicator of who will end up in poverty.  The result of these supposedly empathetic policies is generational poverty. [...] There is nothing compassionate or generous about encouraging single parenthood.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about giving away subsidies on everything to make people dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate or generous about refusing to enforce border laws and flooding towns with more people who will be dependent on the government.  There is nothing compassionate and generous when Democrats block poor and minority children from opportunities to go to better schools.  And there is nothing compassionate, generous or smart in destroying companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  That destroys the poor and middle class.

Kamala Harris' Oakland Is a Disaster.  [Scroll down]  Oakland has every imaginable advantage of climate and geography.  The weather is immaculate [...] and the city has a major port that is practically a tax gold mine.  Yet, Oakland always seems to be on the verge of full-on implosion.  With the departure of the Oakland A's, a Major League Baseball team, at the end of this season, the city will lose its third and last major sports franchise in a decade.  The loss is symbolic of a city that feels like a collapsing settlement at the edge of the Roman Empire on the eve of the Dark Ages.  It's worth noting that without the last-minute sale of the dilapidated Oakland Coliseum, the city was looking at a budget shortfall of over $100 million.  The sale hardly solves the long-term problem.  Oakland is pondering doling out reparations to black residents, but a reparations panel said it needed $5 million just to draw up a plan.  This is a city that's used to treating taxpayers like a piggy bank for grifting.  Of course, Oakland has been associated with high crime rates for decades, but following the mayhem of 2020 the challenge became acute.  In 2021, the Oakland City Council in effect voted to defund its already beleaguered police department.  Crime exploded.

The World Is on Fire Thanks to Biden and Harris.  When President Donald Trump left office, there was peace throughout the world.  Today, there are ongoing wars in several regions of the world and other conflicts could escalate into war at any time.  While Trump was President, Russia did not invade any countries, in contrast to what happened during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. [...] In August of 2021, the United States demonstrated tremendous weakness during the withdrawal of our military forces from Afghanistan.  The debacle resulted in the death of 13 American military heroes and billions of dollars in military equipment left behind for the use of the Taliban terrorist regime.  In addition, Biden and Harris abandoned the massive Bagram air base in Afghanistan.  The base featured a 12,000-foot runway, a 50-room hospital, and 100 parking spots for fighter jets.  In their haste to depart the facility, the United States military left behind 3.5 million items, including armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition.

Kamala Harris polling better than Donald Trump?  The Biden administration locked up patriots who strolled through — or near — "The People's House" on Jan. 6, some of whom are still imprisoned, but has supported legislation that lets hardened criminals go free.  Moreover, it has made deals with countries that sponsor terrorists — and with terrorists themselves, when it is not actually paying them or gifting them advanced military equipment.  The Biden administration has let illegal aliens in by the umpteen millions and treats them better than it does American citizens.  Biden administration policies have caused rampant inflation that has eaten up a significant part of Americans' earnings and made home ownership for many young families virtually impossible.  Democrat and Democrat-appointed judges have thrown the book at Trump for imagined or comparatively trifling "crimes" while treating much more serious offenses committed by the likes of Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.

The Denigration of America's Great Cities.  [Scroll down]  Kamala Harris and her supporters will blame the urban decline on racism, capitalism, white supremacy, historical economic divide between white persons and minorities, and American republican constitutionalism.  Though there are elements of all these issues affecting the conditions of American cities these are not the major cause of the decline I have witnessed.  The cause is intentional and ideological and found in communities run by progressive Democrat mayors.  The Great Society programs pushed by President Lyndon Johnson accelerated the growth of urban slums after a period of economic energy following World War II.  Marxist philosophical programs have furthered urban decline during the past three decades and was given an additional push by the Obama administration.  The Biden administration has furthered this effort through its border policies, excessive targeted domestic spending, and rhetoric.  Defund the police efforts have shrunk these forces of protection.  The chaos these mayors and DAs have created via additional crime, declining economic opportunity, racial division, fewer prosecutions, and increased taxation allows these above narratives to appear real.

America's Lab Rats?  Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.  Consider:  Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?  Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that "Hamas is coming" while spewing hatred toward Jews — and all with impunity?  A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?  Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo — as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?  Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?  In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade.

Deep State Carnival Barkers Distract Us with Kamala.  Pay no attention to the sky-high interest rates making home ownership unaffordable or the sky-high inflation that has doubled the cost of basic necessities.  So what if the average person's paycheck barely covers monthly gas and grocery bills?  Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris identifies as a female "person of color."  She is a shiny object that should help everyone forget about personal financial troubles.  Don't worry about the fifteen million illegal immigrants that have streamed across the border in the last three years.  Ignore the precipitous rise in violent crime and the growing homelessness crisis.  Diversity remains our strength!  And crime statistics can be easily manipulated to reflect a better reality!  Forget about mail-in-ballot fraud and other voting crimes.  Democrat secretaries of state and Democrat attorneys general have vouched for the security of our elections.  Democrat judges have vouched for those Democrats' vouching.  Anybody who objects is simply an "election-denier" who should be imprisoned for "insurrection."

Trump's Courage and Biden's Failures.  One is tempted to become one of those awful conspiracy theorists who might propose that this presidency has been planned from election day November 2020 through the Biden Executive Orders reversing most of Trump's Executive Orders through the Afghan debacle, through the inflation debacle, through the Ukraine v.  Russia debacle, through the deficit debacle, through the Transgender Visibility Day being held on Easter Sunday debacle, through the campus riots against Israel and Jews debacle (which continues without real-time censure or comments from the Administration), through the lawfare prosecution and persecution of J6 defendants (whatever happened to habeas corpus?) debacle, through the decline in the dollar in international markets debacle, through the illegal mass immigration debacle, and through the fentanyl death debacle, the shifting away from Medicare to Medicare Advantage debacle, the computerization of elections debacle, the Balkanization of America into so many sub-ethnicities and sub-groupings debacle, and now the recommendation of Kamala Harris for President debacle.

A 'Livable America' According to Radical Leftists.  A number of celebrities and VIPs of the radical left, including one who betrayed our Vietnam veterans while they were putting their lives on the line for this country, have been warning that if President Trump returns to office, life in America will not be livable, as it presumably is under Biden.  Whoever believes this must also believe, or pretend to believe, that America is more livable when the following conditions are in place:
  •   Immigration laws are violated to allow foreigners to enter this country illegally, disregarding the warnings, official and unofficial, against terrorist infiltrators. [...]
  •   You can go to prison for disagreeing with the government's policies, dictatorship style, [regardless of] the Constitution. [...]
  •   Cities under Democrat mayors make the list of worst in the country to live in. [...]
  •   Crime is promoted instead of fought, with policies that decriminalize felony and make the police stand down where it occurs. [...]
  •   Increasingly less of your income is yours to keep, as taxes keep growing, unabated. [...]
  •   Small businesses are crushed under excessive regulations, forcing many out of business. [...]
  •   Big businesses send jobs overseas, leaving American workers and their families struggling to survive. [...]
  •   Babies that are not wanted are killed before they leave their mother's womb and disposed of like trash. [...]
It is necessary for one to be totally insensitive, brainwashed, and uninformed to permit such conditions, and to have missed the fact that President Trump acted vigorously to end such barbaric attacks against the American people.

The Editor says...
This page seems to accumulate bullet lists, but that's the easiest way to list all the poisonous fruits.

When will Democrats be held responsible for their Trump-hating rhetoric?  We tolerate a lot of things.  To wit:
  •   Democrats and the media falsely accused the Trump campaign of colluding with the Russians.  And no one cared.
  •   Democrats, the media, and 51 top intelligence officials ludicrously claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop "had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign."  And no one cared.
  •   Antifa, BLM, and assorted thugs burned down parts of our major cities, did billions of dollars in damage and killed and injured dozens of people.  And no one really cared.
  •   Statues of past heroes and historic figures — even including Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill — were vandalized or destroyed.  And no one cared.
  •   We were locked down for many months on end and told that we couldn't even attend the weddings — or funerals — of our loved ones.  Our kids were kept out of school.  Many folks were told that their jobs weren't all that important.  Many businesses closed.  And no one really cared. [...]
  •   Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear of an illegal immigrant raping, assaulting, or murdering someone.  And no one truly cares.
  •   The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to imprison its primary political opponent — to save our democracy — and no one truly cares.  Least of all spineless RINOs and other Republicans.

Coming Disaster - Nearly 50% of Small Business Will Not Survive if Biden Gets 2nd Term:  Survey.  A survey of small business owners found almost half believe a second term for President Joe Biden would be the iceberg that would send their enterprise to the bottom.  Forty-nine percent of those who responded to the PublicSquare/RedBalloon poll said their businesses "definitely" or "probably" would not make it through four more years of Biden.  Seven in 10 business owners said they were holding off on adding staff and six in 10 said they expected stagflation — when prices rise but the economy does not grow.

Another Biden 'Achievement': Interest Payments [are] Now Second Largest Federal Spending Category.  If you want to know just how dire the federal government's fiscal situation is, consider the fact that interest on the national debt for the first time now tops every other spending category but one, according to the latest monthly report from the Treasury.  This "achievement" has been brought to you by President Joe Biden.  According to the report, the federal government spent $682 billion in "net interest" payments so far this fiscal year (which ends Sept. 30). That's more than all the money spent on "health" ($670 billion), national defense ($644 billion), and income security — which includes payments to the poor ($508 billion).

Americans Feel The Heat As Bidenflation Climbs Toward 20%.  The dark reality of Bidenomics is the alarming 19.5% inflation under the President's watch, which is 5.7% annually.  When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Since March 2021, inflation has consistently remained above the Federal Reserve's 2% target for 40 consecutive months.  Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion.  To finance his spending spree, the Federal Reserve printed money from nothing.  The increased money supply, without a corresponding increase in goods and services, reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

Dethroning Biden.  Joe Biden's cognitive decline has been obvious since he launched his presidential 'run' in 2019. [...] Once he was 'elected', the cognitively impaired Biden was used as a rubber stamp to push their agenda. [...] The results of the Biden administration's misgovernance are open borders, out-of-control inflation, rampant crime, targeting of dissenting citizens, identity politics giving preference over merit, and spending on gratuitous foreign wars and items such as the Green New Deal.

Can They Cheat a Dementia Sufferer Back into the White House?  Biden is damaged goods — for reasons discussed and politically.  Four years ago, Biden was running as a challenger.  2020 was a referendum on Trump's performance.  This year, the roles are reversed.  Even a healthy Biden would have to defend the indefensible.  The cost of living is killing average wage earners.  The border remains wide open.  Crime has skyrocketed in cities.  Campuses were roiled with anti-Semitism.  Biden's handlers are edging us closer to war with Russia.  Where's the prosperity, where's the peace?  Compounding Biden's troubles is the unique feature of this race: a former president is contesting a sitting president for the White House.  That hasn't happened since the 1892 Cleveland-Harris contest.  Was life better under Trump or is it better under Biden?  That's a no-brainer for most voters.

Too Many Rights?  Our Constitution worked successfully for almost 200 years until a litany of newly perceived pseudo-rights burst upon the scene, devaluing our core historical rights.  How did we transition from a generally accepted interpretation of the Constitution to where we are today, where almost anything can be inferred?  By corrupting or diminishing core tenets and understanding of the Constitution, we have created discord and distrust in our court systems that will deliver you any answer you want if you shop the right court or judge in our court system.  Millions of individuals see what is happening as intentional and contrived, with an end game of weakening our country and seeding the ground for what's to come.

Bringing in the lawyers won't solve this problem.
Joe Biden Threatens to Send Out Attorneys General to Go After Grocers in Plan to Combat His Food Inflation Crisis.  Grocery prices are soaring thanks to Joe Biden's tax-and-spend policies.  The US economy is in bad shape because of Joe Biden's war on domestic oil and the 'Green New Deal' disguised as the 'Inflation Reduction Act.'  Moody's Investors Service recently cut the US's outlook to negative.  Moody's lowered its ratings outlook on the US government citing high interest rates, government spending, and deficits.  Inflation is still high, grocery prices are up more than 19%, gas prices are still high and more than 15 million illegal aliens have poured over the border since Biden was installed in January 2021.  Most Americans are struggling to put food on the table thanks to Joe Biden.

What exactly are Biden's achievements in his first three-and-a-half years?  Here are some things Biden deserves credit for, which may be why he isn't so popular:  Mass migration from a dissolved border, which has made cartels rich, increased drug-, human-, and child-trafficking, is destroying cities, and putting pressure on schools, police, housing, and health care, and made our southern border is now the deadliest border in the world; dictatorially and unconstitutionally paying off hundreds of billions in student loans; making the world much more dangerous, as Biden's energy policies are essentially funding Russia and Iran (we are funding both sides in the Ukraine-Russia conflict); and destroying women's sports by making them compete against men.

The deliberate murder of virtue.  For decades, the American Left has been making a deliberate and successful attempt to kill virtue.  Much of what they do demonstrates a disregard for normal traditional American virtues such as decency, consideration, productivity, respect, decorum, honor, and moderation.  The truly virtuous would never dream of announcing their sexual preferences in public. [...] The Left have taken a careful and systematic approach to destroying American virtues such as hard work, modesty, humility, consideration of others, and planning for the future.  In their places, the Left decided that it was virtuous to be demanding, slothful, narcissistic, godless, and sexually profligate.  The Leftist virtue-killers think the government has its own money to give to them for doing nothing.  Taking what belongs to others and lazing about the house and streets with it is not virtuous.  It is theft; taxpayers pay for the progeny and sloth of these unvirtuous slackers.  If the Left can remove time-honored virtues such as productivity and merit, they create a national movement where they can be taken care of by others without consideration for those who really pay.  You get a nation of unvirtuous entitled slobs.

An affront to America.  [Scroll down]  Ultimately, the Democratic voters are responsible.  But they'll tell you they didn't know.  They've been lied to by the Democratic Party.  The fabled and very effective Democratic propaganda machine lies to Democrats as well as us poor Republicans.  You have to think for yourself lest the lying Wizard behind the Green Curtain leads us all into oblivion.
  •   Joe Biden doesn't like Donald Trump, so Joe blew away Trump's border control policies and we now have a disaster.
  •   Joe Biden doesn't like Donald Trump, so Joe blew away Trump's energy independence policies and we now face an energy shortage.
  •   Prices are 20% higher and interest rates more than doubled under Biden than under Trump.
  •   With the high prices, high interests, and the influx of illegals, there is a housing crisis under Biden.
  •   There is war in Europe under Biden, there was peace under Trump.
  •   There is war in the Middle East under Biden.  The Trump Abraham Accords, which promised Middle East peace, are on life-support and anti-Semitic violence rages throughout our country under Biden.

Barack Obama and the Stupidity of the American Voter.  Is the American media establishment fair, balanced, and independent?  Do the FBI, CIA, IRS, and Justice Department stand for the rule of law, judicial fairness, and the American way?  Is the GOP a formidable political foe, working hard to contain the excesses of crazed liberal Democrats?  No, not remotely, and you gotta be kidding.  The despicable media spread the lies they're given, enthusiastically and in unison, often using the exact same language.  It's almost as if they've been given a script to follow.  They have.  If the current American justice system didn't have two standards, why, it would have no standards at all!  A simple comparison of the judicial treatment afforded, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump makes that abundantly clear.  You're free to burn down a city, if you're BLM, but say prayers across the street from an abortion abattoir, and you're going to prison.  As for the GOP, those pretenders and senders of strongly worded letters and subpoenas that are thrown into the circular file as soon as they're received, they have a perfect avatar in former Senate leader Mitch McConnell:  a chinless, bespectacled turtle.

IRS: Illinois loses $10 billion in income from 87,000 people moving out.  More than 87,000 people moved out of Illinois taking with them nearly $10 billion in income, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data.  For the last six years, the total lost adjusted gross income is more than $47.5 billion.  For nearly a decade, annual population estimates from the U.S. Census show Illinois losing population.  For well over a year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has denied the state's population decline, saying the Census is getting it wrong.  In May, he doubled down.  "You should take what I'm saying as truth that actually when we count people, it turns out we're gaining," Pritzker said.  The U.S. Census did recently revise Illinois' population upward from previous estimates, but the state still continues to lose population.  It's not just Census data showing Illinois' loss.  Moving companies routinely show Illinois among the states with the most people moving out year after year.

All of a Sudden, A Crisis Is Revealed.  The first official presidential debate of 2024 was held on June 27, and the reactions are fascinating. [...] While the Right has been talking about this issue for years, this is the first time that most such voices of the Left have done anything but deny the fact of Biden's incapacity. [...] But most importantly, they weren't embarrassed when mountains of undeniable evidence proved his criminality — and the criminality of his family — in a pay-for-play pattern that has been going on for decades.  And they weren't embarrassed when he appointed incompetents, criminals and freaks to be cabinet secretaries and department heads, ranging from an airport kleptomaniac in drag to a man wearing a plastic nursing chest prosthesis for imitation breastfeeding.  And they weren't embarrassed when his policies caused record deficits, unprecedented inflation, a collapse in the American standard of living, a flood of illegal aliens, a lethal crime wave, and the destruction of our standing as a net exporter of energy.

Joe Biden is not the problem.  Watching the CNN roundtable after the debate was comical, if not tragic.  For months (years) Republicans have been asserting that Joe Biden was not competent, and that it is not he who is running the White House.  Today, those assertions are vindicated.  Anyone thinking that Joe Biden is making policy decisions, or setting the direction of the White House is smoking dope.  To say that the CNN "brain-trust" was apoplectic is an understatement. [...] Here's the problem for Democrats — of the top concerns of the American people; immigration, inflation, jobs and the economy, Social Security/Medicare, foreign entanglements, abortion, crime and public safety, it doesn't matter a hill of beans who takes Joe Biden's place on the ticket — Hillary, Michelle, Whitmer, Newsom, Pritzker, or Kamala.  It is not Joe's policies that have failed the American people.  It is leftism writ large.  Interject any of the above-mentioned names onto the Democrat ticket and the trajectory of Americas destruction continues apace.

America Is In Shambles Because Of Democrat Policies, Not Just Joe Biden.  The jig is up.  Here's what disillusioned Democrats and independents and moderates need to know.  What all the blue-state refugees who now live in Texas and Florida instead of California and New York City need to admit.  What all the fed-up middle-class families and forgotten nonwhite voters in the suburbs need to remember:  These aren't just Joe Biden policies that are disastrous.  They're Democrat policies.  Abortion.  Economy.  Crime.  Immigration.  Lawfare.  Foreign policy.  Health care.  It doesn't matter what pet issue has voters down in the dumps.  Democrats are in lockstep on the losing side.  And anywhere they aren't in lockstep — like on whether Israel is a victim of terrorism or a group of oppressive "colonizers" — they tow the radical line.  You think a Democrat switcheroo is magically going to secure the border and end the unmitigated illegal alien crime wave?  Not a chance.  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Biden's expanded asylum, repeal of Remain in Mexico, outrage over shipping migrants to Martha's Vineyard, support for ripping down border razor wire, and playing footsie with Mexican cartels are all fruits of the same poisonous tree:  Democrats' antipathy for the U.S. border.

Cast Away Illusions and Prepare for Struggle.  The hour is already very late.  We are ruled by a regime that deeply hates and fears the bulk of its own people, and is demonstrably willing to do whatever it takes to retain power.  A regime that characterizes its political opposition as "extremists" and "domestic terrorists," and uses its security services to surveil and intimidate even the most ordinary dissenting citizens, treating them as enemies of the state.  One that wields the law as a weapon, flagrantly showcasing a two-tier legal system as it routinely seeks to arrest, humiliate, and destroy its political enemies while shielding its friends and foot soldiers from accountability.  A regime that now holds hundreds of political prisoners.  That has turned the tools of its military counterinsurgency apparatus on its own people.  That colludes with the world's most powerful technology and media companies to establish vast systems of mass censorship, propaganda, and reality distortion.  That has successfully corrupted nearly every public and private institution with a distinctly totalitarian state ideology.

Freight Train of Regulations Coming to Destroy Small Businesses.  The Job Creators Network said that $1.2 trillion in new regulations is about to hit America and will directly affect small businesses.  That's on top of the $1.9 trillion we already lose to regulations, $10,000 per household.  It comes to $10,000 in new regulations on top of $15,000 in regulations we already pay.  Twenty cents of every dollar you earn is snagged by regulatory costs that you never see on top of taxes on top of new rules.  There are manufacturing restrictions on pretty much everything in your house, including dishwashers, water heaters, ceiling fans, lightbulbs, gas stoves, washing machines, and, of course, air conditioners.  The new rules for the climate change hoax will raise the price of a washing machine by $200 and the furnace by $500.  The cost of refilling your air conditioner will increase by over $1000.  It could push some products like gas stoves out of existence altogether.

Searching for America's Identity.  After 171 years without a doctrine of separation of church and state, the Supreme Court of the USA in 1947 by a mere 5-4 vote declared that this separation is necessary and sacrosanct.  And by 1962 and 1963, both Bible reading and prayer were declared by the Court forbidden in our public schools.  By 1973, a woman's right to an abortion on demand was declared a constitutional right, and legitimate thereby in every state in the Union.  Only recently did the Supreme Court reverse itself, after 60 million-plus abortions, to allow each individual state to make its own abortion laws as its voters see fit.  Abortions are not inherently a national, constitutional right.

California's Minimum Wage Continues to Destroy Restaurants.  Would you rather have some jobs available at $12 an hour or no jobs available at $20 an hour?  The answer may vary depending on whether you're a business owner or job seeker — or politician or bureaucrat.  Regardless, the opening question, which is of the kind late economist Walter E. Williams often asked, should be pondered with news that California's new $20 minimum wage is continually claiming victims.  The latest is a San Francisco McDonald's franchisee who'd been in business for 30 years.  This pales in comparison, though, to one of the new minimum wage's first victims:  Rubio's Coastal Grill.  That chain is closing 48 Golden State locations — more than a third of its 134 remaining restaurants across California, Arizona, and Nevada.

A Door Closes, A Window Opens.  The roster of "Joe Biden's" failures is so deep that all Mr. Trump has to do is remind the audience what they well-know adds up to an apparently deliberate effort to wreck the nation:  the open border and the growing record of atrocious crimes committed by illegal aliens plus the immense anxiety about the intentions of jihadists and other nefarious foreigners ushered in by Homeland Security; the idiocy of our role in the Ukraine War and how easily the conflict could be concluded by willing negotiation; the cratering on-the-ground economy of goods and services (minus government hand-outs, bail-outs, subsidies, and statistical shell games); the out-of-control Deep State intel blob that is eating away at our basic liberties; the insane race-and-gender hustles aimed at sowing hatred and disordering normal modes of human relations; and much more that has been done to insult and humiliate the people of this land.

Behold the Monster You Created.  [Scroll down]  Well, my friends.  You miscalculated. [...] You supported drug legalization on the farce that you cared about boosting tax revenues when in reality you just wanted to enjoy your daily edible because apparently your life in the first world, middle-upper class, most privileged society in recorded history is just too unbearable without cannabis to ease your omnipotent suffering.  But you have since discovered that they never intended legalization to end with cannabis, and your once-beautiful city is now a feces-covered open-air fentanyl market.

Biden EPA Rules Will Cause Blackouts for Millions of Americans, Study Warns.  President Joe Biden's aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent study commissioned by North Dakota's state government.  The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units.  Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.  The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies.  Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warned after the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under the regulations.

The Revolution Will Not Be What You Expect.  America today is far removed from the unreconstructed America that student radicals in the '60s hated.  From the boardroom to the stock room, America is now almost entirely woke, groveling in abject and continual apology.  Diversity and inclusion are enshrined in our national life, despite the constant lectures on race.  Movies and television are full of "people of color."  Our national sports heroes are almost all black.  Mixed-race couples dominate our national advertising.  (Fortunately, we have an army of grievance professionals available to interpret the "systemic" racism in our every word and gesture, which they will do for large sums of money.)  In addition, marriage redefined is the law of the land.  Gay pride is celebrated for the entire month of June.  Homosexuality is mainstream.  On transgenderism, parents in some states are still trying to establish their right to stop their minor children from being sexually mutilated without their consent.

Police demoralized, military demoralized, trains derailing, airplane parts falling, and products recalled.  Why?  Police departments around the country are shorthanded, defunded, demoralized.  Many officers have retired, retired at their desks, or walked away, because they aren't valued — or, worse, are demonized.  All for working long hours for not great pay ... and putting their life on the line for public safety.  And, if they do arrest somebody for even violent behavior, the perps often are sprung the same day, no bail required.  This has led to the majority of American citizens being less safe than perhaps ever before.  Our military is far less capable than it was just a few short years ago.  Patriots, Christians, MAGA types, and conservatives have been deliberately drummed out of the services in favor of more left-leaning individuals.  Competence — let alone excellence — has been dismissed in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion. [...] Recruiting goals are not close to being met.  The U.S. Navy, 600 ships strong at the end of Reagan's presidency, is now down to just 283 mostly functioning vessels. [...] All of this was predictable.  In fact, there is no other possible result of an all-out assault on competence, reason, and productivity.

Joe Biden's Foreign Policy:  A Series of Failures.  [Scroll down]  The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan marked the end of the twenty-year "War on Terror," declared by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The Afghan operation aimed at destroying the Taliban terrorist group ended completely at the wrong time — the agreements with official Kabul and the Taliban reached during Trump's presidency were multiplied by zero.  In consequence, the Taliban seized the entire country.  The withdrawal of troops was long overdue.  The twenty-year presence in one of the most problematic regions of the world cost at least $825 billion since 2001 (several experts say that these numbers are seriously underestimated), and the lives of 2,300 soldiers.  Our troops left the country at the time of a Taliban offensive, removing the last shield protecting Afghan civilians, while also leaving the Taliban weapons worth billions of dollars, including helicopters, armored vehicles, artillery systems, rifles, and much more.

Will New York City Die of Stupidity?  Since the 1960s many of America's foremost cities, notably Detroit, Newark, St.  Louis, and Baltimore have exhibited sharp declines in population, economic vitality, and overall quality of life.  Today, other major cities such Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and even New York City may soon join this list.  Our urban failures cannot be explained by the usual destructive forces.  No foreign invader sacked them or bombed them into rubble; no earthquakes or plagues made them unlivable nor have economic depressions rendered them irrelevant. [...] Like carbon monoxide poisoning, urban decline comes slowly, often barely noticed and decades may pass before a tottering-on-the brink city must be rescued by Washington.  If one word explains this slide toward disaster, it is stupidity and, particularly, stupidity month after month, year after years and is the barely noticeable nature of insanity that makes it so difficult to reverse.

The Left Knows Leftism Doesn't Work.  Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms.  There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.  [Advertisement]  Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.  [Advertisement]  How do we know this?  By a variety of barometers.  [Advertisement]  None of the major Biden "achievements" — 10 million illegal aliens across a nonexistent border, key components of the cost of living 25-30 percent higher than in 2020, wars and chaos abroad, DEI racial and tribal obsessions, wars on fossil fuels — poll at even 40-45 percent.  Biden's own approval ratings, as the nominal architect of the most left-wing agenda since the Roosevelt administration, hover between 36 and 34 percent.  [Advertisement]

Rejecting the Status Quo Is the Only Way to Survive.  For years we've been bouncing around in a pinball universe designed by Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury.  When the government isn't policing our language or arresting little old grandmothers for engaging in wrongthink, it's busy helping Mexican drug-smugglers hook Americans on Chinese fentanyl and encouraging young boys to chop off their willies.  The Gestapo FBI spends most of its time hunting patriots as "domestic terrorists" and orchestrating elaborate entrapment schemes to justify bloated budgets.  The Josef Mengeles at the CDC work to create new diseases that will require experimental "cures."  The Department of (in)Justice can't stop locking up Americans for their political beliefs while lecturing the country about the importance of thwarting tyranny.  So much insanity now grips the United States that the great dystopian novels of the last century appear downright tame by comparison!  The easiest way to navigate this Kafkaesque environment is to follow a simple rule:  whatever the government says, believe the opposite.

No more than spectators?  Today we are witnessing the final stages of Western civilization.  The agents of destruction (the Marxist Left) have seized control of all levers of power, social and institutional.  One after another the avenues of redress of grievances have been shut down.  Academia and the press, as well as Hollywood, have reshaped public opinion.  The system of checks and balances, so precious to our freedom, has been dissolved into an all-powerful executive branch.  The legislative branch is mere window dressing much like the Roman Senate under Caesar while the judicial branch has become another bureaucracy accountable only to the executive.  The Marxist Left feels no need to hide its true intentions of fundamentally transforming our constitutional republic into a communist welfare state.  The mask has come off because the transformation is complete.  Political prisoners are held without trial while rival politicians are victims of show trials.  The FBI, CIA, Justice and State departments are mere toys in the hand of the executive.  The Supreme Court is neutered by outright physical threats from the unchecked mob.

Nashville School Shooter's Writings Leak: 'I Hate Everything About My Gender'.  This week the Tennessee Star published a description of previously unseen writings by Audrey Hale.  The Star is one of the papers that is part of a lawsuit trying to force the Metro Nashville PD to release the documents, but this did not come as a result of their efforts in court.  Apparently someone just leaked several dozen pages, all of which had been left behind by Hale in her car.  One entry about civil rights was written 35 days before the attack. [...] Audrey Hale considered herself trans and went by Aiden Hale at the time of the shooting which took place on March 27, 2023. Just 16 days earlier, Hale wrote a diary entry titled "My Imaginary Penis." [...] Hale also wrote that she would "kill" for puberty blockers but that they were introduced too late for her as she's already gone through puberty by the time she knew about them.  Later in the same entry, Hale describes how she fantasized about being a man using her stuffed dolls to simulate intercourse and taking photos of the whole thing.

Will the United States Become a Third World Nation?  What generally defines "Third World" includes pervasive poverty, dilapidated infrastructure, lack of sanitation, inadequate modern healthcare, rampant crime, ineffective education, and violent political instability often reflecting ethnic rivalries, not democratic elections.  Law reflects the whim of the powerful; not following written precepts.  Third world governments also have a penchant for crushing national debt and wild spending.  Invariably, a very rich minority governs masses living in squalor.  What separates First World nations like the U.S. from Third World nations like Nigeria is not vast natural resources.  Third World Nigeria abounds in natural wealth while First World Japan has little.  The key difference is human capital, a collection of multiple traits, especially brain power and a strong work ethic, and absent these traits, a modern capitalist economy cannot exist.  Expats in Third World countries routinely complain "nothing works," and the corrupt government cannot fix or maintain anything.  Countless outward signs of a typical Third World nation have recently emerged in the United States.  Most visible is the physical decline of major cities: filthy streets, unsanitary homeless encampments, open drug dealing and use, unpunished crime, burgeoning slums "off limits" to ordinary people, and a general incivility.

A Dude Has Just Been Crowned Miss Maryland USA.  A man has been crowned Miss Maryland USA.  Transgender male Bailey Anne has beaten dozens of women to win the prestigious women's pageant title.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Nobody dares to object.

Remote tribe gets hooked on internet porn.  Teenagers in a remote Brazilian tribe have become hooked on pornography months after they were given high-speed internet access via Elon Musk's Starlink.  The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the billionaire's satellite network in September.  The community embraced the technology, marvelling at the life-saving ability to call for immediate help when grappling with venomous snake bites as well as being able to remain in contact with faraway relatives.  But, since a group of men arrived at the camp with antennas strapped to their backs to connect the remote tribe of 2,000 people to the internet, there have been some less desirable consequences.  Critics warn tribe members have become "lazy", reclining in hammocks all day glued to their phones to gossip on WhatsApp or chat to strangers on Instagram.

The Editor says...
Where did this isolated tribe of natives get the money for the satellite terminals, the internet service and the smart phones, or laptops, or other devices?  It sounds like they are neglecting their occupations, but what were those occupations?  If they're so isolated and primitive, who told them how to set up the equipment?  And what magnanimous wealthy globalist decided these guys needed to be on the internet?

The End of the Nation-State.  Indeed, nowadays there are as many as 195 recognized states in the United Nations, but many of those are known as failed states — Somalia, Haiti, Syria, and Yemen, for example — and one organization that measures such things, a Fund for Peace think tank in America, found in 2023 that two dozen others are so fragile that they cannot provide a full range of basic state functions, plus another 84 that have one or more warning signs of failure. [...] But we don't have to go traipsing around to find the best example:  it is here.  The America of 2024 could no longer be called a nation, in the sense of a common culture, common loyalties, common beliefs, common religion, common ideology, common vision, common allegiance, or even common language.  It does not have a common agreement on what marriages should be or how many genders there are (ABC news in 2024 counted 53 in use), or what the country's history has been or even what year it started, or what constitutes a crime; it does not have a working system for public education in any state; it does not even have defended borders, the minimum task that a civil body must fulfill to be a nation.

The Merchan Scale.  [Scroll down]  We have a lot of problems with government in this country, not because the people don't know how to fix them, but because the government has ceased to give a hoot what the people want.  They don't want high electric bills and spotty service, but everything the EPA and government has done is designed to create just that.  They don't want high food and transportation bills, but the president himself signed executive orders to create the situation that would cause it.  They don't want crimes to go unpunished, but every major city and many states have engaged in a revolving door policy for criminals.  Come in, get booked and walk out.

One day in the life of Joe Biden's America.  What's this single day's news?
  •   Joe Biden is spending his Memorial Day weekend honoring George Floyd
  •   Biden's vaunted Palestine pier to supposedly deliver humanitarian aid has ripped off from its moorings, been blown out to sea, and has washed up on the shore. [...]
  •   San Francisco's city government is apparently brimming with criminals according to a whistleblower report, so by all means let's expand government
  •   Biden has denied Catholics a permit to hold their Memorial Day Mass at Arlington cemetery for [the] first time in decades
  •   Special Counsel Jack Smith has launched a desperate new bid for a gag order on President Trump for talking about the FBI making plans to use lethal force on him
  •   New York state Justice Juan Merchan gave his jury in the Trump hush-money trial bad instructions on unanimity of the premise and legal eagles are complaining
  •   The Nevada state supreme court ruled unanimously against a Democrat bid to block voter identification [...]
  •   Illegals from Chechnya have rolled in through Joe Biden's open border and are now spying on U.S. military bases

America the disgusting.  The concept of America was and is beautiful. [...] Now we have new tyrants, we're not getting educated, we're not growing our personal fortunes due to Bidenflation, we're not engaging in forming traditional nuclear families much anymore, and we're not even having many babies.  We have certainly lost the notion of the "gentleman" or "lady."  We have long ago lost the idea that "children should be seen and not heard."  That is a shame.  Children are not developed people with much to offer the country until they are civilized and educated.  Until they are, they should not have an international platform on which to spread their venom, their bad habits, their Marxist ideas, their silliness, and their hubris.  Not to mention their utterly horrific narcissism.  America has become a land where the DEI-incompetent flourish and get nourished by other incompetents.  We have become a nation of the garish, where otherwise attractive news anchors tart themselves up in drag queen eye and lip makeup, and where TV commercials unappetizingly serve up bottoms, armpits, and "packs" as they hawk full-body deodorant for men and women.  It's disgusting.

Memorial Day Weekend in the City.  In rabidly anti-gun cities like New York, Chicago, and D.C., no matter how many thugs and robbers are heavily armed, the law-abiding citizen is not allowed to be, and he must walk defenseless if he walks at all.  Are they changing that policy this summer?  In the blue states where the so-called progressives have proudly "eliminated cash bail," even criminals who are caught and prosecuted are still set free to rob, rape, or brawl again, without so much as requiring a single dollar bond to make sure they ever return for trial.  They are just set free as soon as the documents are filed for the last crime.  Are they changing that policy this summer?  Every day, we read or hear the news: over a hundred thousand unknowns per month cross our intentionally porous border with Mexico, heading north.  They aren't all from Mexico, but that's where they fly, from Asia and Europe, from Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.  They all come to Mexico so they can walk across the border and blend effortlessly into these United States, unfollowed and largely untrackable.  Some are decent folks who mean no harm; many are hardened criminals, from more violent cultures than our own, either lone wolves or members of countless foreign crime syndicates.  What about them, you pompous Democrat governors, mayors, and police chiefs, we ask?  Are you doing anything to close off this dangerous spigot this summer?  For generations now, we have seen judges, governors, legislatures, law schools, and newspapers join forces to attack standard minimum sentencing guidelines; to attack the concept of capital punishment, no matter how richly deserved; and to push the spread of alternative punishment like "community service" in lieu of prison time.  Anything and everything they can think of, to increase the odds that known criminals will be back through the revolving door, infesting our streets and alleys, our parks and beaches, within the hour.  Are they changing this policy, too, this summer?  Hardly.

Study Finds Teen Marijuana Use Tied To Dramatic Increased Risk Of Psychosis.  A study published Wednesday found that teens who use cannabis are 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, according to NBC News.  The study was led by researchers from the University of Toronto and examined teenage patients who used cannabis within the last year and those who did not, according to NBC News.  When the study was further limited to teens who were sent to the emergency room or hospitalized, it showed a 27-fold increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with psychotic illness.  "I think that there's enough evidence out there for us to give recommendations that teens probably shouldn't be using cannabis," Andre McDonald, a postdoctoral research fellow at McMaster University and lead author of the study, said, according to NBC News.  "If we can somehow ask teens to delay their use until their brain has developed a little further, I think that would be good for public health."

The Editor says...
Somehow?  Ask?  Delay?  I guess self-control is a thing of the past.  So is parental authority.

And the taxpayers all went out of Massachusetts.  Let's add another state to the list of blues losing people and taxpayers.  It's Massachusetts, or one of the original 13, but another one bites the dust, proving the reality that going blue has consequences. [...] According to the story, people are leaving because of three reasons:  a high tax burden, expensive housing, and health care costs.  There goes Obamacare again!  Another reality is that remote work policies have made it easier for "prime age" workers to leave.  Why does that matter?  Prime age workers buy homes and cars, and pay taxes.

Climate Change 'Solutions' Are Harming the Environment.  As whale deaths mount on the East Coast, The Heartland Institute along with our allies at CFACT and the National Legal and Policy Center have filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order on Dominion Energy's plans to begin pile driving for construction of the base and tower portions of 176 giant offshore wind turbines it plans to erect at great economic and environmental costs off the coast of Virginia as part of President Biden's "all of government" approach to fight climate change.  CFACT has established a great resource devoted to the myriad environmental problems — including the threat to the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW) from the push for offshore wind along the East Coast.  These turbines are being erected right in the middle of NARW and other protected marine mammals' habitat and migration routes.  In the rush to erect these turbines quickly, the federal government and Dominion played fast and loose with the rules and permits, in particular failing to follow the law and proper procedures in accounting for potential comprehensive, cumulative whale impacts.

U.S. Intelligence Deserves the Distrust It Is Generating.  President Obama sought to change the demographics and the political complexion of the federal work force, and intelligence leaders such as CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017) made clear that they intended to change the organizational cultures of agencies in politically significant ways.  They succeeded brilliantly, with overt activism in defense of Obama/Brennan changes beginning in 2016, when Trump emerged as a potential threat to the "progress" that Obama's policies allegedly had achieved.  This radical change became glaringly obvious when former CIA deputy director Michael Morell invoked his CIA credentials in a New York Times op-ed to rationalize endorsing Hillary Clinton for president while harshly criticizing Trump.  Morell then became one of the "talking heads," along with Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Hayden, and several dozen less-senior people whom the mainstream liberal press promoted as legitimate observers of everything relevant to their anti-Trump campaign.

New study finds risk of suicide jumps 12-fold after gender surgery.  A new study has found that people who've undergone transgender surgery boast a much higher risk of committing suicide.  Published last month in Cureus, a medical science journal, the study specifically found that "[g]ender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks."  The researchers reached this conclusion by analyzing the healthcare data of 90 million adults aged 18 to 60.  They specifically looked at emergency room treatment data for those who'd undergone transgender surgery.

Mike Schmidt destroyed Portland with freed criminals, drug use and empty stores.  Mike Schmidt, the leftist prosecutor in Portland, Ore., is asking voters to give him the opportunity to serve four more years as head of the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office.  In an interview with local media last October, he graded himself an "A" for his performance.  But if the past four years of record homicides, decriminalized antifa rioting and surging street overdoses represent Schmidt as his best, Portland may not survive another four years with him at the helm.  Schmidt's re-election is being challenged by his subordinate, Nathan Vasquez, a senior deputy district attorney and moderate candidate who promises to prosecute crimes and restore the office's relationship with police, which was broken by Schmidt's open cop hatred.

The Deep State and Globalism.  America's decline from a previous high mark in the quality of life of its citizens was a topic that was not covered by the mainstream media.  Today that decline needs no reporting, for it stares us all in the face.  The pretense of leftist VIPs that America is a better place than ever and on the right track shows the quickness of leftists to lie.  The drive toward a new world order, since its presidential proclamation in 1991, is obviously not taking us to a world fit for human habitation.  It is a world certain to be run by men with no real interest in humanity, as the World Economic Forum demonstrates.  Such leaders as these are unfit to govern anyone, let alone everyone.  Millions are noticing a world that is not on the right track and is not headed toward a better place than ever.

A Landmark on the Road to Decline.  Every dimension of our socio-political order — all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities — has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.  We've known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history.

What has Biden accomplished in his presidency?  Devastation.  Biden and his sycophants in the media sing his praises on a daily basis, pretending he has been an effective president.  In fact, all he has accomplished is desecration on every level. [...] Biden drained our strategic oil reserve to keep gas prices momentarily low through midterms.  He has yet to refill it.  The inflation caused by his administration's and Congress' irresponsible spending is destroying the lives of millions of American working families who now struggle to pay for groceries, health care, housing, electricity, insurance, as well as gasoline.  What was Biden's answer when asked about his inflation?  He replied that "people have the money to spend."  He has no idea of the disaster he has caused or how it affects people.  The debt is now $35 trillion and going up by a trillion dollars every 100 days!  The nation is headed for an economic disaster of epic proportions.  By the end of this year, the interest on that debt will exceed our national defense spending!  All the money spent must be borrowed.

Suicide Risks 1200% Higher After 'Gender Affirming' Surgery.  [T]his isn't what we have been told.  At least not what the MSM, the medical establishment, the President of the United States, every civil rights organization, or anybody in the Establishment has told us. [...] There is rarely a correlation between what the mainstream media puts out and what is actually true.  Sure, they are perfectly willing to report facts when they don't upset their narrative, but the goal of their "reporting" is to reinforce a false view of the world that corresponds with their ideological priors.  This is how we get years of propaganda that insists that parents face a choice between a live daughter or a dead son.  Never, ever have the statistics even hinted that this is the case.  There was zero evidence of this assertion, yet it was made every day, several times a day, to "prove" that children needed to be sterilized and mutilated in the most horrific ways in order to preserve mental health.

This Is Not the 1960s.  [T]he United States in the 1960's was a far different country than it is today:
  •   During the 1960s the vast majority of Americans believed the United States was an exceptional country and were extremely proud to be Americans.  By 2023 only 39% were extremely proud to be Americans.
  •   Seventy-years ago just 15% of Americans wanted the country to go more in the direction of socialism; in 2019 43% of Americans believed socialism would be good for the country (young adults — 50%)
  •   This was also a far more religious nation with the vast majority of its population steeped in an attendant sense of national and individual moral responsibility.  In 1965, 70% of Americans said religion was "very important" to them, by 2024 that number had fallen to 45%.  In 1962, nearly 50% of Americans attended religious services on a weekly basis, in 2021 just 29%.
However, the marches, demonstrations, and unrest of the 1960s do have one thing in common with the current chaos not only in America's colleges but throughout the nation.  That decade planted the seeds for the Marxists to overwhelmingly dominate America's institutions.

Fast Food Workers Make $20 Min.  Wage in California, Now Everyone Wants It.  California implemented a $20 minimum wage only a month ago, which many workers celebrated.  However, the initial optimism has given way to concerns as massive layoffs sweep various industries.  Who could have predicted that?  Also, not every fast food worker is getting $20 an hour.  Now, all want wage increases, and the unions are pushing for more with no end in sight.  Before you know it, more layoffs will follow, and businesses will fold.

Stories of Young People Whose Bodies Were Sacrificed on Altar of 'Gender Ideology Cult'.  The cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries being prescribed to young people struggling with their gender identity are "experimental," according to Mary Margaret Olohan.  "We don't actually know what kind of effects that the puberty blockers and hormones are having on these young people," Olohan says of women and men who attempt to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex.  In her new book "Detrans:  True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult," Olohan shares the stories of detransitioners, such as Prisha Mosley.  As a young woman, Mosley took testosterone and had a double mastectomy before she chose to detransition and return to living as a female.  Now an adult, she is expecting a child, but will never be able to breastfeed her baby.  "I'm very happy for her and glad to see that she is able to bring new life into the world," Olohan says of Mosley, but added that "we don't know if other people will be able to do the same."

The Real Reason Pro-Hamas Protesters Wear Masks.  Some of the mask-wearers themselves maintain that they are trying to "stay safe" — in what they believe is the ongoing COVID "pandemic."  Other observers have postulated, however, that this is an effort by the protesters to hide their identity. [...] The central reality to gauge here is that unisex/desexualized dress satisfies leftists' morbid pining for enforced sameness.  It is crucial, in their world, to erase physical as well as emotional differences and attractions between people.  In the utopian endgame, humans must all be replicas of one another and be devoted to the cause, the revolutionary state, and to its all-knowing administering of "equality" and "social justice."  It is no surprise, therefore, that Western leftists were enthralled with the Maoist social engineering experiment.

Retail Theft Ring Busts Reveal Some Hard Truths.  Los Angeles County Sheriff Department detectives proudly announced a complex and successful sting this week.  A retail theft ring has been caught red-handed, with millions of dollars' worth of make-up, perfume, pharmaceuticals, and more, stolen from stores in and around California, much of it still bearing store tags. [...] Where do these ringleaders get the army of foot soldiers to do the swiping, the smash-and-grabbing, the flash-mobbing?  For the past few decades, the leftist approach to the problem of urban crime has been to empty the jails and just hire more social workers.  They disregard or statutorily reduce sentencing guidelines for property crimes, so that even after shoplifters, burglars and other robbers are convicted, they are released back into the community almost immediately.  Should anyone be surprised that crime is rampant, when the government is knowingly releasing every thief they catch via a revolving door policy?

This Economy Does Not Look Good.  Core inflation rose at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter and 2.9 percent in March, the Commerce Department reports.  Fearful of renewed inflation, the Federal Reserve will not ease up on the money supply and will keep interest rates at their highest level in more than two decades, as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced on Wednesday, which should slow economic growth further.  Meanwhile, President Biden is doing his very best to destroy the economy via regulatory brutality.  The American Action Forum reports that Biden "agencies published $875.3 billion in total costs" on the U.S. economy in just one week in mid-April, including tighter emission standards for cars, tougher efficiency requirements for light bulbs, and silica exposure limits clearly meant to end coal mining.  Biden's one-week regulatory bacchanal amounted to "[j]ust $20 billion less than what President Obama did in two terms!" notes AAF President Douglas Holtz-Eakin.  The contrast between Biden and Trump is ten times as dramatic as that: $1.37 trillion by Biden to $30.1 billion by Trump by April of year four of their respective administrations.

Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One.  Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime.  More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [...] While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov's fourth and final stage.  If America's borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

It's the Economy... Again.  By this November 5, a high electoral price from the Democrats may be called in due to a fractured American economy.  In the runup, there are several negative economic indicators flashing red — factors soon to converge in force, each one predicated on Biden's incompetence.  His economic climate tells against the erstwhile middle class, or the legally voting 'majority,' and its prosperity.  The collective, negative impact of Biden's combined and often unilateral federal actions, the upshots of bad policies and mismanagement, suggests that we will soon have a new, expanded class of 'the poor' in the United States — an historical phenomenon that has eventually manifested itself in every country subsequent to communist/socialist takeover.  Biden's policies and directives are coalescing and advancing in a hushed, cumulative economic effect very quickly.

Moral Anarchy:  An Understatement.  Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized.  The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.  Since Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality, we have been in a state of moral anarchy.  Crude and licentious parades with many naked or almost naked men celebrating sodomy are considered by many to be positive and invigorating.  The abrogation of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision does not end abortion, but simply leaves the existence of abortion laws up to each separate state.  There are so many different laws now on when it is legitimate to abort a baby.  Thus, the people have decided that it is legitimate for citizens to decide when a life is a life.  The truth is that a life begins and is a life at conception.  That is what the Holy Bible teaches and has been the basis of the sanctity of life — announced even in our Declaration of Independence — for thousands of years.

Democrats Have Deliberately Shattered The Ties Binding America.  Two generations of leftist media, a broken education system, and a corrupt government that protects itself at all costs have brought us to this day.  By and large, our youth have lost their ability to look rationally at what is required of them to shape their own future.  They feel simultaneously entitled and angry.  Ask them, and they'll tell you that the Baby Boomers were the last generation to make it.  They feel justified to malinger and complain about the remaining scraps.  Biden told them they were entitled to abandon their student debt obligations.  15% of Americans want to leave our country.  Never before have so many been so disenchanted that they effectively see the American Dream as dead.  The clock is ticking down our remaining time, however much that is.  There is time left to make a difference.

We Won't Live By Your Wokeness.  A young woman who came to the pregnancy center where I work shared this story with me.  She had a pediatrician appointment for her baby girl last week.  She brought her infant, dressed all in pink, into the doctor's office.  After stating the baby's female name, the doctor asked, "So, have you decided what gender you're assigning to this child?"  She was stunned.  She said she just stood there until the word "female" came out of her mouth.  This wasn't the first time I've heard this line of questioning in a pediatrician's office.  A friend told me her daughter was asked the same thing on her first visit to the doctor's office with their infant son.  The question, "gender assigned at birth" is now on many medical forms.  A man I know was at a new doctors' office and the paperwork included an entire page on "gender identity."

Which Major City Will Completely Collapse First — Los Angeles, Chicago or New York City?  In 2024, virtually all major U.S. cities have certain things in common.  First of all, if you visit the downtown area of one of our major cities you are likely to see garbage, human excrement and graffiti all over the place.  As you will see below, some of our core urban areas literally look like they belong in a third world country.  Most of our politicians don't seem too concerned about doing anything to clean up all the filth, and so it shouldn't be a surprise that rat populations are absolutely exploding all over the country.  In some of our largest cities, the total rat population is numbered in the millions.  Meanwhile, rampant theft, out of control violence, endless migration, predatory gangs and the worst drug crisis in the entire history of our nation have combined to create a "perfect storm" of social decay that is unlike anything that any of us have ever seen before.  Millions of law-abiding citizens and countless businesses have been fleeing America's largest cities, and property values in our core urban areas have been absolutely crashing.  We really are in the early stages of a full-blown societal "collapse", and things just keep getting worse with each passing day.

The Democrats' Anti-Business Policies Create The Food Deserts They Decry.  Riots [...] are just one way a community can be destroyed.  Another, far more insidious, is common crime.  With riots, everyone can point to the damage and clamor for rebuilding, but with common crime, once the window is replaced or the body chalk is washed away, the neighborhood looks exactly the same as it did before.  But of course, it's not the same.  From citizens being scared to walk down the street to kids having to dodge junkies as they walk to school to upstanding members of the community not visiting certain neighborhoods — and not spending money there — the fear of violence has devastating consequences on any community.  Food deserts are one of those consequences.  Retailers typically are not charities.  They exist to make money.  When violence, security costs, and shoplifting make it so they can't make money, they usually close.  Hence, when all the food stores close, you have said "food deserts." [...] Why all this matters is because the chickens are coming home to roost.  Across the country, from San Francisco to Seattle to New York to Boston, stores are closing because of crime.

U.S. Cities Fall Into A "Doom Loop" As The CRE Crisis Absolutely Explodes.  In the entire history of the United States, we have never witnessed an urban collapse of this magnitude.  During the pandemic, millions of Americans started working from home, and many of them have never returned to the office.  Meanwhile, rapidly rising levels of crime, homelessness and migration have transformed many of our inner cities into extremely dangerous places.  As a result, thousands upon thousands of businesses have left our core urban areas in search of greener pastures.  So now there is lots and lots of commercial real estate space that is sitting empty, and commercial real estate prices have absolutely plummeted.In the entire history of the United States, we have never witnessed an urban collapse of this magnitude.  During the pandemic, millions of Americans started working from home, and many of them have never returned to the office.  Meanwhile, rapidly rising levels of crime, homelessness and migration have transformed many of our inner cities into extremely dangerous places.  As a result, thousands upon thousands of businesses have left our core urban areas in search of greener pastures.  So now there is lots and lots of commercial real estate space that is sitting empty, and commercial real estate prices have absolutely plummeted.

The Editor says...
What do all the doomed cities have in common?  Socialist government, un-punished crime, homeless bums in the streets, and illegal immigrants everywhere.

The Founding Fathers' Fears Are Coming True, and the Damage Is Intentional.  The Founding Fathers, in all their prescience, wrote the Constitution to protect We the People from the very onslaughts we are seeing today, some two-and-a-half centuries later.  Donald Trump represents a clear and present danger to the pinko-Americans who have infiltrated every institution in the United States, and we can all see how the Constitution somehow doesn't protect this one man. [...] Need more evidence that our nation is on life support?  Our replacements are being invited to cascade over the southern border by politicians who were elected to protect us from such an onslaught.  Criminals, many of whom aren't even citizens (yet), operate with impunity within our borders.  Fentanyl, created by China and sent to the Mexican drug cartels for assembly and distribution, floods over our phantom southern border and kills roughly 80,000 Americans annually while enriching the Chinese and Mexican drug lords, yet nothing changes.  Have you wondered why?  Worse, the destruction we see taking place in the United States is 100% intentional.

The Bargain with Government Is Coming Apart.  [Scroll down]  Take education, for example — a paradigmatic service people expect from government.  People are openly challenging public schools, which spend more on racial and sexual ideology than on reading, writing, and arithmetic.  On crime prevention, perhaps the number-one benefit derived from government, problems abound.  Crime is surging.  Progressive no-bail policies are releasing offenders the same day they are arrested.  Terrorists and criminals are flooding across our borders unvetted.  At the federal level, we're more vulnerable to attack than we have been in decades because we redirect defense spending from war-fighting to DIE seminars.  If you are a low-wage worker, open borders allow illegal aliens to pour in and take your job.  The government is not keeping its end of the bargain.  Insecurity is the word of the day.

Planet Fitness Founder Admits the Truth:  Company Has Pretty Much Been Destroyed.  You let perverts go into any locker room they want, and it will destroy your company.  The Alaska Planet Fitness isn't the only one that's been having problems with mentally ill individuals going into the locker room of their choice, regardless of their biological gender.  North Carolina and other states are seeing the same shit.  Now, the founder of Planet Fitness is admitting defeat. [...] You pander to the communist "woke" left, and this is what happens.  They will happen to any company that bends their knee to the communist Democrat agenda.

Democrats Will Champion Despicable Pedophilia Within Five Years, or Less.  Transgenderism is validated by psychiatric and other medical professions that stopped caring about patient welfare long ago, and instead, champion woke delusions.  The profit motive exerts tremendous attraction; there are millions to be reaped from hormone treatments and sex-organ mutilations.  To opine that the deviant "road to progress" will lead to pedophilia is not mere conjecture.  Preliminary moves in that direction have already been undertaken.

The Brainwashing of America.  Brainwashing is defined as "the process of pressuring someone into adopting radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible means."  In case you haven't noticed, that is the kind of pressuring presently threatening the "blessings of liberty." [...] Rather than anger, good people seem to be owning the accusations and in turn acquiescing to abuse like mistreated pets.  Riots are purposely incited by implicit suggestions that retaliation for things like racism is justified.  Police are disrespected, shot, and killed.  Terrorist states are enriched, and foreign wars financed with tax money siphoned from government coffers.  Our border, language, and civilization is being decimated, and Third World diseases infect our citizens.  Meanwhile, everyday Americans are portrayed as inherently evil.  To ensure voters' voices are drowned out at the ballot box, instead of forbidding illegal entry, our government presses beaten-down taxpayers to feed, clothe, enrich, and accommodate hordes of illegals that include swindlers, murderers, and rapists.  As stunned citizens lick the wounds inflicted by government, progressives support an invasion of military-aged men armed with tactical game plans printed in Chinese.

Words Aren't Enough.  The more and better-distributed sources of information that fill the search engines and radio programs, the harder the truth is to hide.  That's an important role in the ultimate battle for America down the line.  The border fiasco is all Biden, the lower wages are all Biden, the inflation is all a product of Bidenomics, the debt is all Biden, not because he came in with a clean slate, but because he has increased spending to the point that we now owe over a trillion dollars a year, just to pay interest on the debt.  That's more than we spend on the Department of Defense.  In January of 2021, when he took office, the debt was 21.6 trillion dollars and that was after the lockdowns and the pandemic.  U.S. debt today is 34.6 trillion dollars and adding a trillion dollars every 100 days.  Our tax collections run at about 4.5 trillion dollars a year, with budgets ranging from 6.5 to 7 trillion dollars a year.  The spin is that we need these illegals to help the economy.

99 Reasons I'm In Mourning.  High rents and theft are a key reason many dollar stores are closing in medium and large cities.  However, dollar stores in rural locations are thriving.  Dollar General just opened its 20,000th store in Alice, Texas, with plans to open 800 more this year!  By focusing on rural locations, they have less competition, lower real estate expenses, and less chance of retail theft.  (At least not at levels seen in larger cities where culprits walk in, shove items into bags, and walk out knowing there's little chance they will be arrested and/or prosecuted.)  Who knows how long the other dollar chains will last?  Family Dollar, whose parent is Chesapeake, Virginia-based Dollar Tree, Inc., announced it will close 600 Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores.  The Dollar Tree empire employs nearly 212,000 employees (retail staff, distribution center, and store support).  How many will be affected by the announced Family Dollar and Dollar Tree closures?

St Louis Is Dying.  We all know that prominent coastal Blue cities are in deep trouble, but this report in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that almost all large cities are run by idiots driven by Democrat ideology.  Democrat ideology is toxic.  In cities across America a doom loop has set in.  [Tweet]  Saint Louis, it seems, is seeing its central business district die a slow and painful death.  Office buildings have been clearing out, and with them the businesses that supported the workers have been leaving to set up in greener pastures.

The Most Important Election in American History?  The ideological division in America is the greatest it has ever been — even during the pre-War Between the States era.  And the contrast between the two candidates (regardless of whom the Democrats finally nominate) could not be more dramatic:  one a decided pro-American patriot, the other an unequivocal Leftist totalitarian heading a party that gives every indication it hates everything traditional America stands for and wants to continue to take the country down a determined leftward, morally decadent path. [...] America isn't anything even close to what it was in 1960. [...] But, until Obama, and especially Biden, we didn't realize the depth of the anti-Americanism, the full intention of what the Left was trying to do with and to our country.  We noticed the increasing immorality and growth of government, but the horrific degeneracy, decadence, and economic recklessness have exploded in our faces the past few years.

Is The Great Illusion In Ruins?  [Scroll down]  Now, as we enter the fourth year of the great experiment, America is $35 trillion in debt, borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days.  Home mortgages are at 7 percent.  Key prices for food, insurance, rent, and fuels are 30-40 percent higher than when Biden entered office.  The nation has been humiliated and emasculated abroad.  Racial relations are the worst in a half-century.  The military is in virtual receivership.  Biden is polling about 40 percent approval and is behind in key swing states in most of the 2024 polls.

Biden Administration Environmental Rules Estimated to Cost Americans Almost $1 Trillion.  Mandates, mandates, mandates; subsidy after subsidy.  All of these cost money, and we're occasionally reminded of just how much.  The Biden administration seems determined to shatter all the norms when it comes to unilaterally deciding that they know best what's good for us Americans and are willing to spend our money to those ends.  Now we see the cost; the environmental rules alone implemented by this administration (without input from Congress) are projected to cost Americans more than $845 billion.  As if the fiat-currency dump fueling inflation wasn't enough already.

99 Cent Only Stores Shuttering all Locations, Citing Crime and Inflation as Key Factors.  One of the first places I discovered when I moved to California in the late 1980s was the 99 Cents Only Store.  One of my apartments was in walking distance of one, and I could buy a week's groceries for $20.  Those halcyon days are long gone, not just for me and others, but for the iconic 99 Cents Only Store.  When the company had to raise their price point from $0.99 to $1.01 a few years back, you kind of got the sense they weren't going to outrun this.  It was finally the weight of inflation and the COVID pandemic that did them in. [...] The press release did not mention rampant retail theft as a reason, but you know that factors in as well. 99 Cent Only Stores are extremely soft targets, with very little security presence.  In California, with Prop 47 in place, retail theft of up to $950 won't even be prosecuted.  So, thieves could take out three-quarters of the store and get away scot-free.

Who Are the Real Conspiracy Theory Nut Jobs?  Remember how the left ridiculed us for predicting disaster once Biden got into the White House?  They were quite sincere and convinced that we were wrong.  They said with conviction, "Oh no, you are wrong!  Biden will be a president for all the people.  The world will be relieved at his presence.  Peace and security will ensue."  Now, Biden is overseeing a vast human tragedy at the border, soaring gas prices, racial hatred, and the world on the brink of war.  Not only were we right — we were too right.  It has degenerated faster than even we imagined.  We emphatically warned that he would rain down calamity after calamity.  That he would cause soaring gas prices, inflation, a spike in murder rates, unrest in the Middle East, and war.

A GOP Landslide in November.  The Biden Democrats have opened the southern border to about eight million illegal aliens, many of them military-age single males.  Assume only half of those aliens are males and one in a thousand are in terrorist sleeper cells infiltrated by Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Iran.  That adds up to 4,000 attackers spread all over the country, which is 200 times greater than the twenty that Al-Qaeda planned for its attack on September 11, 2001.  Instead of thousands of deaths, the casualties could be hundreds of thousands.  That death toll would overshadow the body blow to American cities from millions of unscreened "migrants" whom Democrat governors and mayors are subsidizing with free housing and free money.  The answer from Biden Democrats to the terrorist threat is to ban the terms "Islamic terrorist" and "jihadist" from intelligence reports at the Pentagon and the FBI.

The Democrat party is a Potemkin village.  The Democrat party as a democratic institution is a false front.  Our judicial system has been Stalinized; Democrats are free to break all laws, conservatives will be punished severely for minor infractions.  Our law enforcement agencies have been thoroughly weaponized.  Rampant crime is the chaos the Democrat party needs to further its agenda.  What has been done to the people who were present at the Capitol on January 6 is Stalinist in the extreme as is the lawfare perpetrated against Trump.  On top of that, Biden intentionally destroyed the energy independence we enjoyed under Trump.  His open border has forever altered the demography of the nation and not in a good way.  The migrants pouring over the border are not coming to be productive citizens; they are coming to be taken care of by American taxpayers.  They are not grateful for what they are receiving, and they expect more.  That's what we get when other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending their worst our way.  Democrats routinely, endlessly present themselves as the party of democracy while they censor narratives and opinions they do not like.

Maintain Your Brain.  Generations ago it wasn't uncommon for educated people to memorize chunks of The Iliad, building up their minds by forcing them to do all the rewarding work associated with real reading: assembling images, keeping track of plot and character structure, juggling themes and challenging ideas even as you carried the story along.  Then came mass media.  Newspapers shortened attention span, movies arrived and did visual assembly for you, TV mastered mental junk food, MTV replaced story with montages of interesting nonsensical images, then finally the Internet came and made it possible to endlessly follow your own random impulses instead of anyone else's schedule or plot. [...] Inventions like TikTok, which I'm on record saying shouldn't be banned, are designed to create mentally helpless users, like H addicts.  If you stand there scrolling and thinking Next! enough, your head will sooner or later be fully hollowed out.  You'll lose the ability to remember, focus, and decide for yourself.  There's a political benefit in this for leaders, but more importantly there's a huge commercial boon.  The mental jellyfish is more susceptible to advertising [...]

New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco And Baltimore Were Once Such Beautiful Cities.  If America is heading in the right direction, why have so many of our major cities become cesspools of violence, drugs, theft, trash and homelessness?  Once upon a time, millions of young people from all over America flocked to our rapidly growing metropolitan areas.  Today, there is a mass exodus out of our largest metropolitan areas due to the absolutely deplorable conditions.  If you are not yet convinced that we are a nation in decline, spend some time wandering around our core urban areas.  The shiny new cities that previous generations of Americans built for us are degenerating at a pace that is absolutely stunning.

'The River Is Essentially Dead': How Enviros' Push To Save Salmon Ended Up Killing 'Hundreds Of Thousands' Of Them.  A well-funded environmentalist group played a key role in the push to remove dams in the Pacific Northwest's Klamath River ahead of premature deaths of thousands of salmon.  American Rivers — an organization that has received millions of dollars from left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking organizations in recent years — was "the orchestrator of the Klamath dams removal project," according to Siskiyou News, a local outlet in Northern California.  The drawdowns of several reservoirs pursuant to the scheduled removal of four dams in the river preceded the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of young salmon in the waterway, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.  The push to remove the dams is often marketed as beneficial for salmon, as proponents of the plan — including American Rivers — have argued that the dams obstruct the natural movements of salmon as well as their access to habitat.  However, weeks after beginning the process to remove one of the systems scheduled for deconstruction on the river, a large number of the 830,000 young salmon released into the river on Feb. 26 had died as of March 2, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

The losers in Biden's America.  The future is not bright for most people under 50.  You are seeing (and will see) a continued deterioration of the dollar and a diminishing standard of living if you vote for Democrats.  As Ronald Reagan succinctly stated, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness."  Freedom and (market) opportunity have served prior generations of Americans.  Joe Biden and Democrats have a vision for America, where freedom and opportunity are subverted to the interests of the state.  "You will own nothing and be happy." [...] If you want to buy a home, rent a home or apartment, eat, or drive, you are getting hammered by Bidenomics.  The affordability of homes for new buyers is all but out of reach for most Americans.  Rents are skyrocketing.  The cost to fill up a car or truck is 50% more than it was when Donald Trump left office.  Eating out has gotten expensive, even for fast food, with McDonald's meals reaching $18.  In California, wait until the minimum wage for fast food workers goes to $20/hr.  Your meals will also increase in cost to absorb this expense.

Joe Biden's winners.  The top of Biden's winner list has to be illegal aliens.  As the saying goes, what you promote, you get more of.  Joe Biden and his surrogates have actively promoted the arrival of more than 7 [to] 8 million new illegal aliens since his inauguration, when he overrode Donald Trump-era policies and instituted new executive orders, opening the floodgates.  Illegal aliens are being housed, fed, given stored value cards, free medical treatment, and "the promise" of amnesty.  A peripheral beneficiary of our open border is the Mexican cartels, who are making bank, trafficking drugs, adults, and children. [...] On the heels of illegal aliens are non-governmental organizations and other leftist activist groups, who are grifting the government to the tune of billions of dollars per year.  Woke Catholic charities, woke Protestant charities, woke attorneys, woke hotel chains and housing authorities all benefit from the continuation of the border surge.  Leftist homeless groups benefit from the continuation of, not the elimination of, homelessness.  If they "solved" the homeless crisis, they would be out of work.  Not the "people" in said sanctuary cities and states, but leftist Democrats, who benefit from the increased number of congressional seats afforded them, by the increased counts in the Census, soon to be the right to vote.

We Should Fight First for the Bill of Rights.  [Scroll down]  The military recruiting crisis is so bad that the Army is now seeking retirees to come back in a desperate move to fill "critical position vacancies."  According to the directive, "There is no age limitation, although personnel older than 70 are not normally recalled."  No worries, America.  Everything's fine.  We're just looking for a few good men with experience — and senior citizen cards! [...] I guess all those commercials highlighting a "woke" military culture and fondness for men in drag didn't quite puff up enlistment figures enough to intimidate global adversaries.  Truth be told, bringing back the Old Dogs might be the only way to save an otherwise sinking ship — but only if yesterday's soldiers are permitted to turn today's soldiers into something more than their preferred pronouns.  The Armed Forces are in dire need of an ideological fumigation that can drive the "woke" mind virus out for good.  Unless the branches return to a culture that celebrates honor, strength, and merit, DIE-obsessed Marxists will continue to transform America's once-intimidating fighting forces into a puny pack of politically correct toy poodles.  Nothing invites aggression so much as perceived weakness.

Domination Through Chaos and Fear.  [Scroll down]  What do you imagine the BLM and Antifa riots are about?  Or the "Defund the Police" movement?  Eroding trust in rational systems and behaviors creates radicals and radicalization empowers the worst elements of a society.  Without enforcement of existing rules about civil campus behavior, radical students and professors overcome the moderates on campuses.  Those desirous of honest debate or who take different non-radical views leave or shut up, and the mission of the institution is corrupted and destroyed. [...] I think it's safe to say that we can expect more of this drive for power through manufactured chaos, and you've no real choice except to resist bullying as well as you are able.

Trump's Third Act has begun.  The gears of the machine have become visible.  We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized.  We know the border is open intentionally.  We know the cartels are working with our government.  We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there's only one reason for it.  We can see Biden is not in charge.  We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them.  We know our rising debt is ruinous.  We know our experts are liars.  We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us.  We know our government is racist.  We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population.

Biden and the insurmountable.  Black voters seem to have matured a bit.  Street interviews and polls suggest that an increasing number realize that they re-enslaved themselves to the Democrat party and received little by way of meaningful benefits in return.  Yes, they got welfare, cheesy food stamps, and drug-infested housing, but look what it cost them:  their dignity, a husbandless family, females working two and three jobs to feed their families, alienation from their churches, more crime, and you know the rest.  Biden inflation has eaten any wage increases workers obtained during the Trump years.  The cost of essentials is devastating for those on the lower-socioeconomic level.  Furthermore, competition from Biden illegals is beginning to create adverse employment opportunities, and it will only worsen.  The military was an employment refuge for many black and white citizens, who gained many social benefits and positive life experiences as well as post-service education stipends.  Now the military cannot fill its quotas because of what Biden has done by way of sexualization.

Judge McAfee Ruling Is The Latest Blow to Public Trust in Government.  Quite simply, of late, the unbelievability of the government's positions and actions has escalated significantly:
  •   We are supposed to believe that the southern border is secure, the millions of impoverished, military-age males flowing into our country pose no threat to our economy, culture, or national security, and the only people opposed to this invasion are racists.
  •   We are supposed to believe America is a fundamentally, systemically racist country.
  •   We are supposed to believe a new economic principle holding that paying the same price for a smaller bag of Doritos is intrinsically different from and somehow more sinister than paying a higher price for the same size bag of Doritos.
  •   We are supposed to believe that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a well-planned and brilliant success, not one of the worst military and foreign relations disasters in our lifetimes.
  •   We are supposed to believe that DEI is a far better rubric than merit for making all our institutions — even our military — better.
  •   We are supposed to believe that it is perfectly fair and right for biological male athletes to compete against biological females — despite the former being dramatically overrepresented in winners' circles.
This list could go on for pages, but some of the examples are far weightier than others.  The Russia Hoax, arguably the most corrupt, treasonous scandal ever orchestrated by the cabal of governmental agencies, opposition party, and media, delivered a massive body blow to government credibility.  The COVID scandals — from identifying origination to lockdowns to the efficacy of the vaccines — and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal fully exposed in the Twitter Files release were a one/two punch combination that left government credibility on teetering legs.

Biden's Bloodbath.  The Left is castigating presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump for warning that there would be a "bloodbath" if he's not elected in November.  The dishonest media wasted no time taking the comment out of context (he was talking about tariffs on foreign auto imports) and falsely claiming that Trump was cooking up an insurrection — or maybe even WWIII. [...] While left-wing media parrots are weeping and gnashing their teeth about Trump using the word "bloodbath," there are very real bloodbaths that the policies of Joe Biden and the Democrats have caused:
  •   A million dead babies a year, courtesy of Democrat policies and bolstered by their evil minions at Planned Parenthood
  •   13 troops killed during Biden's botched Afghanistan withdrawal — 13 families who lost mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.
  •   55,000 deaths a year from Fentanyl overdoses thanks, in part, to Biden's refusal to protect our southern border.
  •   The highest increase in suicide rates in two decades.
Democrats yapping about bloodbaths are complete and utter hypocrites.  Nothing Trump has done comes close to the ghastly, ongoing genocide of innocents on the tables of abortion clinics.

New Inflation Numbers Keep Economic Concerns Front and Center.  Inflation tickedup in the latest figures from the U.S. government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), released March 12.  It's not a huge rise, but enough to keep the eroding value of the dollar in the headlines, feed Americans' dissatisfaction with the economy, and be received as very bad news by the White House.  The president and his allies work hard to claim credit for what they tout as a thriving economy, but all they've done is link the Biden brand to rising prices and a general distaste for the president's management.  "The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent in February on a seasonally adjusted basis, after rising 0.3 percent in January," according to the BLS.  "Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.2 percent before seasonal adjustment."  That's a big improvement over the 9.1 percent that inflation hit in 2022.  But it's still a reminder to the public that the money in their wallets buys less with each passing day.

The Editor says...
The 9.1 percent inflation from 2022 is not erased or mitigated by the 3.2 percent inflation the following year.  This is a shell game, and if you watch TV news, you lose.

Consequences Minus Truth.  Are you feeling more confident that the US military can competently defend our country?  Probably more like the opposite, because the manipulation of language is being used deliberately to turn our country inside-out and upside-down.  At this point we probably could not successfully pacify a Caribbean island if we had to, and you've got to wonder what might happen if we have to contend with countless hostile subversive cadres who have slipped across the border with the estimated nine-million others ushered in by the government's welcome wagon.  Momentous events await.

Becoming Haiti:  How Biden Is Transforming America Into a Gang-Infested Wasteland.  What is transpiring in Haiti is so post-apocalyptic — so unspeakably brutal — that it would be impossible to believe were it not for the steady stream of phone videos and first-person testimonials substantiating the media reports pouring out of the country.  "Millions of Haitians Face Starvation as Gangs Aim for Total Takeover, Free 5,000 Prisoners," reads one recent headline.  "Haiti Gangs Launch Main Airport Seige, Massacring People 'Indiscriminately' Days After Massive Jail Break," reports another.  This weekend's Washington Post report, titled "Haitians shot dead in the streets and there's no one to take the corpses away," paints a picture of the scene on the ground: [...] The situation is grim, even by Haitian standards.  (And the situation in Haiti has been varying levels of grim for the past 200 years.)  Reports suggest that a gang leader named "Barbecue" — a reference to his enthusiasm for burning people alive in their homes, not to his culinary prowess — is now "the most powerful man in Haiti."  Barbecue's gangs recently stormed two Haitian prisons and released thousands of prisoners before launching a full-scale attack on Haiti's main airport.

Tyranny Is Rising as Freedom Falls.  The U.S. military is being used to patrol subway stations and police the U.S.-Mexico border, supposedly in the name of national security.  The financial sector is being used to carry out broad surveillance of Americans' private financial data, while the entertainment sector is being tapped to inform on video game enthusiasts with a penchant for violent, potentially extremist content, all in an alleged effort to uncover individuals subscribing to anti-government sentiments[.]  Public and private venues are being equipped with sophisticated surveillance technologies, including biometric and facial recognition software, to track Americans wherever they go and whatever they do.  Space satellites with powerful overhead surveillance cameras will render privacy null and void.  This is the state of our nation that no is talking about — not the politicians, not the courts, and not Congress:  the government's power grabs are growing bolder, while the rights of the citizenry continue to be trampled under foot.

Watch the Destruction of New York City in Real Time.  The New York City police are finally arresting some of the violent migrants.  There were two attacks in Times Square, where there are multiple migrant shelters.  Two of the suspects are members of one of Venezuela's most violent gangs, Tren de Aragua.  The gang has a strong and visible presence in New York, Chicago, LA, Miami, and elsewhere.  Venezuela's Communist President Maduro opened the prisons and sent the criminals to our border.  Thank a Democrat.  Currently, there is a manhunt now for 16 other people who stabbed a teen in the back.  Cash [Jordan] says the majority are fleeing extreme poverty.  We understand that, but we can't take in the entire world. [...] Cameras are everywhere, but they don't do much since they don't give clear photos.  It also doesn't matter because the criminals are released immediately.  There are mobs of foreign people here illegally, running around, doing whatever they want.  They grab phones and belongings from tourists while zooming around on e-bikes.  Watch what has happened to New York City under Progressives:  [Video clip]

CNN beclowns itself by confirming the escalating cost-of-living crisis while trying to pin it on Trump.  A recent article from Matt Egan at CNN admits that Americans have a problem paying for things... but neither he, nor any of the outlet's other employees ever bring up Joe Biden or his policies as a significant cause of the problem; [...] Egan says the problem has been building for years instead of admitting that inflation didn't start increasing rapidly until Biden took office.  Despite COVID and supply chain issues, inflation remained below 2%... until Biden.  The economy was growing rapidly pre-Biden, despite the entire country having come to a screeching halt over a virus, yet he signed the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, and fulfilled his campaign promise to destroy affordable energy (oil), which sent prices skyrocketing.  He compounded the inflation problem by issuing executive orders to open the borders: housing, food, education, healthcare, law enforcement, energy, and other things are obviously strained when millions of people are suddenly thrown into the mix, bringing no wealth and anti-American cultures and ethos.  The federal budget is around 60% higher than before COVID, and they are borrowing trillions each year.  That obviously puts pressure on prices and forces an increase in interest rates.  Here's how Egan framed it though, to distract from the obvious:  ["]From the historically unaffordable housing market and budget-breaking day care rates to high car prices, the United States has a cost of living problem many years in the making.["]

Is New York City Really Dead?  Far too many edicts coming from Mayor Eric Adams' administration are simply mind-boggling.  The city has been invaded by illegal immigrants from several countries and the mayor has ordered that they be sheltered in hotels, schools and senior residencies, displacing senior veterans, and resident citizens.  In addition, a pilot program will be giving them $10,000 prepaid debit cards to buy certain items.  What?!!  Needless to say, the recent political judgments against President Donald Trump and his businesses have induced a "get out of NYC asap rampage."  No one wants to do business here if biased judges can officiate over kangaroo court cases against political enemies.  Those families who can move are relocating to red states but there are many of us without the resources to do so.  There are also many like me who prefer to stay and fight.  New York City used to be the greatest city in the world and as I was born here during its glory years, the very idea that it's doomed is unacceptable.  I believe that everything that is wrong with the city is due to misguided, progressive politics, primarily instituted by Democrats.

The Editor says...
Just because you know who caused all these problems, that doesn't mean the city isn't doomed.  The damage may already be irreparable.

Why Americans No Longer Trust the Healthcare System.  Trust is foundational in relationships, whether between individuals or between individuals and institutions.  A Gallup survey from last summer found, "Americans' faith in major societal institutions hasn't improved over the past year following a slump in public confidence in 2022."  Notable other examples where surprisingly few Americans have "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in major institutions include Congress at 8%, big business and television news at 14%, and the criminal justice system at only 17%.  The medical system fared slight better with 34% of Americans expressing confidence.  But two thirds have lost trust.  Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare systems used to be held in high esteem, but no more.  Aren't these the "experts" in white coats? [...] In terms of one's own healthcare decisions, "35% of American adults believe it's safe to trust advice from experts" By party however, only 22% of Republicans trust the experts compared to 52% of Democrats.

50 is the new 20.  People who do the shopping for their families know that inflation is not "under control," as President Biden and his advisers are insinuating.  When was the last time any of them went food-shopping or filled up their own gas tank?  "The economy is booming and everyone knows it — except for the American people," wrote former Treasury secretary Larry Summers this month in a working paper on inflation and the cost of money.  A January Gallup poll found that 45% of Americans think the state of the economy is "poor," and 63% say it's getting worse.  What's the reason for the disconnect?  Well, statistics and politics have a lot to do with it.  The primary measure of inflation, the CPI (Consumer Price Index), is constantly being manipulated and redefined to achieve the desired results.

Morning Again, Again.  In 1984, the Reagan-Bush campaign aired a political commercial that helped seal their landslide re-election, winning 49 states and 525 electoral votes.  "Morning in America" is an iconic piece of political history — a video that is fondly nostalgic for the Boomer generation because the Reagan years were a golden time of peace and prosperity. [...] Time and again, Biden issues policy directives that are disgustingly immoral.  Have we really reached the point where we are not allowed to say what is a man and what a woman?  Are we required, on penalty of loss of employment or expulsion from school, to refer to "non-binary" individuals as "they" and "them" instead of he/she and him/her?  Do we really wish to allow repeated shoplifting if it falls below $900 per occurrence?  Do we want open borders with tens of millions of unvetted individuals entering our country?  Do we want to see our living standard cut by 6% or more annually as a result of inflation, driven largely by out-of-control government spending?

The Stinking Privilege of the Green New Deal.  A few years ago when I was building my house, [...] I followed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum template, contracted the job myself.  I wanted to build a healthy house, which meant as little chemical off-gassing as possible.  Despite my savings, which were considerable, it still cost 40 percent more than a traditional stick-frame.  The geothermal system cost $35,000 more than traditional heating and no, I have not "made back that money."  Today that cost would be north of $150,000.  We're all in this together, right?  The only reason I am not bankrupt is that where I live is so restricted as to land use, housing prices have skyrocketed.  Only the rich can afford to live here.  My property with its "improvements," which is to say my money and labor, is now worth 30 times my initial investment.  This is known as old-fashioned economics, wherein you restrict supply and prices, via demand, go up.  This too is a perfect micro-illustration of the "Green Economy" or the the "Green New Deal."  It is "green" only for the wealthy or privileged by virtue of education.  It is very, very "green" for those who profit from it.  The people who took my extra money, other than the giant suction hose of government, were mostly those demanded by "green" theology:  engineers (5), lawyers (3), surveyors (2), wildlife consultants (2), and permitting bureaucrats.  Those requirements have doubled in the intervening years.

The green movement is stripping away life's small luxuries, one by one.  Our former colonial masters, the micro-managing misery merchants of the EU's institutions, have agreed on a new way to interfere in our lives with a deal banning sauce sachets and regulating the air inside boxes.  When you fly away on holiday in six years, you may need to pack your own ketchup to address both concerns.  If your suitcase is too empty it might be considered wasteful packaging and be either quarantined as an eco-crime, or stuffed with images of sad-eyed Swedish children whose future you have stolen.  The goal of the snappily titled Revision of the Packaging and Packing Waste Directive is to reduce packaging waste, which is on the rise.  In 2021 each EU citizen generated 189 kg, up about 17 percent over the decade.  This raises questions over the utility of the previous legislation.  Self-evidently it failed.  However, the intention is noble, reducing the impact of some materials, deemed polluting, on the environment, including for example hard to recycle plastics.  All packaging on the EU market will have to be recyclable by 2030.  The best way of encouraging such change is inventing better alternatives.  The rise of plastics over the last 100 years is due to their utility.

Klamath Dams Down:  Will Ranches Survive?  The largest, most devastating dam removal experiment in modern history has reached the point of no return.  As of January 23, 2024 — despite opposition by a majority of local residents — the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River have been officially breached.  Ironically, dam removal proponents claimed the project would help salmon, but now the Klamath River is being polluted with millions of cubic yards of decomposed algae, organic deposition, chemicals, and fine silt that has built up behind the dams.  Dead steelhead trout and other species are floating to the banks.  Any salmon spawning beds in the Klamath River were undoubtedly destroyed.  At press time, conditions in the Klamath River were not likely survivable for the salmon juveniles that were beginning to emerge from the tributary rivers and creeks on their way to the ocean.  There's no way of knowing the survival rate of those juveniles until it's time for them to return to their natal spawning grounds as adults (fall of 2025 for coho salmon; later for Chinook salmon).  But there is cause for great concern:  by one estimate 26 million cubic yards of sediment is stored behind the dams.  No one knows how much of it will slough off into the river, or how long the river will remain in its turbid state, or how much of the sediment will settle on the river-bottom.

Oregon Realizes Drug Decriminalization Has Failed Spectacularly.  I'm not trying to get anyone's hopes up here too much, but it's just possible that we are witnessing a turning of the tide in terms of the progressive fads and policies that have been sweeping the nation over the past couple of decades.  First, we saw the "defund the police" movement turn into a "refund the police" effort (at least in some places) as voters began to feel the bite of rising crime levels.  Many progressives who formally sympathized with less strict immigration laws have been changing their tune after witnessing a literal invasion of our country numbering in the millions.  And now, out in Oregon, previous successful efforts to decriminalize hard drugs have morphed into a push to "recriminalize" those same substances.  It's not just talk, either.  The state legislature passed a measure this week that would roll back the previous decriminalization rules and the Governor has already indicated that she is inclined to sign it.

The Dark and the Light.  The poison killing our country is pervasive untruth.  Every institution we have relied on to run the public interest has become a factory churning out lies, evasions, and misdirection — not unlike the way mRNA "vaccines" turned the cells in your bodies into tiny generators of spike proteins destroying your organs.  Likewise, half the population, apparently, thinks this is a good thing, that we need more lawfare — the perversion of law by attorney perverts — and that we need ever more lies, evasions, and misdirection (just as the degenerates who run Harvard declare their student body needs more mRNA boosters to remain in school).  Since the doctors have all failed — miserably and dishonorably — America needs an exorcism. [...] Are you asking yourselves:  what will satisfy these maniacs?  Anything short of the ruin of our country?  What will their coveted power be worth in a ruined country?  Mr. Trump volunteered to play the role of exorcist in this grand psychodrama.  Whatever else you make of him, he has shown a lot of fortitude.

Radical Democrats Want The Same Fate For America As Hamas Does For Israel.  [Scroll down]  This worldview is institutionally endemic from the campus to the boardroom to the federal bureaucracy.  It — antiracism, progressivism, intersectionality, gay race communism, et al. — is the basis of our de facto state religion.  Those who are filtered through and direct American institutions cling to this ethos with religious zeal.  That presents a serious threat to the lives and safety of the American people.  Observe how adherents of this worldview embedded within the U.S. government foment chaos and violent crime by refusing to enforce the law at the southern border.  Currently, legions of fighting-age men from across the globe, including several suspected Islamic terrorists, are illegally flooding across the shared border with Mexico before finding themselves in the country's heartland, where they've committed hundreds of thousands of violent crimes.  But whole generations of people are reared to sincerely believe this isn't a problem.  They believe the U.S. is an illegitimate nation whose institutions seek to target and oppress nonwhite residents, such as these illegals.  From their earliest days in the education system, virtually every child in America is taught to despise the nation and its culture because it is deemed "oppressive" and infringes on an abstract, ever-expanding notion of "rights."

The Feminization of America.  We are witnessing a new rise of authoritarianism in opposition to freedom.  Men do not want to be ruled.  Look at the national submission to COVID mandates:  this was a pure feminine reaction favoring security.  We are on the brink of total submission to authority.  "Please, keep me safe!  That's all I ask!"  We the People, men pointedly, meekly allowed ourselves to submit to loss of freedom imposed by a vastly overreaching government.  We consented to be so governed.  The despair of men who have lost their role and identity as independent and strong seems to be cheered on in the guilt-ridden media who see masculinity as a sickness.  Their concern is that men are not adapting as anticipated... some are resisting.

Defeating Michelle Obama (or any other Democrat).  [Scroll down]  They've spent the last three years taking a wrecking ball to our liberty and individual rights while continually lying that we're doing that — always repeating their big lie to make it the truth.  You can always tell what they've been doing because they accuse us of doing it.  They ripped open the border to an illegal invasion, but somehow, some way, it's the fault of the pro-freedom right, because we didn't legalize the invasion and funnel more money into its facilitation.  They're causing rampant inflation, printing money to buy votes, but somehow, it's also our fault, because we noticed. [...] All indications are they are going to wait until the convention to play the Biden bait-and-switch on the people.  That helps them, because if we focus just on him and the disaster that has been his regime, a fresh face wipes that all away.  Hence, we have to hammer the party instead so the Democrats can't get away with their usual treachery.  The far left is always thinking three or four steps ahead of the game.  That's why leftists had Joe take the fall for the economy with the "Bidenomics" label.

Privacy Is a Fundamental Value.  The administrative class delights in imposing its views on the rest of us, especially when it involves our private lives.  Small businesses are made to prepare wedding cakes for gays; young children are forced to study sexual practices from which they ought to be shielded; workers are made to attend classes on DIE in which, if they are white, they are accused of racism and exploitation, even as they are the ones being exploited by racism.  We live in a world turned upside-down, and it can only end in chaos.  For the woke class that now governs our country, it's not enough that gays and transgenders, now treated as minorities and thus victims, are granted complete equality and full human rights.  What they seem to want, and what the administrative class imposes on the rest of us, is superiority and oppression of others who are straight.  Everything gays and transgenders demand is granted by administrators, judges, corporate leaders, and politicians who are afraid to refuse them because of the stigma of seeming to be "anti"-minority.  Even when it imposes harm on the rest of society, the wishes of gays and transgenders come first.

Federal Reserve records massive losses, makes up fictitious value called 'deferred assets' to compensate.  When inflation started rising rapidly after Biden took office, the Federal Reserve and others falsely called it transitional.  Biden campaigned on, and has governed on, policies to intentionally destroy reasonably priced energy.  As a result of these radical policies, energy prices soared, and energy inflates the cost of everything.  Crude oil is used in over 6,000 products, and crude oil is still up over 90% from the day Biden was inaugurated.  Yet I have not seen members of the Federal Reserve call out Biden for his energy policy as a great cause of inflation.  Biden's green policies are forcing car companies to produce electric cars, which are losing them a massive amount of money, because the public doesn't want them.  Then the car companies jack up the price of gas-powered vehicles so they can cover the losses, and make profits to cover the cost to manufacture the more expensive E.V.s.  Consumers, especially the poor and middle classes, are hit with huge increases in car payments.  I haven't heard the Fed say how that contributes to inflation.  Because of the increased cost of cars, car repairs and insurance rates are soaring — a "staggering 23%" increase for repair costs in just one year, and a "26%" increase for insurance rates, which equates to a $500 per year jump.

I never thought I'd see.  There are days when I wake up in an America I hardly recognize.  Some of that is my age, but much of it is astonishment.  A part of me is thankful that my grandparents are not alive to witness what we all are.  They would not have tolerated what we now take for granted.

The Absurd Democrat Border Con.  In 2021, Joe Biden opened wide an inherited, secure southern border that had finally stopped mass illegal immigration.  When he overturned Donald Trump's efforts, a planned flood of over 8 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. Almost all arrived without background checks, health screening, or vaccination certificates — but with massive needs for free housing, education, healthcare, and food entitlements and subsidies.  For four years, Donald Trump battled the courts, his Democratic opposition, and the open-border establishments within his own party to ensure legal-only immigration.  Somehow, he rebuilt some of the old porous border fence.  He had begun to build his long-promised new wall to the Gulf of Mexico.  He had ended Obama-era catch-and-release.  Would-be refugees had to apply for asylum in their home country.  Trump leveraged Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to police his own border and stop cynically transiting millions of illegal aliens into the U.S.  There was general Democratic Party opposition to all of Trump's measures, both through Congress and via the courts.  For the last three years of Biden's mass influx, the left has applauded open borders.  That is, until late last year, when overwhelmed southern border state governors began busing and flying illegal immigrants en masse to northern sanctuary-city jurisdictions.

Inflation is real, and it is the result of the Democrats' print-money-and-spend-it policies.
McDonald's Shares Tumble After Executives Acknowledge Price Inflation.  McDonald's executives have finally acknowledged that their $18 Big Mac meals and other inflated prices are putting off lower-income customers.  "We certainly know consumers are more wary or weary of pricing," Chief Financial Officer Ian Borden told investors during a Monday earnings call. [...] A Big Mac burger, a medium beverage, and a medium fry meal now costs $18 in some locations, up $10 from 2018 when former President Donald Trump was in office, Breitbart News reported in November 2023.

CBO report says [the] US deficit [will] skyrocket in [the] next decade.  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday released a report projecting that federal budget deficits will skyrocket to well over $2 trillion per year in the next decade.  The baseline in the CBO's annual budget and economic outlook covers the 2024 to 2034 period and projects that the budget deficit will rise from about $1.6 trillion in 2024 to $2.6 trillion in 2034, with deficits topping $2 trillion each year after 2031.  As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) — or the size of the U.S. economy — the deficit rises from 5.6% of GDP in 2024 to 6.1% of GDP in 2034.  That comes after the percentage briefly dips in the late 2020s due to the projected expiration of tax provisions from the 2017 Trump tax cuts resulting in increased tax revenue for the government.

Biden's 'Middle Finger' To Americans. Police say that at least 12 illegal aliens pummeled two NYPD cops outside a taxpayer- funded shelter in Times Square on January 27.  Among five arrested, four were released without bail, three hours later.  Unrepentant, Jhoan Boada, 22, waved his middle fingers as he left court. [...] "Why aren't they in jail right now?" New York City Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry demanded Thursday.  "They brutally attacked a New York City police officer and a lieutenant.  Our criminal justice system is upside down.  It fails every day."  This incident encapsulates life under the Joe Biden Democrats:  BINO — A Border in Name Only, rampant illegal immigration, disdain for law enforcement, far-Left "prosecutors" who lionize criminals, pushover judges with bleeding hearts, illegal aliens fueled by entitlement rather than gratitude, and an ever-expanding sense of chaos.  The American people did not vote for this, nor did they ask for the crime explosion that Biden and his border-hating Democrats have detonated.

A Tale of Two Canals.  The United States chose to give up the Panama Canal during the Carter administration.  With our rigorous processes for major capital projects, it's inconceivable that a Panama Canal under U.S. control would have undergone its recent expansion without making proper provision for the necessary additional water sources to prepare for an extended drought. [...] What we teach in our business schools, how our manufacturers source the materials they make and sell, which business choices are rewarded or punished by Wall Street investors — and most of all, who we elect to public office — makes a difference.  Sometimes a very costly difference indeed.

Hell Must Be Empty.  Ever since Obama's presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about "hands up, don't shoot"; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.  Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops.

Culture crash; thank the liberals.  Remember when America's great cities were great?  San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other major cities were centers of art, culture, wealth, sophistication, and shopping.  Now, the cities are overrun with vagrants.  Liberal judges decided that people have a Constitutional right (see, Martin v. Boise) to camp on the sidewalks and poop in the gutter, because stopping them from doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for violating the laws that prohibit them from doing so.  Crimes such as shoplifting have been de-criminalized.  The outcomes are predictable to anyone but a liberal:  This new retail mode where payment is optional has produced more cases where people choose not to; Store owners, from small family-owned hardware stores to Walmart, are leaving the cities because they can't make money if they can't charge for their goods; liberals are shrieking "racists!"  Laws against dangerous drugs have been relaxed.  The result is more dangerous drugs and drug addicts.  Duh.  Then there are the illegal aliens.  Lots of them.  Tens of millions of them.  The liberals who preside over the cities virtuously signaled that these illegal aliens are welcome in their cities.  To their surprise, the illegal aliens took them seriously, and took their cities by storm.

Is America Already A Dead Country?  The Democrat party's open southern border has allowed millions of able-bodied, unvetted young men into the United States.  Is a terrorist attack coming?  The porous border was the number one issue for New Hampshire primary voters — and New Hampshire is quite a distance from the southern border.  It was also top of mind for Iowa's voters, another state far from Mexico.  Let's assume 7 million unvetted illegal alien invaders have waltzed into our country since January 2021.  If just one-quarter of 1 percent have malicious intent to do us harm, that would be 17,500 people, all of whom are scattered across the United States, with many receiving free housing, free medical, free education, free driver's licenses, free iPhones and, in some cases, free ballots.  It is estimated that the United States government has so far spent more than a whopping $450 billion on these illegal invaders.  Think what ONE person can do when they go on a murderous rampage at a school, shopping mall, or Las Vegas hotel, and then multiply that by the possibility of thousands of terrorists waiting to cause injury, death, and havoc from sea to shining sea.

Biden is drowning in three disasters of his own making.  Responding to the killing of three American soldiers by Iranian proxies this weekend, President Joe Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Middle East is now more volatile than at any moment since 1973.  At around the same time, Biden finally admitted that the southern border is in "crisis," just as his Department of Homeland Security announced 300,000 migrants were arrested for illegally crossing into the U.S. in December, a number dwarfing all previous records.  Again, at the same time, inflation ticked higher last month, as a record number of people find they cannot pay their rent and consumers owe more personal debt than ever before.  Workers can't afford a home or a car, and their real wages are lower than when Biden took office.  There is upheaval, even chaos, at home and abroad.  Every one of these crises — Iranian aggression in the Middle East, chaos on our border, and higher prices at home — are all disasters created by Biden.  His policies caused each, which is why, if anything, the president's 40% approval rating isn't low enough.

Rolling Blackouts in Hawaii Offer a Case Study For Michigan.  Rolling blackouts in the Aloha State presage things to come in Michigan.  Michigan's new net-zero and "100% clean energy" policies mirror Hawaii's "goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045."  These energy plans are causing both states to rely on more weather-dependent wind and solar, which means that reliability issues are becoming more pronounced.  On Jan. 8 and 9, heavy rains hit much of the island of Oahu.  News releases from Hawaiian Electric, the island's main electric utility, explained that during the storm two large generating units at the Waiau Power Plant had gone offline.  In an email, company officials said that water damaged a control system at one plant.  The system at a second plant "tripped after a tie-in to the grid was damaged, likely by weather."  That was unfortunate timing, for as the utility noted, it had also recently taken several generation units offline for scheduled maintenance.

The Army's 'Recruitment Crisis' Happened When White Recruits Stopped Showing Up.  A DEI-driven 43% drop in white recruits caused the Army's 'recruitment crisis'.  The military recruitment crisis that has crippled our defense capabilities has been talked to death by generals, politicians and pundits who have blamed everything from rising minimum wages to obesity to Gen Z culture for the problem.  They have raised enlistment bonuses to unprecedented levels, spent fortunes on ad campaigns that feature lesbian weddings and doubled down on DEI as the answer to the crisis.  And yet the crisis has grown worse.  That's because recruitment was a self-inflicted problem caused by a woke racist military.

Joe Biden, the demolition man.  President Trump worked hard with Central America to close the border; on day one, Joe Biden worked very hard to open that border back up.  Trump worked very hard to cut off funds from Iran, to stop the sponsorship of terrorism, and Biden turned the spigot back on, deluging the regime with billions of dollars.  Trump gave the world the Abraham peace accords; Biden gave the world a massive disaster by sparking conflict after conflict between nations with fragile relations.  Trump worked very hard to keep oil prices low and make America energy independent; Biden told the world we were going to destroy our domestic oil industry, which jacked up the global price, and allowed Iran to fund the terrorists and Russia to fund its war.  I don't understand why Iran is still sponsoring all these attacks since the Biden administration has told Iran in strongly-worded terms, many times, to stop sponsoring terrorism.  But, according to the media, other Democrats, Nikki Haley, and many establishment Republicans, it is Trump who causes chaos.

'This is Your FBI,' thanks to DEI.  [Scroll down]  "The FBI does not appear to be getting experienced, 'mature' candidates, such as the former cop, former military person, the professional career person, the lawyer, accountant or engineer."  Sound familiar?  The U.S. Army has the same problem.  The brass can't seem to recruit anybody who can do a push-up.  Who in their right mind wants to risk their life by joining an organization run by entitled, shiftless incompetents who despise them?  "The FBI is now a joke among other law enforcement agencies because of its apparent investigative failures, political targeting of certain individuals/groups, and woke adoption... The FBI is considering hiring candidates not accepted by other law enforcement agencies."  The G-men have Diversity Recruitment Events — "straight white males may not attend."  In other words, there's no room for a modern-day Inspector Lew Erskine.  But Dylan Mulvaney or Jussie Smollett — come on down!

A world war, not a civil war.  The de-stabilization of the West goes beyond the invasions.  Western leaders turn their back on the Lord as the devil collects the souls of nation upon nation.  Countries no longer praise the men who freed them but instead shame today's white people for what are declared past sins.  In Canada, Justin Castreau made up a story about Catholic boarding schools killing Indian students and burying them in shallow graves — without evidence.  Conveniently, they won't dig up the alleged graves because that might disrespect them.  In America, LGBT groomers use child porn in schools to recruit kids.  Public schools have become a poor man's Epstein Island.  I won't go into the transmania today because it sickens me so.  Given the attempts at suicide by our society, how can historians not conclude that the terrorists won 9/11?

Racing to Death.  Today young men and women are more likely to die from drug overdoses, especially fentanyl, though tomorrow it may be some other trendy drug.  Though different from car racing, the underlying cause of death is the same:  the heedlessness and overconfidence of youth within a society that in nearly every media venue glamorizes speed, drugs, and sex.  If only the young would recognize the dangers of life and their own limits — in other words, if only they would become conservative and wise beyond their years — then little of this would happen.  But of course, they do not, and in 2022, there were 105,452 deaths from drug overdoses and 42,795 deaths from car crashes.  Altogether, there were 218,064 "unintentional deaths," so approximately 70,000 accidental non-auto deaths unrelated to drugs.  In addition, there were 49,449 suicides in 2022.  I suspect that most of those dying in these careless and destructive ways do not value their lives as they should.  The underlying cause is not just that the young are heedless — the young have always been so — but that they have become increasingly heedless, and dangerous to others, in recent years.

The Editor says...
It appears to me that the public schools are teaching nihilism, secular humanism, and recklessness, instead of teaching civics, ethics, good citizenship, history, and common sense.  Public school kids seem to have little regard for right and wrong, but they're very aware of what they can get away with at any moment of the day.  Teaching philosophy and Christianity, or at least the Golden Rule, would help.  But alas, the Communists have taken over the public schools, directly or indirectly, thanks to the Socialist Democrats; and the internet has taken the place of fatherly advice, so this is the fruit.  Young people today don't know how to act in church, in a restaurant, in a theater, or on the highway.  We expect them to behave and they won't.  The first thing you have to wonder about teenagers racing their cars (or their mothers' cars) in the street is where are their fathers?

300,000 Illegal Border Crossings In December.  Biden's failed policies have created the crisis at the southern border.  In Biden's first 100 days he took more than 94 executive actions on immigration, including halting construction of the border wall and ending the successful "Remain in Mexico" policy.  Illegal immigrants have confirmed this:  "The border is open... everybody believes that the border is open.  It's open because we enter.  We come in, free, no problem... We came illegally."  The Biden administration lost track of at least 150,000 illegal immigrants during the summer of 2021.  Joe Biden and "border czar" Kamala Harris are nowhere to be seen, with each only having visited the border once since taking office.  It's not just Biden; Democrats in Congress have consistently voted for policies that make the border and country less secure.  Democrats aided sanctuary cities and sent stimulus checks to illegal immigrants, opposed legislation to fund Title 42, and repeatedly voted against funding the border wall.  Democrats voted against hiring more border agents, deporting felons, preventing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes from becoming permanent residents — and voted against strengthening the successful Remain in Mexico policy.  Democrats voted against funding for counternarcotic operations and ensuring the enforcement of immigration laws at the border.  Democrats voted against ensuring all local and state law enforcement are permitted to cooperate with federal immigration officials to track illegal immigrants.

Is Biden Poison-Pilling Trump?  Biden is a disgrace.  No other president in history has done more to cripple a country than the former senator from Delaware: devaluing the dollar, raising energy prices, forcing people to stay home, firing workers who showed up because they wouldn't take a government-mandated experimental vaccine, causing massive instability in Ukraine through failed diplomacy, leaving thousands of men, women, and children behind in Afghanistan, who, because of his failed policy, now live under tyranny and death.  Biden's failure to protect Israel by doing business with Iran cannot be forgotten.  His encouragement of sanctions of immoral health practices — even encouraging and supporting genital mutilation among "trans" youth — is criminal.  Pandering to every progressive pipe dream, no matter the cost, including the inefficient desire to be carbon-neutral without any credible science or benefit to support his goals, is psychotic.  All of this adds up to a country that has been mortally wounded, with blow after blow of egregious and sociopathic leadership.  This is the legacy of the Biden presidency.

The Editor says...
Leaving stink bombs for the next president is exactly what Obama did.  This is just more evidence that Obama is still the acting president in 2024.

2024 — America's Year of Living Dangerously.  During Biden's tenure, the U.S. military has suffered historic shortfalls in recruitment, the disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, a new DEI commissariat that wars on meritocratic promotions and assignments, the politicization of generals and admirals, the hyped but otherwise inane effort to root out mythical white supremacists and "domestic terrorist" bogeymen from the ranks, and the expulsion of some of our best soldiers for their reluctance to be vaccinated, many of them having developed natural immunity from prior infection.  The Pentagon is short on ships and planes.  U.S. weapons stocks are dangerously low, drained by the abandonment of billions of dollars of equipment to the Taliban, the resupply efforts to Ukraine and Israel, the failure of the Biden administration to fund the restocking of our munitions and to ramp up resupply production — and a $35 billion national debt fed by $2 trillion annual deficits.

America's Healthcare Potemkin Village.  A 2020 study compared ten-year (2007-2017) performance of top healthcare stocks to patients' access to care.  The time period extended from before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — passed in 2010 and implemented in 2014 — to after full implementation and thus included effects associated with the ACA on stocks and on patients.  Over the ten years, the seven largest healthcare stocks all increased in share price, with average gain of 307 percent (range: 157 to 635), while the Standard & Poors Index gained 80 percent.  Over the same time period, the maximum average wait time to see a primary care physician increased from 99 days to 122 days.  As stockholders gained value, patients lost access to medical care.  While this is a statistically significant (p<0.0001) temporal association, that does not prove cause and effect.  One may infer causation based on how health insurance companies profit.

Bidenflation strikes:  If you waited to buy your 'Forever' stamps, you're out of luck.  [Scroll down]  And now you know why every business or every organization is begging you to switch to online bill delivery and offering you all types of goodies if you do.  You also know why you, an over-30-something, are now paying your bills online, fees included, to avoid high-priced stamps and questionable delivery resulting in late payment fees.  You've even become accustomed to receiving online wedding and other gala (and not so gala) invitations, announcements, etc., tucked among the daily multi-platform, multi-multi messages jamming your computer and/or cell phone.  Faster and cheaper can't be beat.  Oh, and not so by the way, for those of you with long memories, which includes 21-year-olds, in 2021, when President Joe Biden (D) took office, the price for a first-class forever stamp was 55 cents, so today's first-class stamp price increase comes to 23.5 percent in just three years.  A fine example of Bidenomics in action.  Get used to it; more to come.

Minds To Think.  For a lot of us, there is no excuse to be uninformed and unprepared by now, but there are so many who come across bits and pieces of the picture without the will to put them together and form a strategy for resistance. [...] They see the pandemic for the fraud that it was, for how it destroyed whole swaths of American cultural freedoms, but still they complied.  They accepted, they were too timid to just tell people no.  They cling to their current lives, living in the hours before the devastation of the American experiment, holding onto careers that no longer exist, jobs that will not even be there in a year.  They protect their bank and 401k accounts as if the entire worldwide economic reality hasn't drifted into fantasy, held aloft only by the belief that debt doesn't matter, that going digital will provide control, but where is that ability to control without electricity?

National Populism and the Rise of Donald Trump.  Conservatives have lost control over organizations that have shaped their communities over the years.  Many judges and lawyers no longer respect a settled body of law.  Churches no longer preserve our foundational Christian heritage, and college professors don't enforce firm standards of academic accomplishment.  Globalist progressives have taken over all the vital institutions.  Now, even parents are timid about enforcing discipline and passing on traditional family values to their children.  Conservatives are mocked as people who cling to their Bibles and their guns and are labeled as fascists, haters, homophobes, and worse.  The ruling class has given us $35 trillion in national debt; an underfunded, politicized, and emasculated military; more than 8 million illegal aliens; massive police defunding; 100,000 dead each year due to fentanyl; and a highly partisan DOJ and FBI.

You're Going To Get Dirty.  [Scroll down]  If you want freedom, you're going to get dirty.  By all evidence, we are mere steps away from a global war.  I believe the Western powers will lose it, that when it starts the U.S. will have its legs ripped out from under it by the nearly one million foreign fighters who have been allowed to infiltrate the U.S. through Biden's traitorous open borders.  That's when the internal fighting will begin while the military is busy getting annihilated overseas.  I am less convinced of a nuclear exchange because I don't think either Russia or China believe they need to resort to it and there is no one in the United States chain of command who believes enough in the righteousness of America to use them to defend it.

'Their' Democracy:  Tyranny Comes to the US.  I am angered that Americans are being conditioned to loathe our shared history and the very people who made our modern country possible.  Even our founding documents have been labeled potentially harmful.  Make no mistake: these actions are happening because of unscrupulous politicians, bureaucrats, and others who are intentionally destroying our nation's heritage to obtain greater power, control, and wealth.  In place of the constitutional republic gifted to us by our founders, these charlatans promote "their" democracy.  Even though our founders rejected direct democracy because it leads to tyranny through mob rule, our elites have managed to convince Americans otherwise.  As a result, in pursuit of their democracy, our political class has amassed unsustainable national debt and created an enormous welfare state.  While declaring unity, our democracy cheerleaders encourage racial animosity.  One way is by falsely claiming white supremacy as our country's greatest threat.

The Hysterical Style in American Politics.  The [Covid] lockdown caused untold economic chaos, suicides, and health crises.  One result was the 120 days of looting, arson, death, destruction, and violence spawned by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd while in police custody in May 2020.  Suddenly, a hysterical lie took hold:  American police were waging war against black males.  The details around Floyd's sudden death — he was in the act of committing a felony, resisting arrest, suffering from coronary artery disease and the after-effects of COVID, and being high on dangerous drugs — were off limits.  The riot toll reached $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law enforcement officers.  A federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic church were torched.  Police forces were defunded.  Emboldened left-wing prosecutors nullified existing laws.

Inflation is around double of what it was when Joe took office.  The Biden campaign workers, posing as journalists, are out in full force:  They are telling the poor what great benefit they are getting now that inflation is now down to less than 4% [...] The analysts are making month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons, ignoring the rises that have already happened and not been compensated for with higher salaries.  What voters are comparing, though is what prices were like before Joe Biden took office and what prices are like after Joe Biden took office.  That makes the TIPP CPI Index, which makes that comparison, much more useful.  What's their reading this month? 16.6% higher overall than it was when Joe Biden took office "with no signs of easing."

2024 Promises the Expansion of the Green Energy Scam.  Years ago, I wrote a post about how cheap air travel to Europe was ruining America.  My point was that the Americans visiting Europe were confusing what they experienced as a tourist with the reality of life in Europe.  These progressive American fans of two-hour lunches and 6 months of maternal and paternal leave didn't have a clue about how average Europeans lived.  Indeed, a couple of years later, the Foundation For Economic Education came out with a study that showed the poorest 20% of Americans were better off than the average European.  Basically, the average European suffers from high taxes, high prices, tiny homes and cars, and, increasingly, less freedom.  But tourists sipping tea in London or shopping in Paris rarely, if ever, see this, or understand it if they do.  Nonetheless, with little understanding of economics or history, they decide that America must become Europe.  Socialism, Obamacare, and gay marriage are just some of those European imports that Americans have to deal with today.

DEI, Airplane Crashes, and Bad Medicine.  How safe are you nowadays on commercial airliners?  How safe will you be tomorrow?  Are airlines sacrificing safety at the altar of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)?"  Who do you want piloting the jetliner you're on, the best, most experienced pilots or box-check hires?  Flipping the page, medical schools will graduate bevvies of DEI doctors as the decade unwinds.  What if you need open-heart surgery?  Cancer treatment?  Won't you need a sound diagnosis for starters?  Will the most capable physicians attend you?  Or will you have to settle for the right color, right gender, right sexual orientation, pick-your-pronouns person in a white lab coat?  The nation is being plagued by incompetence.  Plenty of that is from lax parenting, subpar education, trophies for just showing up, and a debauched culture that discounts hard work and competence.  Forget excellence.  While that's bad enough, DEI adds another corrosive layer.  People are receiving degrees and certifications for superficialities.  Merit is shunned.  Standards [a]re being dropped in too many instances and exceptions made.  Victimhood is ginned up and fobbed off as part of progressive social reform.

Joe Biden's Scary Speech on Jan. 6.  Just recently, ahead of the anniversary of Jan. 6, President Joe Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to kick off his 2024 campaign. [...] Politically speaking, the purpose of the speech was clear.  Given that Biden has among the lowest favorability numbers ever recorded for a sitting president, he cannot make the election about his achievements.  Because he has none that warrant his reelection.  In every way, he has made America a worse country.  He has terribly damaged the economy — increased an already unsustainable national debt; changed an energy-independent and energy-exporting country into an energy dependent and energy-importing one.  He hurt America and the world by withdrawing — and in the way he withdrew — American troops from Afghanistan.  He showed that America cannot be counted on by those who depend on us.  He abandoned $7 billion in weaponry, much of it now being used by Islamic terror groups. [...] He has created the first large set of political prisoners in American history — hundreds, soon perhaps thousands, of Americans sentenced to prison for merely entering the Capitol, or for just being present on the Capitol grounds, on Jan. 6.  He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political opponents, and is overseeing the prosecution of an ex-president and political rival for the first time in American history.  From his first day in office, he has stoked racial tension in America.  His inaugural address was the most hate-filled and divisive inaugural address in American history.  He has so demoralized the American military that recruitment levels are at their lowest ever.

Chronicles of Decline.  Internal data reviewed by Military.com show that "the Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade."  The "most significant drop" occurred from 2022 to 2023.  Army officials and data experts are baffled by all this.  The ones interviewed by Military.com blamed "partisan scrutiny of the service, a growing obesity epidemic and an underfunded public education system."  It's a bold move to react to a decline in white recruitment by arguing that white men aren't enlisting anymore because they're dumb, fat, and stupid. [...] Recall that in 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a "stand down" to confront "extremism" in the ranks.  In practice, that meant lecturing people about our perennial bugaboo: "white supremacy."  And while troops were reminded of the importance of staying apolitical, their superiors encouraged them to support Black Lives Matter.  People noticed that discrepancy.  Sen. Tom Cotton gathered written complaints from members of the military who were put off by what seemed to be a double standard about what is and is not considered "extremism."

Bidenflation Steady At 16.6%, With No Signs Of Easing.  The dark reality of Bidenomics is 16.6% inflation under the President's watch.  When he took office, inflation was at just 1.4%. Inflation has stayed above the Federal Reserve's 2% target for 35 consecutive months since March 2021.  Average hourly earnings for all employees dropped 2.5% to $11.10 in December from $11.39 in January 2021 when Biden assumed office.  Despite nominal salary increases at their fastest pace in years, American workers are now worse off than when the President took office.  In summary, the prices have increased by 16.6%, while real wages have declined by 2.5%, meaning Americans have taken a 2.5% pay cut under the current administration.  To put it differently, people now need 19.1% more income than they had in January 2021 to maintain their living standards.  How do Americans make up the shortfall?  Many must take up a second job, tap into their savings, or supplement with credit cards.

Small Town, USA learns the hard way that welcoming lawbreakers has negative consequences.  A few days back, AT published an essay by contributor C.S. Boddie that highlighted a recent tragedy in Colorado:  an illegal alien, who had been deported four times before, killed a mother and her 16-year-old son, as he drove (allegedly) completely inebriated near a high school.  The illegal had four "alcohol-related driving" convictions under his belt, and just days before, he'd received probation, community service, and work release from a Colorado judge; Boddie's piece also included a number of other "chilling" examples underscoring the deadly consequences of admitting millions of scofflaws.  But dead Americans aren't the only casualties — say adios to Whitewater, Wisconsin, a once-safe and once-quaint midwestern town.  Whitewater recently came into the national spotlight after a letter to the Biden regime got picked up by conservative media.  Local police chief Daniel Meyer, had appealed to Washington to request help for the influx of illegals that have cropped up since 2022, putting a "strain" on reasources, and bringing in problems like these:  [Tweet]

We Are in an Abusive Relationship with Our Government.  California is now covering the costs of genital-mutilating surgeries for illegal aliens.  Leftism's slippery slope invariably leads to depraved absurdity.  Consider how Governor (receding) Hairdo and the Pyrite State's other communist saboteurs have greased the shifting ground under Californians' feet:
  [#1]   There is no illegal immigration crisis.
  [#2]   There may be a crisis, but California taxpayers won't be paying for it.
  [#3]   Taxpayers may have to foot the bill for the illegal immigration crisis, but California will do nothing to incentivize illegal immigration.
  [#4]   After further review, these aliens aren't "illegal," but rather "undocumented."
  [#5]   Health care is a human right.
  [#6]   California must provide "undocumented" aliens healthcare.
  [#7]   Mutilating the genitals to make them look like the opposite sex is health care.
  [#8]   California taxpayers must pay for "undocumented" aliens' genital surgery.
  [#9]   Californians who object to paying for undocumented aliens' genital surgery may be guilty of "hate" crimes and will be prosecuted.

White Men Don't Want To Join An Army That Tells Them They Aren't Wanted.  The U.S. Army is experiencing a sharp decline in the number of white recruits it's bringing into the service, a new report found.  According to data analyzed by Military.com, "A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop."  The report further noted how "[n]o other demographic group" has experienced such a downward trend in recent years, and that the "rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts."  Much like the Navy and Air Force, the Army missed its recruiting targets for the 2023 fiscal year, with the branch coming up 10,000 recruits short of its goal of 65,000.  When discussing the matter with reporters in October, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed the Army understood its 2023 target was a "stretch goal" and described the branch's plans to launch a "new 'talent acquisition' enlisted occupational specialty dedicated to recruiting" to help stymie the problem.

Army Recruitment of White Soldiers Plummets, Take a Wild Guess Why.  Military recruitment is in trouble, with the U.S. Army missing its goal by about 10,000 new soldiers in 2023. [...] The Army is now having to absorb more deployments with fewer deployable soldiers, meaning those who do sign up are facing more time away from their families.  In turn, that incentivizes potential recruits to look elsewhere.  It's a vicious cycle of stretching what is there while creating the conditions for continued failure to hit recruiting goals. [...] Why are white people looking at the Army and deciding not to join when they were doing so at nearly double the rate just five years prior?  One only needs to look at the changes within the military over the last several years to figure that out.

Report: U.S. Army Sees Massive Decline in White Recruits.  Over the last several years, the U.S. Military has struggled to meet recruitment goals across all branches, perhaps most of all with the Army.  One of the reasons for this has now been explained.  White men are no longer enlisting in the numbers they did in the past.  Families which used to encourage young men to enlist are doing so in far fewer numbers for reasons which are obvious to many.  New woke policies, the vaccine mandates and the embrace of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies mean white recruits are looked over for advancement in the US Military today.  All of these factors have all contributed to this decline in white recruits.

Joe Biden's Scary Speech on Jan. 6.  Last Friday, ahead of the anniversary of Jan. 6, President Joe Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to kick off his 2024 campaign. [...] Politically speaking, the purpose of the speech was clear.  Given that Biden has among the lowest favorability numbers ever recorded for a sitting president, he cannot make the election about his achievements.  Because he has none that warrant his reelection.  In every way, he has made America a worse country.  He has terribly damaged the economy — increased an already unsustainable national debt; changed an energy-independent and energy-exporting country into an energy dependent and energy-importing one. [...] He has done terrible damage to the most important freedom — freedom of speech.  Among other things, his administration worked with Big Tech before and since the 2020 election to censor political speech.  He has created the first large set of political prisoners in American history — hundreds, soon perhaps thousands, of Americans sentenced to prison for merely entering the Capitol, or for just being present on the Capitol grounds, on Jan. 6.  He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political opponents, and is overseeing the prosecution of an ex-president and political rival for the first time in American history.  From his first day in office, he has stoked racial tension in America.  His inaugural address was the most hate-filled and divisive inaugural address in American history.  He has so demoralized the American military that recruitment levels are at their lowest ever.

Electricity Prices Are Soaring:  It's Time to Hold the "Energy Transition" Accountable.  Electricity prices in the United States are skyrocketing, with all-sectors electricity rates reaching new all-time highs in 2022 and 2023, but wind and solar advocates like to pretend that these energy sources are not responsible for the rising electricity costs paid by American families and businesses.  However, recent reports from Regulatory Research Associates (RRA), a division of S&P Global Commodity Insights, evaluating requests from electric companies to raise their prices (known as rate cases) clearly show that rising electricity prices are largely being driven by spending billions of dollars on wind turbines, solar panels, natural gas plants, and new transmission lines in pursuit of the so-called "energy transition."  Our deeper-dive into the eight-largest rate increase requests, as identified by RRA, reaffirms these findings by quoting directly from rate cases filed with state regulators, debunking the idea that wind and solar aren't causing electricity rates to rise, once and for all.

A Culture in Collapse.  In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.  The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military.  These symptoms of decay share common themes.  Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. [...] What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.  In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War.  The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.  Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative.  But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden's presidency has shocked Americans.

Yet Another Trans Shooter.  Once is an event.  Twice may be a coincidence.  Three times is a pattern.  Four?  Five?  Six?  At what point does it become a trend?  [Tweet]  We are now at the "it's a trend" stage.  We still don't know much about the shooting, and early reports are usually unreliable.  But the evidence is mounting that the shooting in Perry, Iowa, was perpetrated by a mentally ill boy who identified as "genderfluid," was an LGBTQ+ activist, and pushed alphabet ideology.  [Tweet]  2023 seemed to be the year for transgender shooters, and it looks like 2024 may continue the trend.  Given that there isn't a lot of evidence that I am aware of that transgender-identifying people have in the past been particularly prone to shooting large numbers of people, we have to ask, "What has changed?"  And I think the answer is obvious:  a lot of things have changed over the past couple of years, and they have all been pushed by the Left.

Anti-Intellectualism and the Left.  The smug superiority of many on the progressive Left never ceases to amaze me.  They regard Republicans, especially of the MAGA variety, as knuckle-dragging cave people with diminished intellectual abilities while they are really the one's with contracted brain function.  Every societal issue, such as unfettered illegal immigration, record unchecked spending, and disastrous U.S. foreign policy, involves proof of how the Left is incapable of higher than the most rudimentary thinking.

There Was a Time When Governments Tried to Make Their People Better.  The Biden regime seems hell-bent on celebrating and subsidizing the worst tendencies of human nature:  not only every conceivable manner of perversion, but resentment, envy, the privilege of protected classes rather than advancement on the basis of merit, and so much more.  It is not hard to suspect that Biden and his henchmen have some vested interest in encouraging Americans to become worse people, harder to get along with and more difficult to deal with.  What could more effectively justify an authoritarian crackdown than a population that is as obstreperous as it is immature?  One outcome of all this will be that Americans will become worse people than they used to be.  A government can't expect to celebrate mental illness, demanding that everyone take it as normal on pain of ostracism, deplatforming and worse, and exalt skin color and gender over competence and expect that Americans will continue in large numbers to value being rational, competent, and capable.

Nearly 60 Years After Congress Killed Off Mental Hospitals, Complete Breakdown of the System Has Lawmakers Attempting to Bring Them Back.  What people think is compassion sometimes brings bad results.  Fail to confront the slacking employee and other workers have to carry more of a load.  Be a pal to your children and then be frustrated by their disrespect.  Lavish welfare and then wonder why unappreciative people won't work.  And then there's the running away from obligations to protect the mentally ill from themselves and from society.  Perhaps you've had the same thoughts as I — the grand experiment in mental health care of the past half-century or so has failed.  Just witness the aggressiveness of babbling panhandlers, the general filth of helpless people living on the sidewalks, the destruction of cities such as San Francisco.  Believe it or not, the left-leaning Politico published an article Monday that gave a nod in the direction of some kind of return to the involuntary commitment of some mentally ill people.

We Want Disruption, Not Chaos.  Peter Strzok and Lisa Page used their positions in the FBI to create an "insurance policy" against our electoral choice.  Their plan certainly introduced a bit of chaos into the 2016 election.  Leftist groups filed lawsuits against virtually every action President Trump attempted in office.  Those suits caused a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about America's path forward.  The longest shutdown in U.S. history was brought about by Democrats to avoid funding a border wall.  It caused weeks of political disorder and years of unrestricted national invasion.  When the Mueller investigation spent three years investigating a crime that never happened — based on fabricated evidence provided by Hillary Clinton — we experienced years of political upheaval.  When General Mark Milley informed his Chinese counterpart that he would inform them of any surprise attack Trump planned, it introduced chaos into our military chain of command.  Anthony Fauci was responsible for a healthy dose of chaos when he illegally funded "gain of function" research at the Wuhan lab, creating a virus, which the Chinese "leaked," leading to a global pandemic.  It was a stark demonstration of the chaos men are capable of who have more ego than wisdom.  We also experienced a bit of chaos when San Fran Nan conducted two impeachments, based on hearsay and disagreements.

Why Is Everything So Stupid?  [Scroll down]  This past week, many analysts were suggesting that the Ivies be shuttered, given the performance of their Vice-Chancellors in Congress.  Academia is lying to us, corporations are lying to us.  Every institution is corrupted.  Individual lives are substantially impacted, population growth has collapsed.  We are deliberately refusing growth to Africa and inflicting cruelty far above any colonialism caused.  The shame of this will last a hundred years.

The Corruption of Everything.  Sexuality has been corrupted.  Men claim to be women and vice versa.  Drag queens set the kiddie agenda in schools, and transsexuality has become epidemic, although de-transitioners are becoming more noticeable these days.  Meanwhile, young lives have been ruined because of this fad.  In addition, no TV or streaming drama is complete without the obligatory sex scene.  This has made family watching almost impossible and even non-prudes like me squeamish.  Sex scenes are not even necessary to enhance the storylines.  It's just another way the left can degrade something beautiful and sacred.

Markets and Miracles.  Government handouts changed people's thinking.  They taught millions of Americans:  You are entitled to a check.  No longer was it individuals' responsibility to help families, neighbors and ourselves; now it was clearly government's job.  The result is that people became dependent on handouts.  Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.  Welfare created something never seen before in America:  a near-permanent "underclass."  Welfare told parents:  don't get married; you'll lose benefits.  Don't work; your check will be reduced.  Above all, make sure the father isn't home when a welfare worker comes.  If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.  This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations.  The result has been ruinous for millions of children.

Biden Dept of Energy Continues War on Consumers.  We all know the routine.  Water-saving toilets that don't flush (flush twice), water/energy-saving dishwashers and clothes washers that don't clean (run two cycles), lightbulbs that don't light, dryers that don't dry (run twice), and all the ancillary nonsense that comes from the intervention of the regulatory state.  What Biden and the progressive movement call the "green new deal" effort toward "sustainability," including the ban on gas stoves and internal combustion engines, simply results in a diminished quality of life, a loss in lifestyle productivity, and the exact opposite outcome from their expressed/intended purpose.  It's an abject mess of stupidity, pushed under the guise of environmentalism.  Today the Biden Dept of Energy (DOE) takes it one step further with rules and regulations on fridges, freezers and fans. [...] Now we will see air conditioning units that don't cool, fridges that don't chill, freezers that don't keep things frozen and fans that do not move air.

Crime Soars As Punishment Vanishes.  Portland, Oregon, decriminalized drug use in 2020. Fentanyl pills — all coming through Mexico with ingredients from China — sell for only a dollar or two, down from three times that in 2020.  (This is one notable area where "Bidenomics" actually lowered the price of something.)  Kevin Dahlgren has worked with the homeless for 30 years and calls Portland "the largest open-air drug zone in state history."  He has written, "I have found more dead people and seen more overdoses this year than in all the other years of my working and volunteering, combined."  In Washington state, theft up to $750 is only a misdemeanor, and just like in big California cities, prosecutors often choose not to prosecute shoplifting.  In November, unionized workers went on strike at three Seattle-area Macy's, saying the chain "is not doing enough to address shoplifting, violent shoppers, and other safety threats to workers and customers."  One worker said that when she called police to report "a repeat shoplifter that even law enforcement was familiar with," she was suspended without pay.

73 Three and Four-Year Olds, Hundreds of Children Under Six Sent to Disgraced NHS Transgender Clinic.  Children as young as three years old have been referred to Britain's socialised medicine's 'Gender Identity Development Service' transgender clinic, with hundreds of young children referred in the past decade.  382 children aged six and under have been referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the Tavistock and Portman Trust, known commonly as the National Health Service's transgender clinic, in the past ten years new figures from the Trust reveal.  The numbers, published by the Daily Mail, reveal how even the youngest children have been pushed into interacting with the controversial clinic, and that the numbers being referred to GIDS have soared in recent years.

Chesterton's Fence.  The lesson of "Chesterton's Fence" tells us to not tear down a fence until we know the reason it was erected.  It may have been built for a good reason of which we are unaware, and tearing it down would reap horrible consequences.  Traditional marriage?  Not important, get rid of it.  Traditional roles between the sexes?  Oppressive!  Traditional values?  Racist and colonialist!  The cultural suicide the West is committing can be explained by viewing the Judeo-Christian institution as a very old, paint-peeling, building column.  The impulse of modern man was to beautify things by chopping them down, without realizing that this was supporting the entire building of Western civilization.  A building that is now collapsing.

Then why is New York still a "sanctuary city?"
Eric Adams Suggests Migrant Crisis Will Result In Rampant Crime.  Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams raised concerns that the city's migrant crisis will create more crime during a press conference Tuesday.  Migrants that are arriving and unable to work in the U.S. legally have become a challenge for the city, Adams said during the news conference, where he was asked about rising crime.  Out of the more than 100,000 migrants that have arrived to the city, only 2,200 have been approved for work permits, Anne Williams-Isom, the city's deputy mayor for health and human services, said.  "When I talk about the devastation impact that the migrant and asylum seekers, people only think about the volume of people that are coming in.  There are byproducts to this, cuts to services, like we had to postpone a police class, looking at some of the budgetary cuts, having a body of people, many young, who can't work," Adams said.

The Editor says...
Those problems were all self-inflicted.

Use the Colorado Precedent.  Americans will not be defended from the antagonistic members of society by behaving themselves.  They want to, they have been taught their whole lives that there's nothing worth fighting for, that's not the way civil society operates, even while they are amidst the most uncivil society ever devised in the homeland.  They are being shown scenes of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China on their own streets, in their own courts of law, and they still refuse to see it.  They have endured a biological weapon unleashed on them; seen young, strong athletes drop dead on football fields across the land and they still don't break free of the trap into which their mind has been captured.  Invasions of illegals from every nation in the world have descended upon their borders and strolled through with the guidance of border patrol officers.  This is at the behest of a single president, a single department in the government in violation of the will of the people.

Finally, Destruction for Destruction's Sake.  America's cultural degradation began in the late 1960s.  The counterculture was the primary agent.  Libertinism has been battling traditionalism ever since, with traditional America giving ground, sometimes in inches, other times in feet, proving that it's much easier to destroy than preserve and build.  In this quest to ruin America, institutions, public and private, have been thoroughly infiltrated — actually, in some ways, ceded by traditionalists.  Schools, media, and entertainment have seen decades of steady retreat by traditionalists who prefer other pursuits.  Culture is the captive of the degenerate elite.  Americans are required to swim in the cesspool that nihilists choose to fashion or shut up and slink away — for the time being.  Any objection deemed a notable threat leads to cancellation, a form of oppression.  Government and private institutions are used to cancel objectors.  If not stopped and reversed, the oppression will only increase.

Secession Without Secession.  [Scroll down]  It's a trend that has been taking place in New York, San Francisco and any other "sanctuary cities" where they separate themselves from United States laws they don't like, even when they find their separation is a burden too difficult to bear and seek financial aid from the rest of us to make it bearable.  This is the insanity that has gripped the United States after several internal coups against the rule of law and replace it with the rule of power that we see playing out everywhere in the US today.  January 6th protesters are charged with insurrection, but leftist/communist/Muslims take over the capitol during session and a few arrests take place, but nothing like the dragnet set out by the FBI for J6ers.  That's the rule of power.  Any attempt to restore the rule of law, such as vacating the chair when McCarthy betrayed the whole Republican Party, is met with incredible pressure and the corruption of whoever is finally selected as the Speaker of the House.  But that's just under Republican control.  This never happens under Democrat control, because they are the ones behind the coups, who benefit from the rule of power.

COP 28 is the Codification of Elite Hate, and Lies all the Way Down.  [Scroll down]  Such are the fruits of the modern environmental movement.  Wherever they go, they destroy.  In Dubai this past week, at Cop 28, they devised a slave system for the world.  After their globalist system is in place, the only people who will make money will be the cartels.  It'll take a couple of decades, but our world will be a slave state run by criminals, just like my gorgeous province that both sets of paternal great grandparents settled in the 1880's when there were 4,000 people in Vancouver.  They built the water systems, clear cut the neighborhoods, built churches, founded schools and the hospital and made a welcoming city replete with one hundred years of peace and prosperity.  Now, fathers are knifed in front of their children outside of Starbucks, and people lie on streets dying from fentanyl and native women are so desperate they prostitute themselves to serial killers, organ harvesters and slavers.  All that goodness extinguished under violence and greed and, above all, the wilful ignorance of the comfortable.  Many, many cities are experiencing the same and under COP28 it will get worse.

Americans Must Choose Between Civilization or Its Destroyers.  When Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, the U.S. was naturally rebounding from more than a year of Covid-enforced lockdowns.  Overtaxed supply chains were still fragile.  Pent-up demand was soaring.  Consumers were flush with government cash.  Trillions of dollars had been printed and infused into the economy to ward off a feared recession.  All economists advised not to increase the deficit, spike further consumer demand, and expand entitlements.  Instead, the Left did just the opposite.  Four trillion dollars were printed and distributed.  In no time, Americans, recovering from Covid, next experienced the worst, but entirely preventable, inflation in 40 years.  Three years later, prices on staples remain 30-40 percent higher than when Biden took office.  Mortgage rates tripled.

ESG, DEI, and the Rise of Fake Reporting.  We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels.  But what are the mechanics of this coordination?  To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) — both occupants of a highly abstract thought dimension and the latter an especially incomprehensible word salad.  ESG as a phrase was coined in a 2006 United Nations report, gradually gaining adoption by private companies like BlackRock via the production of annual ESG reports.  Governments then started supporting these voluntary efforts, and eventually began making them mandatory.  Since early 2023, corporations in the EU have been compelled to report on ESG. [...] Bahar Gidwani, co-founder of a company called CSRHub, a compiler and provider of ESG company ratings, estimates that the collection of ESG data alone is already costing companies $20 billion worldwide.

Average Monthly Mortgage Payment Explodes to $3,322 In Biden's America.  The average monthly mortgage payment in Joe Biden's America has soared to $3,322, per analysis from the Wall Street Journal.  That $3,322 is nearly double the average monthly mortgage payment when His Fraudulency assumed office.  When former President Trump left office, the average monthly mortgage payment was $1,787.  [Tweet]  "Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans," writes the WSJ, "even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago."

The Totalitarian Three-Step.  This simple political dance can be done to many types of "music," for it has only three steps.  We have seen its familiar choreography in efforts against racism and crime, in steps to preserve our national security, in efforts to support agriculture and education, et al; whatever the tune, the steps are the same:
  [#1]   Manufacture a "crisis"
  [#2]   Offer "emergency solutions" people would never accept except for the "crisis"
  [#3]   Results achieve the hidden goal, unrelated to the supposed problem [...]
We can see how this "dance" played out in the 2008 housing bubble collapse:  Step One, the "Crisis": Bill Clinton manufactured the "crisis," saying poor people couldn't afford to buy their own homes.  Of course, poor people have never been able to afford their own homes, so why was suddenly a crisis?  That situation is actually a motivation for good behavior: work, save money, defer children until you're more financially secure, use alcohol (or drugs) only moderately, if at all, etc.  But no, to Clinton and the left it was suddenly a "housing crisis."  Step Two, Emergency "Solution":  Force banks and mortgage companies to lower housing loan standards so people who can't afford homes are able to get loans anyway.

This Is the Age of Regress.  It took a long time, and it was a protracted painful process for Western civilization — white male Western civilization — to achieve everything we have and take for granted, and are now losing to an invading horde.  Today, Enlightenment values, science, and Western culture have disappeared under the jackboot of "decolonization," "indigenous knowledge," "transphobia," and "Islamophobia."  Objective knowledge and the concept of intelligence are now forbidden "white constructs."

Saving America Starts with Rejecting Digital Currency.  The downward spiral of America is punctuated by: 1) massive corruption of elites inside and outside government who go along with manipulating the masses through creating and sustaining narratives that benefit them while keeping citizens largely ignorant about what is really going down, including threats to their health and their very survival; 2) the loss of confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections, which demoralizes the public and undermines the legitimacy of government; 3) the erosion of privacy, property rights, and freedom; 4) the Biden administration's deliberate open-border policy to facilitate the influx of millions of migrants for political purposes; 5) the politization of the judiciary and the attendant two-tiered justice system that has undermined the rule of law and order; and 6) the atomization of American society and the deterioration of family and community resulting from elite narratives that divide people — primarily around race and gender; and 7) uncontrollable government profligacy and accompanying kickback corruption — the continuing trajectory of which is certain to bring insolvency and collapse of the U.S. monetary system, sooner than later.

Trump's One Simple Campaign Message for Reelection.  Since Biden took office in January 2021, prices for essential goods and services have risen from 20 to 70 percent without a commensurate increase in wages.  By so many measures, we individually and collectively are worse off than four years ago.  The debt and deficit have exploded, along with interest payments on the debt.  We are at war in Ukraine and the Middle East.  Purchasing power is down while crime and drug overdoses are up.  Illegal migration, that which we know about due to millions of "getaways", is approaching 10 million, more than the population of most U.S. states.  Trump's energy independence has been replaced by much higher fuel and energy costs under Biden.  The question Donald Trump needs to ask voters is simple.  Do you like the way things are now or would you rather things go back to how they were four years ago?  Four years ago isn't some hypothetical walk back in time.  Trump was president then and was responsible, in large part, to the state of America.

Biden administration is 'spooked' over price complaints.  A Five Guys customer's video complaining about the extremely high prices of the items at the fast-food chain has resurfaced on multiple social media platforms.  Michelle Newell posted the clip to TikTok explaining that she and her husband had paid $42 for two cheeseburgers, a side of fries and two milkshakes.  The visibly upset patron told viewers that the couple had visited a Five Guys location on a Saturday afternoon for lunch.  Newell shared her anger last year — but a check by DailyMail.com Friday evening confirmed it remains just as expensive to buy the same meal.  Newell said she ordered a regular cheeseburger for herself, another cheeseburger with mushrooms for her husband and a side of fries.  The couple also got two milkshakes.  She said that 'we're absolutely done' and businesses are 'playing with their customers'.  According to the Five Guys current menu, regular-sized cheeseburgers cost $12.09 each, while regular fries are priced at $6.89.  [A]nd milkshakes cost $5.89 each.

The Editor says...
In my opinion, Whataburger makes a better hamburger for one third of the Five Guys' price.  But the word is getting around, which is why there's almost never a crowd at Five Guys.  Even so, the price of everything is going up rapidly, so the prices at Five Guys are not all that extraordinary.  They're just ahead of the curve.

Add pee to the poop destroying American cities, with Baltimore as Exhibit A.  One of the solid hits that Ron DeSantis landed on Gavin Newsom during their Thursday night debate was his waving a map graphically illustrating that San Francisco is covered with human fecal matter (aka poop), something that magically vanished only when a Chinese dictator came to town.  San Francisco may be the worst city for human poop, but it's not the only problem facing urban America.  In Baltimore, the fact that the city has become a giant urinal is destroying the city's historic buildings. [...] In Baltimore, a Democrat hellhole with gorgeous 19th- and early 20th-century architecture, public urination is eating away at the buildings:  ["]Many of downtown Baltimore's buildings are slowly being washed away.  The problem is less flooding and rain, more golden showers.  That's right, pee is eroding thousands of historic buildings downtown, the exterior bases corroding with every spurt.["]

Inside the Woke Air Force.  The military has always excelled at forming our diverse citizenry into a unified force — it embraced "E pluribus unum."  However, the U.S. Air Force is currently indoctrinating airmen in neo-Marxist ideology and creating activists thorough its Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) programs.  Some will push back and claim that DIE is simply about being inclusive of diverse viewpoints, and if this were the case, there would be little controversy.  Yet when senior leaders discuss diversity, as in DIE, the word has a neo-Marxist meaning.  Herbert Marcuse in his 1969 "Essay on Liberation" stated the following: "the familiar (used and abused) vocabulary of freedom, justice, and equality could thus obtain not only new meaning but also new reality," with a "methodical subversion of the linguistic of the Establishment."

Bidenomics: Big Mac Extra Value Meals Selling for $18, Up $10 from 2018.  A Big Mac burger, a medium beverage, and a medium fry meal now costs 18 dollars in some locations, up $10 from 2018 when former President Donald Trump was president.  The skyrocketing costs could impact the 2024 election, as the soaring inflation under President Joe Biden reflects poorly on his economic plan of so-called "Bidenomics."  The Big Mac Value Meal's price increase is just one example of continued inflation, the New York Post's editorial board reported.

The Editor says...
The Big Mac is expensive in the same places that a gallon of gas is expensive, and for the same reasons.

Where's America's Conor McGregor?  [Scroll down]  The U.S. is now effectively bankrupt from these policies, these New Green Deal, industry killing, inefficient policies, thus putting our national security in the hands of our creditors, or inflating our currency to the point of worthlessness.  They've chosen treason over pursuing policies that would benefit the American people.  They've chosen foreigners as their constituencies, allowing millions of illegals, some of them with a tactical purpose, to flood our borders and displace the population.  Some of them serve China and some of them serve Islam or the objectives of big political donors wanting the cheap labor illegals provide.  None of them serve America.  The importations have allowed big corporations to use child labor, children with no identity, no accounting for their time, no true benefactor for their tiny souls.  They labor in service to the global elite in one way or another, something completely illegal, but not out of the reach of those who daily disregard any law with the aid and assistance of our broken political system.

The World Is On Fire And Biden's Spineless Foreign Policy Isn't Helping.  When we look around the world, we see a world on fire and tensions at an all time high.  Thousands of innocent civilians murdered in Israel on Oct. 7th by the savage Hamas terrorists.  Hundreds of thousands of pro-Hamas protests in major cities such as London, Paris, Sydney.  Thousands of Americans and foreign nationals inciting violence against Jews with a Cornell student calling on his fellow students to "slit the throats of Jews" on campus.  This is all happening in 2023.  [Other examples omitted for brevity.]  So yes, the world is on fire right now and that is because America has a senile and weak Commander-in-Chief at the helm right now who talks out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to foreign policy.

Dems Are Getting Mugged By Reality, Often Literally.  Some Democrats are waking up and noticing that the policies they've been cheerleading have produced violent crime waves, a massive migrant crisis, and genocidal antisemitism.  One would hope the public at large is catching on as well.  Just over the past few weeks, we've seen a spate of headlines about lefty, soft-on-crime Democrats attacked on the mean streets they've helped create.  [Examples omitted for brevity.]  At the same time, Democratic mayors are finding their cities being mugged by the illegal immigrants that Biden and his open-border cronies have let flood into the country.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams recenty announced plans to cut $4 billion from the city's budget, including canceling the hiring of new police officers, to pay for the influx of more than 100,000 illegals in the past year.

New York is now the 'least free' state, thanks to Democratic policies.  New York state once again ranks as the "least free" in America, as a new Cato Institute report nails woes The [New York] Post has long decried.  Cato's libertarians rank the Empire State dead-last, 50th, for policies impacting economic, social and personal freedoms — and even where it scores slight gains (for legalizing pot and reforming criminal justice), Albany plainly screwed up. "Combined, state and local taxes are crushing.  Debt is down from years past but is still the highest in the country at 26.1 percent of income," notes the report.  No wonder the state's seeing a huge exodus to Florida (No. 2 in freedom, behind New Hampshire, and first in economic freedom), with Miami now looking like a credible threat to displace Gotham as the nation's financial capital.  New York's endless and onerous state regulations also drive away businesses (and jobs and people) — and its growing green "climate" rules will send power costs soaring and further degrade the state's livability.

Put a Chick in it and Make Her Gay.  And Lame.  There is no peace in the streets, EVER, your people have started three wars in the last two years.  You kill millions of babies and agitate to kill more babies.  You've demanded so much money for social justice, we are broke ten times over, and risk a Weimar Germany hellscape.  Your repulsive politicians have enabled criminal cartels to loot the public purse.  We are being invaded by millions of military-aged men on the border, and at the border, hundreds of thousands of women and children are raped and being sold into sex slavery.  Women — most women — have zero consciousness of any of this.  Almost one hundred thousand children have vanished into the sex trade.  But they want the border open because COMPASSION. Never mind the sharp uptick of crime, sooner or later, honey, you are going to want a gun and a man because the world you created — go girl — is so dangerous.  YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST WOMEN WHO EVER LIVED.

Our Institutions No Longer Curate Civilization.  Schools, by and large have abandoned the task of inculcating self-restraint and, instead, have adopted the dubious project of boosting self-esteem.  Factor in single-parent households, empty houses of worship, and demoralized and de-funded police departments, and you can easily see the trouble we're in:  Our instruments of civilization have fallen into disrepair.  One result is a major problem that hardly anyone in or out of government ever discusses; namely, that an enormous number of American youth have not learned either self-restraint or the difference between right and wrong.  These kids' images appeared in everyone's living room during the George Floyd riots.  They continue to make the evening news when they band together as flashmobs and ransack department stores or commit worse atrocities.

Americans now unwilling to fight for their country?  A disheartening new poll conducted by the Echelon Insights research institute purports to show that 72% of American voters would not be willing to volunteer to fight for their country if the United States faced a major conflict. [...] So let's take a look at why we won't fight.  Here are 21 reasons, some admittedly tied together.
  [#1]   Nearly all of us have become soft and spoiled by our relative wealth and ease.
  [...]
  [#16]   A lack of familiarity and experience with firearms, vehicles, machinery, etc., and a desire to largely stay apart from them.  (Completely opposite of American youth's attitude from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam.)
  [#17]   Helicopter parenting, which prevents kids from experimenting, "inventing," and developing a spirit of adventure.
  [#18]   The attacks on "toxic masculinity" and the simultaneous feminization and infantilization of society.
  [#19]   Some too distracted by watching sports, streaming television shows, video games, gambling, social media, and porn to dedicate the time and energy to much of anything else.
  [#20]   Too many consumed with "self-medication" via pot, alcohol, fentanyl, opioids, etc.
  [#21]   Too many overweight and out of shape.

And Now, a Few Words from Election '24.  As it stands today, the Biden administration has propagated the expansion of divisive and destructive things like open borders; a looming recession; high gas prices; trillions in debt; funded enemies; fentanyl deaths; unprosecuted crimes and riots; energy shutdowns; "gender" madness infiltration; a woke and neutered military; indoctrination instead of education; caliphates enriched with U.S weapons; corporate-targeted censorship; ignored election integrity laws and more.  I could go on, but I don't have all day.  And recently, the FBI has designated Donald Trump and his legion of supporters as "domestic terrorists" who embody a "persistent, evolving, and deadly threat" to the United States.  So, it's not the FBI — who is actually advancing further division in the American electorate — who is the bad guy, but the group of traditional Americans who want their freedoms and country back.  Even Hillary Clinton advanced the idea, with respect to Trump supporters, that "at some point, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members."

Democrats finally solved the illegal immigration problem!  Here are a few of their actions:
  [#1]   By turning off the fossil fuel spigot, they made us dependent on marginally effective and costly energy sources.
  [#2]   By mandating excessively stringent EPA clean air standards and other regulations, they forced us into buying expensive and inefficient electric vehicles that have few re-charging stations and depend on Chinese-sourced materials for their batteries.
  [#3]   By "tweaking" the tax system, they can punish wealthy Americans for their industriousness and innovation.
  [#4]   By dumbing down our educational system in the elementary through high school levels, they can create new generations of history-illiterate automatons who will do their bidding at the ballot box.
  [#5]   By instituting "emergency measures" via executive orders as part of their federal, state, and local toolbox, they can effectively circumvent existing legislation and give themselves carte blanche to declare any challenge to their orthodoxy an "emergency."
Ingenious.  Martial law without the guns.  Liberty infringement by executive fiat.

Misguided environmentalists have made our cities filthy.  If you've visited a big city in recent years, you've probably noticed that the streets are strewn with trash, litter is scattered all over the sidewalks, the buildings are covered in graffiti, and off-putting smells seem to emanate from every corner.  Take San Francisco for example, which not that long ago was considered one of the most beautiful cities in America.  Today, the Golden City is one of the filthiest, with a "dirtiness index of 189.03, ranking 9th among the 40 cities included in the report" and a "litter index of 210.2," which ranks fifth.  San Francisco's streets are riddled with garbage, needles, and human feces.  Its sidewalks are overrun with homeless encampments.  And its public spaces, once enjoyed by tourists, have become open-air drug markets in which vagrants can do as they please.

The eclipse of America's greatness.  The commencement of our decline probably can be traced to the Boomers' "God is Dead," "Flower Power" culture of the 1960s.  That is the generation that allowed an entire generation that followed it to be indoctrinated by a "progressive" secular theology, which incubated in our schools and supplanted the Jewish and Christian principles upon which this nation was founded.  That is the brainwashed generation that is now coming of age and taking control of our country's levers of power.  And yet, the remaining aging Boomers pretend to be shocked when the new "humanist" religion they enabled displaces divinely inspired concepts that once undergirded our most unique Constitution — like the inherent value of human life and the rule of law.  That is the presently emergent ideology now taking hold in our nation, wholeheartedly committed to the advancement of politically malleable secular concepts like diversity, inclusion, and equity.

If You Oppose Tyranny, You're on the FBI's AGAAVE List.  Isn't it amazing that so many hippy-dippy teenagers who "fought the man" during the '60s and '70s grew up to be more authoritarian than anything they experienced in their youth?  Isn't it surreal that so many of them produced children who embrace authoritarianism as a quasi-religion?  Just what kind of counter-culture creates generations of government bureaucrats who instinctively demand that Americans do exactly as they're told?  The same people who once fought to have their voices heard now insist on silencing all dissent.  The same people who used to see mainstream culture as antithetical to authentic art now demand that only one "politically correct narrative" ever be expressed.

It's not about Israel:  We are the target.  Let's apply Occam's Razor to the question, "what is the motive behind Biden's actions as president?"  Biden's first steps were to systematically dismantle everything Trump had accomplished during his presidency.  Using the "global warming emergency" as his excuse, Biden ended drilling for oil and natural gas and moved us from energy independence to having to rely on our enemies to obtain dirtier oil.  His appointees to the military focused on wokeness, not readiness, and ended up with weakness.  His support of Ukraine, to the tune of $60 billion, with another $53 billion allocated, has depleted our military of the supplies and ammunition we need to defend our own country.  He spent money we didn't have for projects we didn't need, and has run up the national debt to $33.7 trillion -- fueling massive inflation that is ruining the lives of the "average Americans" he claims to represent.  He immediately began ignoring the law and opened our borders to all comers — terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers, and common criminals.  Fentanyl is now killing over 110,000 Americans per year, the equivalent of a Boeing 757-300 crashing every single day.  Biden has done everything in his power to support Iran.

If America Does Not Win, Its Enemies Do.  In January 2021, Iran was on the verge of economic asphyxiation, barely able to continue financing Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. [...] Russia had not yet invaded Ukraine.  Chinese President Xi Jinping was not threatening Taiwan.  Then came the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan; Russia's invasion of Ukraine; China's spy balloon, unstopped until it had finished collecting information over America's significant military sites for a week; the Biden administration's cancellation of the China Initiative that had been effectively combating Chinese espionage; failure to close illegal Chinese police stations throughout the US; no response to roughly 70,000 Americans each year killed by Chinese fentanyl; a US southern border overrun by seven million migrants, and reported a known 1.5 million "gotaways" who have presumably evaded announcing themselves for a reason; around 1,800 young Chinese men, in packs, with simialar clothes, haircuts and tattoos who pretend not to speak English, some of whom US border guards recognize as members of China's military; failure to prevent China buying American farmland, possibly either to grow their food or destroy America's — especially near US military bases; a California laboratory with mice bio-engineered to carry at least 20 deadly pathogens ready to be released into the US; Confucius Institutes that had been closed down but were renamed and are now spreading from universities to high schools; China's subversion of America's children by a "Trojan Horse" named TikTok; financing Iran's nuclear weapons and terrorism programs by ignoring sanctions on Iran to enable it to profit by close to $60 billion, funding the Palestinian Authority to the tune of nearly $1 billion, unconditionally, despite its deadly pay-for-slay "jobs program," and last week, Secretary Janet Granholm inviting the Chinese and Russian officials to inspect a US nuclear testing facility.

New York loses 10 billionaires in four years as magnates flee for Florida.  New York has lost 10 billionaires in the last four years — three of whom fled to Florida — leaving tax coffers lighter by tens of millions of dollars annually.  This year 62 New York-based billionaires appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, compared to 72 in 2019 and 65 last year.  Investor and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, whose net worth was valued at $5.7 billion last year, has grown his fortune to $6.9 billion — but he packed his bags for Florida.  Other billionaires who have relocated from Gotham to the Sunshine State in the last four years include hedge funder Daniel Och — whose net worth now stands at $3.6 billion — and investor Carl Icahn, who's worth $6.9 billion.

The Nashville shooter's motive was leftist beliefs.  It has taken about seven months, but we now know what was going through the head of the Audrey "Aiden" Hale, the Covenant School mass murderer.  No thanks to politicians, though.  They have been delaying the release of the handwritten "manifesto" for months.  While it was expected to show that Hale had mental health issues (as it can be argued any mass murderer does), it was speculated that the reason for not releasing the document was because it would have shown the trans-man was targeting the school staff and students because of their Christian beliefs. [...] In fact, the cover-up probably did more harm to the trans community than releasing the manifesto would have done.  This is because it caused the trans activists to show their true colors by occupying state capitals.  They made transgenderism part of the motive through their actions, tying their cause to a mass shooting.  The cover-up tends to be worse than what is being hidden because it compounds the original problem.

Leftist cities:  Be careful what you wish for because you're going to get it.  A young friend of mine moved to Portland, Oregon, because, as a nascent hipster, he thought Portland would be a cool yet affordable place to live.  After less than a year there, he can't wait to leave.  The coup de grace to his dreams of a life in the hipster capital of the Pacific Northwest was the mini tent city that sprang up immediately outside the door of his apartment building.  Apparently, stepping through human feces, needles, and used condoms just isn't hip. [...] In 2020, Oregon voters decided to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs.  Technically, selling them is still a crime, but the police in Portland don't police that crime.  With a dramatically reduced force, why bother?  When your city has gone in a few years from one of the safest cities in America to one of its murder capitals, policing drug sales is a low priority.  The city has been adding police to its roster again, but it's a case of too little, too late.

5 Items to Remember for When Disaster Strikes.  "We, the People," through the bitter experiences of the past two decades, no longer trust our major political, financial, medical, and educational institutions to safeguard our lives, our freedoms, and our property.  Our nation had been invaded by eight million illegal aliens.  We have allowed fentanyl to destroy our inner cities.  We have let Marxist-Leninist politicians to empty our prisons and they have allowed crime and prostitution to flourish.  We have let out our illegally elected president run up the national debt and destroy our energy independence.  Our national media, with few exceptions, have become the yapping lapdogs of the Marxist Democrats.  America has crossed the tipping point.  We can clearly see that the inevitable politically caused disasters such as terrorism, overseas conflicts, and economic downturns will not be met with rational, coherent, and comprehensive solutions from the current federal or state authorities.  Each of us is now personally responsible for the survival of his family and friends.

American Jews on the Left Are Just Shocked by Their Fellow Leftists.  The Left — specifically schools of education and teachers unions — has ruined elementary schools and high schools.  And it has destroyed universities as institutions that allow open dialogue.  The Left affirms the lie that men can become women and women can become men, and it works to crush the lives and careers of anyone who denies that people can become the other sex.  The Left supports the demise of women's sports by fighting to allow any man who says he is a woman to compete in women's sports.  The Left supports putting children who say they are the other sex on hormone-blocking drugs, and supports allowing girls under the age of 21 (and sometimes under 18) who say they are boys to have their breasts surgically removed.  The Left has been waging the most successful war against free speech in American history.  As a result, almost half of America's young people say they believe in free speech but not in "hate speech," which, of course, means they do not believe in free speech.  The Left asserts that the human fetus at any stage of development is, literally, worthless, certainly worth less than a dog, if the woman carrying it wants an abortion.  The Left has essentially destroyed mainstream journalism.  Mainstream media no longer hold truth as an ideal.

What Really Is Going On In Nashville.  [Video clip only.]

Payback: Nashville Police Department Suspends 7 Detectives Over Leak of Transgender Shooter's Manifesto.  As RedState's Bonchie reported Monday, at least part of the manifesto of transgender Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale was leaked to talk show host Steven Crowder, and the writings revealed a disturbed person who wanted to punish students at the school as well as privileged white people.  Hale killed six people, including three children, in a March shooting spree at a Nashville Christian school before she was taken out by quick-acting police officers.  The leak also enraged Nashville Democrat Mayor Freddie O'Connell, who demanded an investigation.  After months of deflecting on the issue, officials had refused to release the writings and have never given a satisfactory explanation.  According to a report, revenge came swiftly, and the Nashville P.D. on Wednesday suspended seven detectives: [...]

Why Much More Than the Manifesto is Needed on Nashville Shooter Motivations.  Following conservative pundit Steven Crowder's release of three pages of a "manifesto" written by the Nashville school shooter, controversy erupted over whether Crowder selectively publicized content to bias the public against leftist dogma.  One the pages implicates "white privilege" — a favorite bogeyman of critical race theorists and the progressive left — as motivation for the killing rampage. [...] Instead of denouncing Crowder, his critics should decry the government authorities who arbitrarily kept this killer's writings from the public.  Multiple media outlets requested the shooter's manifesto through public records only to be denied by the Nashville Police Department and FBI.  These outlets, including Star News Digital Media Inc., are suing for the records in both district and federal court.  Even if all documents authored by the shooter are released, however, insight into the killer's motivations will remain seriously incomplete.  The murderer's medications also need to be public information.

Audrey's Manifesto.  Audrey Hale is the transgender mass murderer who killed six people, including three small children, at a Christian school in Nashville.  Soon after her murder spree, it came out that she left behind a "manifesto" that described her motivation.  The authorities have withheld that document from public view, contrary to the usual practice, presumably because it makes the "trans" movement look bad.  Someone leaked three pages of notebook paper in Hale's handwriting to Steven Crowder.  These pages are not the "manifesto," although they may come from the same notebook.  Rather, they appear to be the notes that Ms. Hale made on the last days of her life:  [Tweet]

As if the political embarrassment is as bad as the shooting:
Nashville Mayor Launches Investigation into How Images from Shooter's Manifesto Were Released.  Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell (D) launched an investigation Monday into how purported images of the transgender Nashville shooter's writings "could have been released." [...] Metro Law Director Wally Dietz clarified that he will undertake an investigation at O'Connell's direction. "At the request of the Mayor, I am initiating a full investigation with multiple law enforcement agencies to determine exactly what happened," Dietz said.  Beyond confirming the beginnings of the investigation, Dietz walked the same line as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD), stating, "I cannot confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents due to the existing lawsuit."  Early Monday, Breitbart News spoke with the TBI and communications director Josh Devine, who said, "We're aware of the images, yes, but we're not offering confirmation on their authenticity."

Nashville Mayor Wants Legal On Trans Shooter Manifesto.  Since the March 27, 2023, shooting at the Covenant Christian School, many of us have been clamoring for release of the shooter's writing.  Many journals, a suicide note, and a memoir were left by transgender shooter Audry/Aiden Hale.  Today, three photocopied pages were obtained by a podcast host and the Nashville Mayor is incensed.  Furious.  Legal action involving possible local and Federal authorities is being looked into, according to Mayor Freddie O'Connell.  If this is beginning to sound like more tangling of the woven web, you are so right.  Without wasting anytime at all to mourn the six victims of the Christian School shooter, the media and opinion writers have blamed various aspects of Tennessee life:  Our Governor and open carry and a so called anti-Drag bill.  It couldn't have possibly been a severely mentally ill human.  It had to be the gun culture and hatred in Tennessee.  Now, a rational being might think that the dead sicko's writings might be important for the psychological community to study and for the general public in spotting signs.  A month after the shooting, we were told that the writings would not be released completely because they were too disturbing.  Which might be a reason they should be released.

The Nashville school shooter's manifesto reveals the left's favorite message.  On March 27, 2023, a woman entered The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and slaughtered three nine-year-old children and three adults.  It was only because police were nearby that she was stopped.  The woman, who claimed to be a so-called "trans man," left behind a manifesto.  However, while police departments and media outlets are usually quick to release statements from mass murderers, government officials in this Democrat-run city refused to do so in this case.  Steve Crowder, though, obtained the first three pages of the manifesto, which he released today.  In addition to showing an obsessive level of preparation (this was no spur-of-the-moment killing), the manifesto shows that the killer was motivated by one of the left's favorite mantras:  "white privilege."

Nashville Trans Shooter Couldn't Spell White Privilege, But Knew She Hated It.  Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who called herself Aiden Hale in her fantasy life as a male, was a product of what the Left has done to education.  She couldn't spell "white privilege," but she knew it was evil, and was determined to do her part to eradicate it from the face of the earth.  On March 27, 2023, she took a rifle into Nashville Covenant School, a Christian school in that city, and murdered three nine-year-old children and three adults, one of whom was black.  Audrey Hale epitomizes what the Left inculcates into America's children: bitter hatred and envy, violence, gender confusion, and abysmal ignorance of what everyone used to take for granted as necessary to learn in order to function well in society.  Ever since her mass murders, Hale's "manifesto" has been a closely guarded secret.  On Monday, however, political commentator Steven Crowder released several pages of this manifesto, making it clear that Hale acted out of hatred for Christians, white people and the wealthy, three groups the Left very much wants us all to hate.

Manifesto of trans Nashville school shooter [was] leaked, [and is] full of anti-white hate.  A leaked manifesto reveals the Nashville trans school shooter had a violent hatred of the "little crackers" with "white privilege" that were murdered.  First obtained and released by the Louder with Crowder conservative Rumble show, the three-page handwritten document shows Audrey "Aiden" Hale meticulously planned their last moments and the mass school shooting at The Covenant School on March 27.  Three young children and three school staff were killed before Hale, 28, was shot dead by responding police.  The manifesto, written in a spiral notebook, has various screeds and thoughts scrawled down by pen.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Goes Woke, Gender Non-Conformity Will Be Front and Center.  A treasured national tradition is getting a little less family-friendly this year.  Americans looking forward to the quintessential national holiday are getting a rude awakening with word that the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan is going to showcase more than street versions of musical numbers and marching bands from around the country.  The transgender agenda will be taking center stage for some of the screen time, and one of Hollywood's biggest liberals will be the featured performer.

San Francisco McDonald's Shuts Down After 30 Years amid City's Decline.  A McDonald's in downtown San Francisco, California, has shut down as the city grapples with numerous issues plaguing businesses in the area. [...] Meanwhile, local bank branches are closing up shop at their San Francisco locations due to the city's economic decline and numerous other woes, Breitbart News reported Wednesday.  The report added, "some of the closures in San Francisco are related to the ongoing exodus of retail businesses, many of which were exhausted by the persistent problem of shoplifting."  The Fox Business article also highlighted the fact McDonald's has been concerned after California said it would institute a minimum wage increase that the business feared would not be a good thing for its franchisees.  Workers' baseline pay will rise to $20 an hour come April 1.

California's EV Conundrums.  The crude oil industry's time in California is limited, and the oil-refining industry is behaving as any industry would in comparable circumstances, by transitioning its operations away from gasoline to activities that will prove to be more profitable in the long run. [...] Refineries are also shutting down because California has imposed a new regulation that bans the sale of gas-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and the State requires 35 percent of new car sales to be zero-emission vehicles by 2026.  It makes no economic sense to invest in new capacity in a state that has de facto outlawed the industry's existence in a few years.

The DNC Con Job to Come.  We watch the news clips, on our televisions or computer screens, and cringe, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stumble over their words, even uttering gibberish when prepared remarks are on the printed page in front of them.  It has been clear from the start that neither one is up to the intellectual requirements of this (or any) job.  When we can manage a sense of humor, we laugh and attribute it to dementia with Biden, to sheer stupidity with Harris.  When we are not in a mood to laugh, however, we reflect on what it means to our reputation on the world stage, as our enemies — military, economic, and cultural — delight in our momentary weakness and move to take advantage while the getting is good.  We watch our nation's suffering as a result — homeownership out of reach, career advancement opportunities disappearing, the prospect of retirement evaporating.  We watch other nations suffering as a result as well — Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe's energy dependence upon Russia, Iran's attack on Israel through its pawns in Gaza.  We know that all this is happening for one reason:  the weakness of America, caused by the Biden-Harris regime.

Red Light District Erupts in New York with Influx of Venezuelan Prostitutes.  A whole new red light district has erupted in New York City with a mass influx of Venezuelan migrant women working as prostitutes.  "Roosevelt Avenue in the Corona neighborhood of Queens is filled with Venezuelan migrants offering sex services in the open-air, so-called 'Market of Sweethearts," reported the Daily Mail.  Prostitutes have even been seen working in the neighborhood during the day and sometimes soliciting children as they leave school.  New York Mayor Eric Adams, who previously warned that the migrant crisis would dramatically alter his city, said that the eruption in prostitution just represents yet another example of its impact.

Joe Biden Isn't 'Managing' Or Confronting Problems.  Joe Biden Is The Problem.  There's a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden's catastrophic presidency:  A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle. [...] But back to Biden.  He's not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him.  He and his party actively created them.  Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.  Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border.  The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine's membership.  Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden's team gifted Iran, the Jewish state's greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies.  We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn't be.  The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare ("childcare" and "living assistance").  And let's not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).

They shut down the coal-fired power plants and look what happened.
Rollin', rollin', rollin' blackouts in... Tennessee?!  [W]hat has the TVA — America's largest government-owned utility, by the by — given up and replaced that brings them to a place where they have to institute rolling blackouts?  The first thing to consider is the influx of people the region is seeing.  According to the TVA's own webpage [...] It sounds like everyone who didn't move to Florida stopped in TN. [...] But if you can't keep the power on, those gains will be fleeting.  The second thing to consider is, again, the fact that the TVA is owned by the federal government.  It puts them under extraordinary pressure to go along with whatever the latest "thing" is as far as the clean/renewable energy push goes, and it seems this is where it's starting to trip them up.  They're shooting for "net zero" emissions by 2050.

Oakland, California, is falling apart.  Last month, at a small church in East Oakland, Calif., hundreds of fed-up city residents gathered outside of a community safety meeting held by Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price.  The group was as diverse as it was united, and despite the reduction in their quality of life over the past year, there was a palpable energy of hope.  Seneca Scott, a community leader, hosted the get-together under the banner of his Neighbors Together Oakland (NTO) organization.  A one-time Oakland mayoral candidate, Scott formed the group in 2021 as a response to the influx of outside money and special interest groups that have contributed to his city's decline.

Now All Americans Can See the Insanity of the Biden Energy Strategy.  We've been warning regularly on these pages that the Biden war on American fossil fuels is not just an economic calamity, but a national security threat as well.  We have known for fifty years that terrorist organizations like Hamas are primarily financed with petro-dollars.  Just as Biden has aided and abetted the Russian war machine in Ukraine, he has enriched Middle East oil-producing nations like Iran as well.  Our latest CTUP analysis finds that the reduction in US oil output under Biden from the Trump trend has cost the U.S. roughly $500 million a day.  Much of that money has been transferred week after week from American producers to nations hostile to the U.S. and Israel.

The Late Hour of Our Republic.  It is my belief, and solely my own, that we, the United States of America, have been captured by the powerbase of the elite and that our representatives and senators now respond to that powerbase, that the people, that are the powerbase of America, have been conquered.  It was done in secret, behind our backs, not in a war or through attrition, but by trickery and now whatever fighting we do for our nation is done for the powerbase of the elite. [...] I tell you that the disinterestedness of our elected officials in our pleas to rectify the election process is a symptom of this capitulation to the powerbase of the elite.  They don't care, because they don't have to.  Anything that could implicate them in the fraudulent elections is discarded by those same elite.  This is the same with the immigration laws, with the laws against theft, rape and murder.  They don't matter, because we do not live in a constitutional republic.  Our rights have been subsumed by their system of graft and clout, of power and prestige.

Joe Biden has blown up the world.  On day one of the Biden administration, he canceled the Keystone Pipeline, putting thousands of skilled workers out of work.  Over the ensuing months, he canceled oil leases, stopped fracking, and drained our strategic oil reserve.  All this was surely intentional; he means to starve the American people of energy, making what is available more expensive by the day.  Like Obama, he means to transform America, and not in a good way.  The most catastrophic stunt Biden pulled was the tragically ill conceived withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He left billions in state-of-the-art military equipment to the Taliban along with the Bagram Air Base, which sits close to China.  Thirteen young American patriots were killed by the sheer ineptitude of their leaders.  This tragic maneuver telegraphed Biden's, and thus America's, weakness to every leader in the world.  Russia thought taking Ukraine's Russian-speaking border regions would be a cakewalk.  Our careless warmongers in the Biden administration thought their puppet-of-the-oligarchs Zelensky would easily defeat Russia with billions of U.S. dollars.  The military complex wanted that war.  All of that went awry.  Here we are a year and a half later; Ukraine has lost half a million people and is still begging for billions more in aid.  None of this would have happened if Trump had been in office.

Over 545,000 New Yorkers left the state in 2022, headed for Florida, Texas and further: census bureau.  Beset by high taxes and quality of life woes, 545,498 New Yorkers left for other states in 2022, according to US Census data.  Top destinations included Florida — the most popular choice — followed by New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania as well as more distant states like Texas and California.  The exodus was partly offset by more people moving to the Empire State in 2022 than any year over the last decade, with 301,000 new residents making the transition.  Despite that uptick, New York still suffered a net population loss of 244,000.

Watch Out, You Might Get What You're After.  The crumbling debt sodden American Empire is being led by an outright moron and anyone expecting Biden to do anything other than make things worse, has probably been jabbed five times, has a BLM, Israel, and Ukraine flag in their Twitter profile, and still thinks Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation.  The U.S. provoked Ukraine conflict has drained the coffers of the U.S. and EU of hundreds of billions, while depleting their precious armaments, just as WW3 launches.  With the Middle East set to explode in a ball of fire, the world's flow of precious oil, is in danger of being cutoff abruptly.  Luckily, Dementia Joe depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for election purposes, leaving us with 17 days worth of supply.  Maybe Biden's green energy windmill and solar farms will fill the gap when gasoline prices soar to $6.00 a gallon and 1970s like gas lines become common again.

In the Mouth of Marxist Madness.  Americans [are] under siege from an Orwellian deep state that manipulates the public by distorting history and undermining the meaning of words.  In a nation that celebrates George Floyd as a hero, clings to the "Hands up, don't shoot" lie as a sacred "truth," and blames Hillary's election loss on Russian bots, propaganda is king.  The U.S. government fights racism by institutionalizing racial preferences.  It supports Black Lives Matter and Antifa domestic terrorists while locking up American patriots as "domestic enemies."  It replaces impartial justice with "social justice" and equality under the law with "equitable" special privileges.  "Climate change" communism kills property rights.  Meme-makers are imprisoned, but Russia collusion hoaxers are not.  Gene-altering serums are called "vaccines."  And generations of judges have replaced the U.S. Constitution with their own postmodern revisions.

Obama's Racist Chickens Have Come Home to Roost.  Rather than elevate black people, the far left has created a situation where black crime is legal and white people are racist if they notice.  Shoplifting alone has gutted major cities, and most of the videos we see show black perps.  Some localities have made it illegal to try to stop thieves.  Businesses even fire employees for trying to stop criminals from stealing, to the point that the stores close and the workers lose their jobs.  Hundreds of businesses have left West Coast cities and taken their jobs with them.  Once flourishing cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland are turning into ghost towns.  Crime, drugs, and tent cities have taken over, as planned by the Marxists looking to enslave us all. [...] This is what happens when lefty politicians convince black people they are "victims" and then make crime an entitlement.  Black crime is now acceptable.  What could go wrong?  The truly insidious move here is that someday a reckoning will occur.  Whether a patriotic president wins or globalists take over our nation, criminals, many of them black, who enjoyed surfing the Democrat-created crime wave will likely end up in prison, never realizing they were pawns.

Billionaire suggests that Northeast cities like NYC and Boston are hemorrhaging income due to political ideology.  With a single tweet, Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO of Social Capital, recently became the provocative main character of the day on X, formerly known as Twitter.  Palihapitiya sent out a screenshot of a Bloomberg article based on how six southern states had contributed more to U.S. gross domestic product than the northeast corridor of Washington-New York-Boston for the first time in history.  But it was his accompanying caption that sparked hot debate: "Go woke, go broke," he said, implying that the ongoing culture war and economic policies of northeastern states had facilitated the migration of wealth and economic power to the South.  While tweeps weighed in with their own thoughts — including fellow billionaire Mark Cuban — here's what the numbers show is really going on. [...]

Seattle lawmaker furiously denies her support for defunding the police is to blame for soaring crime in city.  Council member Kshama Sawant said the city should not add police resources to the Central District neighborhood after 24 children had to crawl to the bathroom of a daycare facility following a shooting.  The incident happened on Monday outside of the A-4 Apple Learning Center, with a 47-year-old man being shot on the street.  A bullet pierced through the window of the center, with co-owner Appollonia Washington telling staff and children inside to 'army crawl' to the bathroom and hide.  In response, the facility shared a statement slamming the City Council and its members for allowing violence to 'plague' the area.

Joe Biden Has Killed the American Dream.  If you only paid attention to the mainstream press, you'd be inundated with a constant stream of articles ensuring you how great the economy is. "Look at the jobs market," the headlines have blared while promoting the supposed historic resiliency of our present moment.  The full-court press has been so strong that the Biden administration has even taken to labeling it "Bidenomics," a marketing ploy that has proven less than ideal.  What looks good on paper, though, is often not representative of the real-world impact.  Thus, Joe Biden's current economic malaise, for which Americans are assured they should be incredibly thankful, is hitting American families far harder than Paul Krugman's latest cherry-picked bar graph indicates.  Shockingly, if you ignore how much things actually cost across the board, you can spin a rosy picture in which a greatly delayed slowing of the rate of inflation is actually an incredible accomplishment.  But back in the real world, this reality still remains.

Where There is No Respect for Life, Evil Flourishes.  The loss of respect for life has also begun to dramatically infiltrate the American ruling elites and the overall society as over the past two decades the following, previously unthinkable, changes have occurred within the United States:
  •   Unfettered abortion up to the point of birth and post-birth infanticide has become a policy position of the Democrat Party.
  •   Euthanasia is openly discussed and supported by an ever-growing (73%) segment of the population.
  •   Sexually confused teens are being coerced into mutilation and permanent disfigurement in order to appease the gods of transgenderism, accompanied by an unabashed campaign to legalize pedophilia.
  •   A significant plurality of Americans is demanding the censorship, imprisonment, and persecution of their political adversaries while they, and recent Islamic immigrants, are openly supporting and justifying the slaughter of Jews by Hamas.
  •   Tribalism has been mainstreamed and with it the belief that certain ethnicities or races are inferior to others and also responsible for society's ills, therefore, they are deserving of disrespect, abuse and discrimination.
The path the United States is presently traveling will inevitably lead to the darkening shadow of unfettered evil descending upon the land leading to national self-destruction.

"Barry's Fingerprints Are All Over This".  Obama didn't travel to Cairo, Egypt for his first foreign policy trip accidentally; he did it with great intent and purpose.  The layers and layers of ideologues he and Hillary embedded in the institutions of the State Dept are as deep as the layers of ideologues Obama embedded in Main Justice and the intelligence community.  The time when Barry needed to give directions is long past.  The embeds are self-aware, acting on purpose, and the outcomes we see today are simply manifestations of that activity.  It is also worth remembering there's an entire new generation of people, who were in their 20's and 30's comfortably oblivious to what was taking place between 2009 and 2017, when the embeds were installed.  That era of the American people is only now starting to have their own slow awakening to the damage as it surfaces.  When Obama aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, only a small percentage of the American people actually saw the big picture and realized the potential for long term issues.

Due to Dem-Backed Law, Prostitution Spreads In California.  Californians are complaining about barely-clothed prostitutes roaming the streets in broad daylight, an issue heightened by Democratic Gov. Newsom signing Senate Bill 357, local officials say.  SB 357, which was authored by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener and backed by the ACLU, decriminalizes "loitering with intent to commit prostitution."  Critics say the law effectively decriminalizes prostitution in California.  National City Mayor Ron Morrison, an independent, recently criticized the law, telling Fox News that prostitutes are now "wearing less than what you would consider a scanty negligee" and "flaunting it in everybody's face."

The Editor says...
There is a very effective way to get scantily-clad whores out of the streets:  Stop voting for Socialist Democrats.

Can We Please Stop Pretending There Aren't Animals Among Us?  Political correctness has been immolated and replaced by its tantrum-throwing progeny, "woke," which decided that ignoring crimes by minorities is no longer sufficient.  One must now cheer on, say, rampant shoplifting, lest one find oneself the target of a fusillade of Antifa spittle launched by spoiled demons from spendy neighborhoods who grew up in lavish bedrooms full of participation trophies.  I remember when pedophiles were considered monsters. [...] The next step in the cultural Marxism playbook is making it a-ok for terrorists to rape Jewish women, mince Jewish babies, and burn Jewish people to death in the name of Allah.  If you ask the rich kids of Harvard, they'll actually tell you the Israelis are to blame for the recent carnage.  I'm not sure who is responsible for such hatred, the brats themselves or their chardonnay-sucking "cool moms" who never said "no" to them.

Thanks to Biden's Open Borders, in Dem Cities it's Black vs. Brown.  The last time the black vs. brown tension was this thick, you could cut a chunk and fry it as the Black Lives Matter riots were tearing Chicago into pieces.  Black protesters led by media-protected white leftists tore up downtown to hurt Donald Trump's re-election prospects.  This was their insurrection.  It took lives and cost billions of dollars in damages in cities across America.  They tore up the downtowns and black neighborhoods and black-owned businesses.  Then Mayor Lori Lightfoot was in literal panic.  But in Chicago, the BLM rioters and their white Democrat Socialist handlers did did not tear up the old and iconic Latino neighborhoods on 18th and 26th street.  Why is that?  Because Latino street gangs publicly threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter rioters if they were found in the Hispanic neighborhoods.  And so, BLM backed off.  But now?  The tension if not the physical damages are high, with longtime black residents told to step off the corner, to step back and give their place in line to illegal Latin immigrants who are being courted as new prospective voters by Biden Democrats.  Black voters have been betrayed.

A Clockwork Orange as Left-wing Politics.  Starting with Antifa and BLM riots of 2020 — fully supported by leftist local governments — urban centers in Democrat-led cities like San Francisco have spiraled into a "doom loop" wherein urban business flees "flash mob" looting and skyrocketing violent crime.  A few examples:
  •   San Francisco:  After flash mobs looted Neiman Marcus and other stores, two dozen retailers have left.  Walgreens closed 12 San Francisco stores, while upscale Nordstrom pulled its two stores, including its Westfield mall flagship.  Australian furniture retailer Coco Republic, which invested heavily in its showroom off Union Square, abruptly closed the store less than a year after opening across from Macy's.  Once fashionable Union Square is now a ghost town.
  •   Los Angeles:  Even two years ago, 20+ robbers at the popular Grove shopping center used a sledgehammer and assorted weapons to smash one of a Nordstrom's windows, reportedly taking men's clothing.  That was child's play, however, compared to the recent flash mob of 100+ that looted a 7-Eleven.
  •   Philadelphia:  Even the examples above pale in comparison to the two-night Philadelphia flash mob spree featuring caravans of hundreds who wrecked dozens of stores, including T-Mobile, Apple, Lulu and Footlocker outlets.  One of the looters, a social influencer calling herself "Meatball," gleefully livestreamed the event to 181,000 Instagram followers, rationalizing it by explaining "Everybody gotta' eat."  A tearful "Meatball" seemed less gleeful when charged with six felonies.

Could Kevin McCarthy's Ouster Be a Tipping Point?  [Scroll down]  You don't need me to recount how our country differs from when you grew up.  You don't need me to tell you that we are nearing the end of a social and economic war where we are on the losing end.  You don't need me to tell you that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and a veritable army of anti-Americans have taken over our country and are rapidly depleting not only our culture and world standing but are figuring out how to empty your pockets and turn us into a beggar nation.  Like the French, we watch it happen in real time.  The fundamental difference today is that we've had much more time to assimilate what is happening to us, yet we stand mute and feckless as our world collapses around us.

Portland residents [are being] told not to call police for help.  Portland officials were proud of themselves in 2020 when they defunded the Police Bureau by $15 million instead of increasing it by $3 million as planned.  One commissioner was even upset that the council didn't remove more from the budget. [...] A year later, the council was trying to add funding and retain the city's police officers.  "The added police spending is occurring amid a year of a record number of homicides, the city's greatest police staffing shortage in decades and reform recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice," PBS reported.  It was too little, too late.  The damage was done, and the city has yet to recover.  In fact, the city government is telling residents not to call police unless their lives are at risk.  Given how dangerous Portland has become, it might not affect the volume of calls to police because more residents' lives are at risk from criminal activity than ever before.

Far Left San Francisco:  Less Than 3% Of Restaurants Have NOT Been Vandalized In Last 30 Days.  As lawlessness in San Francisco shows no signs of abating, local businesses are reeling from the consequences.  A recent survey from the Golden Gate Restaurant Association reveals that a staggering 97% of 74 restaurants surveyed in the city have fallen victim to graffiti or property crime in the last month.  While the liberal mayor pours money into temporary relief, the persistent problems of crime, homelessness, and open-air drug use are driving businesses and consumers away.

Dealing with Consequences.  [Scroll down]  Consider the crime wave that is currently ruining cities with Democrat mayors.  Far-left Soros funded district attorneys such as Alvin Bragg and Chelsa Boudin and George Gascón have made the decision to not prosecute criminals.  As a consequence, crime is rampant and 'Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety' are nonexistent.  To say that Biden has removed our opportunity to vote on his decisions concerning his policies would be a major understatement.  But that's only half the story.  Biden is trying to create a consequence-free society.  Decisions have consequences in the real world, but not in Biden-world.  Making decisions without consequences is simply not possible.  Every decision has consequences, be they favorable or unfavorable, expected or not, intended or unintended, or some combination thereof.

Unsuited for the Senate.  Prior to Schumer's decree, Fetterman was voting from the Senate's doorway, but no more.  Last week, sporting a G. Gordon Liddy mustache that seemed more suited for a character in the Far Side, Fetterman presided over the Senate in short-sleeves and shorts.  Fetterman's apparel is fit for the locker room, not Congress.  Dressing like an adolescent is contempt for the office and the people he represents.  Schumer has no more regard for the Senate decorum and dignity than does Fetterman.  The Biden administration has appointed two men in dresses to senior positions, so you could argue Fetterman is just following suit — minus the suit.  Democrats constantly lament about White male privilege but have changed the protocol for a White male who would be just as comfortable in an orange jumpsuit.  Gone is any pride of appearance.  Standards of professionalism and propriety are disdained.  Once upon a time in America, casual dress was for weekends and tailgating.  Now it is everyday wear in the U.S. Senate.

Radical Democrats' greatest fears are religion, truth, honesty, and integrity.  I am confident that most Americans are worn down by all the chaos that exists in our country, Independent, Republican, and Democrat voters alike.  We have a president who is clearly age-disabled.  We have 2024 presidential elections where both party leaders are accused of corruption.  Women and girls are under attack.  Parents are asked to surrender their children to the state.  Children are taught to lie to parents.  Religious freedom is considered a terrorist act.  Crime and homelessness are rampant in cities.  We can't afford food, gas, or a house.  Our educational standards have failed.  A costly war is in Ukraine.  Simply being "white" makes you racist.  Immigration is out of control and destroying communities.  The black community's need for school choice is ignored.  Citizens are fearful after defunding the police.  Radicals are destroying American history.  Corruption exists with our press and social media.  As an older senior, I ask, how did it get this bad in just three years?

Guess who's upset now about illegal aliens depressing wages.  Karl Marx once wrote of repeating events in history that they occur "first as tragedy, then as farce."  That was my reaction to an article appearing in the Thursday, September 22 New York Post.  The article focused on complaints of existing illegal aliens in the metropolitan New York City area.  The huge influx of illegal aliens has them occupying 50% of the hotel rooms in the city.  They are sleeping all over the sidewalks in Midtown Manhattan.  Mayor Adams has declared that the costs of dealing with them "will destroy the city."  NYC has prided itself on being a sanctuary city willing to house and feed any and all illegal aliens.  Daily television showed city authorities meeting the arriving buses from the border, shaking hands and greeting the new illegals.  But the large flow from the border has swamped the system.  As was posited in Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come."  They did, and they did.

Biden Marches With Autoworkers While Causing Their Problems.  The UAW is demanding a 35% hike in pay and benefits over four years, as well as automatic cost-of-living adjustments, just like in the 1970s, along with a four-day workweek.  The inflationary 1970s are calling Biden, and they want their benefits back — with a post-COVID-19 four-day twist.  According to news reports, Biden told workers, "You should be doing incredibly well."  But he has singlehandedly, through the power of his executive branch, caused them to face job losses and higher inflation.  By changing his policies, Biden could address some of the fundamental reasons for their strike; namely, job loss because of mandatory vehicle electrification and higher inflation resulting from his war on fossil fuels, resulting in higher energy costs.  Both were imposed by the executive branch without support from even the Democratic Congress in place during Biden's first two years in office.

The Role of the Smartphone and Digital Content in the Left's Revolution.  Christopher Rufo, Douglas Murray, and Victor Davis Hanson have all pointed out that we are in the middle of a cultural revolution that is assailing our culture, values, traditions, and institutions, our national security and sovereignty, our economy, our Constitution and rule of law, and our overall quality of life.  The percentage of Americans saying they are worse off is at its highest level since 2009.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this obvious decline is that leftists have managed to convince a very large portion (in many cases a majority) of Americans to support the divisive and corrosive policies producing their own destruction.  What arguments have leftists used to accomplish this?  Chiefly, though not exclusively, they have employed a trifecta of completely nonsensical tropes about race, gender, and climate.

It's not working.  First, I do think that the economy is hurting people big time, from the price of gasoline to the price of cereal to everything else that you can imagine.  I see this every Sunday when the waiter puts the lunch bill on the table.  More than once, my wife has given me that "I don't believe this" look.  Add to this the border crisis which is now a national problem rather than only El Paso, Texas.  For a while, the media could avoid talking about the border.  It's different when New Yorkers see migrants sleeping on their streets or Texas border cities are screaming for help.  Second, more and more Americans do not want to destroy their country in order to destroy Trump.

I Bet You We're Not Better Off Now With So Much Gambling.  I'm no puritan, I honestly don't care what you do with your money as long as you don't expect me to subsidize it or make up for your mismanagement of it.  The problem is, we are all being asked, or made, to subsidize it now.  When gambling took some effort, things were different.  Yes, there were still degenerate gamblers, but not that many.  Now, in states like Michigan, you can play casino games for money on your phone with your credit card.  What could go... right?  Nothing.  I keep citing Michigan because I grew up there, and was back not that long ago and noticed a lot of television commercials for casino apps.  There are three full casinos in the city of Detroit.  The argument for allowing them was the reported million dollars per day going across the Detroit River to Casino Windsor, with their neon sign glowing its siren song to people who couldn't resist its call.  The city and state want a piece of that action, so they got their own.

Berkeley Retail Shutting Down Just Like San Francisco.  Rising crime, looting, and tolerance of drug-addled transients taking over the streets has led to an exodus of retail establishments from San Francisco.  Now another Democrat-controlled California city is enjoying the same exodus of retail establishments:  Berkeley.  Here YouTuber Metal Leo looks at streets near Cal Berkeley University, where store after store after store are closed, boarded up or for lease.  [Video clip]  Banks, pharmacies, cinemas, pizza chains: all closed.  The only thing that seems to be open are Starbucks.

Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?  Critical legal theory has now trickled down into most of our large cities.  It insists that criminals are not criminals at all, but rather victims of prior racial and class oppressions.  Thus their victims should blame society for their injuries, not their predatory victimizers.  Critical legal theory is a sort of Marxist redistribution schema — the middle class almost deserves its equal share of violence commensurate with that of the inner city.  As a result, in Chicago and Oakland and hundreds of other cities, prosecutors let out criminals without bail or sometimes even indictments — in part out of spite and hatred of middle- and upper-middle-class America that supposedly deserves a payback for its bourgeois indifference, in part out of sheer ignorance of the unleashing of human nature once all deterrence is removed.  And the result?  Anxious liberal professionals are fleeing our major cities in the greatest out-of-state migrations since the 1930s.  Or they simply avoid their own downtowns.

All Over America, Blue Cities Are Facing A Severe Shortage Of Police Officers.  Do you remember a few years ago when blue cities all over the nation wanted to defund the police?  Needless to say, that didn't work out too well.  Wherever police budgets were slashed, crime rates shot up.  Today, we are in the midst of a massive crime wave that is sweeping the country.  In fact, it has gotten so bad that even many our most liberal politicians are desperate to restore law and order.  But that won't be so easy, because after everything that has transpired blue cities are discovering that they are having a really difficult time finding enough warm bodies to serve in their crime-ridden communities.

The Destruction of the United States Is Intentional.  Here's What Will Happen Next.  The commies began the operation decades ago.  As Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov warned, the college professors and civil rights leaders indoctrinated — or as Bezmenov calls it, demoralized — generations of Americans and convinced them to hate their nation and, frequently, themselves.  The Soviets successfully infiltrated the black communities, convinced them they were less than, and let the anger seethe into subsequent generations.  That is why we see highly educated and successful black folks like the Obamas, MSNBC's Joy Reid, and the deranged Cori Bush screaming about racism, even though they are one-percenters.  If systemic racism were real, how did these poor, indentured serfs get so far?

Why Do The Poor Countries Always Stay So Poor?  It's now more than sixty years since the independence movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s transformed nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa into independent countries.  Hopes soared for a new era of progress and prosperity.  But six plus decades on, with essentially no exceptions (maybe Botswana?), the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are about as poor as ever. [...] The funny thing about the bad luck of sub-Saharan Africa is that it seems to afflict all 49 countries at the same time, even as elsewhere in the world at least a few countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand) are able to find the magic recipe to rise out of poverty.

The Feds Sue New York Landlords for Not Allowing a Tenant's Emotional Support Cat.  Federal housing officials are charging a pair of New York landlords with violating fair housing law for making no exceptions for emotional support animals in their "no pets" policy.  On Monday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it had filed a complaint against Ronit and Voyl "Tom" Mecham — owners of a two-unit rental property in Jamestown, New York — for denying a tenant's requests to keep a cat on the premises.  The Mecham's tenant, whose name is redacted in the complaint, had requested in November 2021 that they be allowed to have the cat as part of the treatment they were receiving for unspecified mental health issues.  The tenant said they would provide a doctor's note justifying the emotional support cat.

They Were Too Young to Consent but Now They're Old Enough to Sue.  An unnamed woman who once identified as transgender filed suit last week against the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Nebraska Medicine, and three doctors for "negligence and lack of informed consent" after she had a "gender-affirming" double mastectomy at the age of 16 in 2018.  Now a young woman, the plaintiff will never nurse her children, assuming she is still able to bear them after four years of testosterone treatments that "caused significant mental and physical harm."  All because the medical industry — I used to call it "healthcare" — decided that surgery and hormones were the answer to a troubled teenager's emotional and mental health issues and, according to the lawsuit, bulldozed her into their preferred "treatment."  That poor kid doesn't seem to have ever stood a chance against the adults arrayed against her.

To Market, to Market.  Among the factors weighing heavily on public disaffection with Democratic governance is the downturn occasioned by their policies, which hamper production, raise prices, and allow widespread retail theft.  Robert Barnes has done the math: "Under #Trump, real median family household incomes rose 15% in just 3 years, the highest rate since after World War 2.  Under #Biden, real median family household incomes fell 5% in just 3 years, the fastest rate of decline since the Great Depression."  To be sure, the bien pensant big thinkers don't see this as a problem.  The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers up a defense — essentially, voters shouldn't believe their lying eyes.  "The economic data have been just surreally good.  Even optimists are just stunned," says Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

How Woke Lefties Ruined Aspen.  That story begins only 150 years ago with, appropriately enough, a somewhat crackpot idea called "free silver."  For the last quarter of the 19th century, the idea kicked around that the government should buy large quantities of silver to create an easy money supply.  And for a time, it did just that.  Aspen, originally called Ute City, had some of the largest silver deposits on Earth, and it boomed, reaching a population of more than 12,000. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, ending the artificial demand for the metal, and Aspen became a quasi-ghost town with a population at the dawn of the 20th century of only a few hundred.  After a long downturn, Aspen boomed again immediately after World War II, with skiing as the new silver.  Beaton tells with verve the very human story of Army veterans and Chicago businessmen coming together to create a ski resort.  Aspen's first modern chair lift was opened in 1947, one of the longest in the world.  Aspen became not just a town, but a brand — now one of the most prestigious in the world.  But Aspen then had a second downfall.  The 1960s introduced America to drug abuse and other moral laxness on a widespread scale.

Inflation accelerated in August to 3.7% as consumer prices heat up again.  Inflation accelerated for a second straight month in August, reversing previous declines as consumers continued to grapple with the rising cost of everyday goods.  The Labor Department said Wednesday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price for everyday goods including gasoline, groceries and rents, rose 0.6% in August from the previous month, in line with estimates.  It marked the steepest monthly increase this year, underscoring the challenge in taming high inflation.  Prices climbed 3.7% from the same time last year, faster than both the 3.2% reading in July and the 3.6% estimate from Refinitiv economists.

We Haven't Had a Year This Bad Since Obama Was President.  The last time Americans saw a drop in household income as large as we did last year, Barack Obama was president.  The Census Bureau on Tuesday released its calculations for the change in real median household income for last year.  By its calculations, the median income of U.S. households fell in 2022 by 2.3 percent, the worst decline since 2010.  History may not necessarily repeat or even rhyme, but it certainly rings a bell on occasion.  The last time household income suffered a decline as large as it did in the second year of Biden's presidency was in the second year of Biden's vice presidency.  That's before taxes.  Once you calculate in changes to the taxes paid and subsidies handed out, household income fell 8.8 percent.

Criminal Justice is Just Plain Ugly.  I think that the crime problem, the mass incarceration problem, and mental health problem arise out of the liberal cultural beliefs and liberal political power that our liberal friends have used to impose their beliefs and culture on the rest of us.  And for most people not in the laptop class liberal culture and power make things worse.  But I could be wrong.  Earth to liberals:  Urban violence and murder rates are a witch's brew of fatherless homes, welfare, and the separation of sex from marriage and child-raising.  And You Did It.  Earth to liberals:  Mass incarceration and three strikes laws are the knee-jerk response of ordinary people to the rise of crime and violence that amped up in the Sixties with the Great Society.

Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Four Years Ago?  Another metric is food inflation as all Americans need to purchase and consume food.  Food inflation currently sits at 4.9 percent compared to 1.8 percent four years ago.  It has more than doubled in the past four years, with no sign of slowing down.  At a macroeconomic level, is our national debt higher or lower compared to four years ago?  In 2022, the national debt was $30.8 trillion.  Four years ago in 2018 it was $21.4 trillion.  In four short years it increased by almost $10 trillion.  It took America until 2008 to even reach $10 trillion in debt and in four short years we added 230 years' worth of debt to our ledger.  That's what America owes.  How about what America spends?  The annual U.S. budget deficit was $665 billion in 2017, rising to $2,772 [billion] in 2021.  This is more than a fourfold increase in spending money we don't have.  Budget deficits used to be measured in the billions.  Under Biden they are in the trillions.

The 'Climate Emergency' Is a Hoax.  The Biden administration, however, appears not to be concerned about the widespread poverty and massive starvation that will be caused by the unavailability of cheap and reliable energy in underdeveloped countries, or the inflation caused by the skyrocketing prices that are crushing Americans "barely able to afford one meal a day". [...] The Biden administration also does not seem concerned that it is killing wildlife, sea life and the fishing industry by installing offshore wind turbines along the Atlantic seaboard, or that mandating electric vehicles will throw virtually the entire auto maintenance industry out of work (EVs do not need routine maintenance), or that lithium batteries not only explode but cost thousands of dollars to replace.  The administration even wants military equipment, such as tanks, to be electric, as if there were charging stations in the middle of foreign deserts in the event of a conflict.  Moreover, according to NBC News, volcanoes, unimpressed with executive orders, "Dwarf Humans for CO2 Emissions."

Tom Cotton:  Military Citations Using 'Themself' Instead of 'Himself' or 'Herself'.  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Friday sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanding he explain the Pentagon's apparent decision to use the "gender neutral" term "themself" instead of "himself" or "herself" for decoration and award citations.  Cotton, an Army veteran, wrote to Austin:  ["]I write regarding the Department's decision to incorporate 'gender neutral' language into decoration and award citations.  Our military apparently will now use 'themself' — which is not even a word, I hasten to add — instead of 'himself' or 'herself' to describe heroic or distinguished actions.["]

Why San Francisco is the car break-in capital:  Low-risk, high reward.  In case you've somehow missed all the news coming out of San Francisco for the past several years, the city has the highest rate of property crime in the country.  The SF Chronicle published a story today asking the obvious question:  "Why is it so bad here — and not elsewhere?"  The answer the article comes to is not entirely satisfying but it does make some amount of sense.

Exploiting Transgender Kids as Emotional Support Animals.  Do y'all remember the time an emotional support animal was kicked off a United flight for being disruptive?  In this instance, "being disruptive" included a pig defecating and screaming in the cabin.  Passengers were quick to complain about the stink, noise, and awkwardness of it all because, when you pay good money to fly, doing so without a barnyard experience is a reasonable expectation.  Thankfully, over the last decade, emotional support animals have been kept on a tighter leash since they are not now, nor were they ever service dogs.  Airlines have reeled in their restrictions and put a muzzle on the idea any animal can fly under the "if it fits, it sits" mantra.  Everybody knows that the owner of that peacock, hamster, boa constrictor, cat, or hedgehog does not rely on the animal to aid in the performance of specific tasks.  Rather, they don't want to leave their beloved animal behind.  Levity, affection, companionship — that's why we have pets!  We also have therapists.

'Prosecute Them': Dem Who Backed Efforts To 'Dismantle' Police Says She Was Carjacked In Front Of Her Kids.  Shivanthi Sathanandan, the second vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), said in a Facebook post that she was violently attacked and carjacked Tuesday in front of her two children.  Four men allegedly broke Sathanandan's leg and beat her with their fists and guns in front of her two young children at her Minneapolis home before stealing her car and fleeing the scene, she said in the post.  Sathanandan, who had previously backed efforts to reduce the police force, urged fellow Minneapolis residents to "take back" their city and prosecute violent criminals in her post following the incident.  "We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM," Sathanandan wrote.

Leftist Activists Used To Be About Fighting 'The Man.' Now They Are 'The Man'.  For decades, the left defined itself by its opposition to authority, gleefully fighting the old conservative fuddy-duddys in power.  But as a slew of formerly rebellious rockstars have learned, the left has since become the very thing it used to fight.  Alice Cooper, a famously painted-up rock icon since the '70s, came under fire for a series of benign comments regarding the current transgender pandamonium.  "I'm understanding that there are cases of transgenderism, but I'm afraid that it's also a fad, and I'm afraid there's a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that," Cooper said.  "I find it wrong when you've got a six-year-old kid who has no idea.  He just wants to play, and you're confusing him telling him, 'Yeah, you're a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.'"  For this perfectly innocuous statement, Cooper lost a brand deal with Vampyre Cosmetics, which accused the musician of transphobia.  Clearly, the LGBT community is so oppressed and powerless that banal criticism of them results in losing work.  Cooper didn't express anything hateful, he simply cautioned of too many people hopping aboard the current cultural bandwagon and that these procedures have permanent consequences.  For that, Cooper was accused of "spewing debunked bathroom predator myths" and "leaning on right-wing, anti-trans scare tactics" by Rolling Stone, an outlet that used to be about covering music but has since moved on to political hackery.

A 'poop' rampage in Wyoming is an important insight into today's homeless.  The headline at the Daily Mail was eye-catching: "Squatters take over Wyoming city:  Vagrants leave millions of dollars worth of damage to motel and 500 lbs of human feces in downtown area — as Casper fights off a homeless invasion."  It was an image at odds with how we think of Wyoming; that is, a clean, naturally beautifully conservative state.  But the homeless plague is everywhere, and the situation in Casper reminds us that most of today's homeless are not just ordinary people down on their luck; they are dysfunctional drug addicts who are the inevitable result of 60 years of leftist drug policies.

Rousseau and the Collapse of American Constitutionalism.  [Scroll down]  So today in America the new social contract proposed by the Democrats provides, for example, that if you decide to be a man, be a man.  If you decide to be a woman, be a woman.  If you want even more personal freedom, be either from time to time.  If you are a girl, then America is your oyster.  If you don't want to have a baby, don't have a baby.  With immigration, if you want to be an American, come here and be an American.  If you want to join the ruling elite, just register for college.  Someone else will pay your tuition and, presto, without much effort you will have your passport into the new American elite.  If you struggle with illness, taxpayers will free you from that hardship.  But there was a bait-and-switch in Rousseau's design template.  None of us really will have individual authority to live as we might wish.  We must surrender our rights to the collective which has all sovereign power.

The Decline of American 'Civilization'.  The glorification of violence and sex in a society is uncivilized.  These things appeal to the most squalid nature of man, his most carnal appetites, not his noblest.  Uncontrolled lust and violence are characteristics of the lowest common denominator of humanity.  Jungle instincts must be restrained, contained, and overcome for civilization to exist.  Any society that refuses to do so will suffer dire consequences, as indeed we see in America today.

Report: 90% of Online Content May Be AI-Generated Garbage by 2026.  A recent report from Europol warns that by 2026, as much as 90 percent of online content could be generated by artificial intelligence, raising concerns that the web might be even more jammed with useless garbage in a few short years than it is today.  Futurism reports that a recent study by Europol suggests that by 2026, up to 90 percent of online content could be artificially generated.  This staggering figure has sent ripples through various sectors, from journalism and art to technology and law enforcement.  Synthetic media, which refers to content generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence, is not a new phenomenon.  However, its rapid proliferation has raised eyebrows and concerns alike.

Unsafe and 'looking like a dump': How Brighton's controversial eco policy went to seed.  Borage, yarrow, knotgrass and ribwort; for the enthusiastic forager there are herbs enough to fill an apothecary's cabinet.  This is no countryside hedgerow, however, but rather the pavement outside a £1.5 million house in Hove.  Five-foot tall horseweed growing up between the cracks in the paving slabs has become a familiar sight for the residents of Brighton and Hove.  On some streets a tapestry of grass has formed that makes it impossible to walk in a straight-line down the hilly streets.  It is a verdant sight, but not, however, a welcome one for residents.  "My mother is 89 and if she's walking around on these pavements, she can't do it," says one local who preferred not to be named. "I worry about her falling all the time."  For the past four years nature has been left to its own devices after the then Green Party-led council in 2019 banned toxic weed killers that include chemicals such as glyphosate following a petition from residents.

Glyphosate, best known as the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup, has been the subject of many studies and legal challenges regarding its potential to cause cancer, specifically non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  Its environmental damage, particularly to soil quality, is also well documented.

Why wind and solar power are running out of juice.  Alternative energy madness — and that's what it is — has had its biggest impact in California.  But New York and New Jersey have adopted most of that state's mandates.  Sales of new internal combustion vehicles will be banned beginning in 2035 in the states.  All of the electricity sold to retail consumers will have to be "zero-emissions."  Homeowners and building owners will be forced to replace gas- and oil-burning space and water heaters with electric heat pumps.  And, gas stoves will be regulated out of existence.  New York also will soon implement another California import: a carbon "cap-and-invest" program, which will impose a tax on fossil fuels sold by wholesalers and utilities.  The billions of dollars collected each year will provide a green slush fund, allowing the governor and legislators to hand out money to their politically favored cronies, as has so often been the case in the past.  Washington State began its "cap-and-invest" program in January of this year.  Modeled after California's, Governor Jay Inslee promised the program would have "minimal impact, if any.  We are talking about pennies."  Instead, the program has raised gasoline prices — almost 50 cents per gallon so far this year.

Let's Call It Treason.  Millions of people around the world are beginning to figure out that there is a force, an evil cabal trying to take over the entire planet. [...] National leaders are going out of their way to destroy their collective countries.  These chief executives and oligarchs, feeling a New World Order is inevitable, are merely vying for high position in what they think will be a new society.  It is not more evident than here in the United States.  These leaders make decisions that no one understands[,] destroying the election system of the greatest democracy in the world, ignoring the needs of their citizenry, destroying the military and police departments, with no regard for national security, citizen safety or law and order.  Gone is energy independence, dozens of food processing plants (its become a global phenomena), hundreds of farms (meat and dairy are bad, but bugs are good).  Millions of illegal migrants pour into our countries without vetting, background or medical checks.

A compendium of everything wrong with Barack Obama's legacy.  President Obama's assault on Americans' constitutional rights and protections as well as on the nation's constitutionally defined governmental institutions and their respective authority entailed myriad particulars.  It included undermining of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.  It extended to usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress and disregard for the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court.  In addition, Obama compromised the rule of law and protection of rights more broadly.  He ignored the findings of lower federal courts.  He subverted federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and other departments of the federal government, to illegal politicization and lawless attacks on perceived political enemies.  He promoted federal intrusion in and subversion of state and local law enforcement, also in the service of political ends.  The collective impact of Obama's abuses of power, the "transformation" of America that he so often promised, was the creation of a less democratic, post-constitutional, authoritarian nation.

"Nonviolent Crime" Is a Myth.  Five days after sustaining serious injuries, a San Francisco store clerk named Yowhannes "John" Tewelde has died.  He was beaten with a baseball bat by a man whom he tried to stop from stealing beer from his store.  Tewelde's death marks yet another homicide in the Bay Area, which, between San Francisco and Oakland, has seen an enormous amount of crime and mayhem in recent years.  The nature of Tewelde's death illustrates an important reality that progressives working to ease up on supposedly nonviolent crimes don't seem to appreciate: even "minor" offenses like retail theft, open-air drug use, and smoking on subway platforms are frequently backed by a threat of violence.  Had Tewelde not intervened, allowing the thief to take what he wished, progressive prosecutors like former San Francisco district attorneys George Gascón and Chesa Boudin probably would have refused to prosecute him, citing the nonviolent nature of the offense.  All we'd have is a lowly shop owner forced to shoulder the cost of a few cheap beers.  No big deal, right?  Wrong.  The decision to ignore the theft would allow an individual who was in truth both willing and able to kill over $10 to remain on the street.  It would be only a matter of time before he did something terrible.

Why anyone who supported COVID fascism has no right to complain about inflation and housing crisis.  Inflation is very simply defined as too much money chasing too few goods.  Our government decided to spend and then print more money (by a mile) than ever before while shutting down supply chains!  Now we are dealing with endless long-term debt and the expense of servicing it, which is inducing even more inflation, forcing interest rates up, and creating the housing crisis we are living with today. [...] Regardless of who would be president in 2021, that inflation cake was baked.  Obviously, Biden increased spending even more and locked up our energy supplies, placing more pressure on energy prices.  His Ukraine policies made it even worse.  However, the core inflation would be with us today regardless of which party is in the White House, because, with few exceptions, both parties equally embraced these terrible policies of loose money.

The Biggest Environmental Scandal In The World.  A dead whale washed ashore on Takanassee Beach in New Jersey in the early evening yesterday.  Police blocked off the area so tractors could be brought in to remove it.  "We were sitting on the beach yesterday, and I noticed it when people started running up to it," said Soraya Nimaroff, who lives nearby.  "I'm very sad.  It is very sad."  Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022.  Whale strandings have increased markedly since 2016.  The North Atlantic right whales are headed for extinction.  Their population has dropped to 340.  There have been 200 humpback strandings and 98 strandings of right whales since 2017.  "It caused us concern enough to ask, 'What is happening?'" said Cindy Zipf, executive director of the Long Branch-based nonprofit Clean Ocean Action (COA).  "We looked into what was different about this December and early January."  The only thing she and other researchers found was offshore wind exploration.

The return of animal sacrifice.  We look back with bewilderment at the ritual sacrifice of animals by our ancestors.  Whether it was the Celtic people's sacrifice of livestock to appease pissed-off deities or the Ancient Romans' slaughter of oxen so that Jupiter might be more sparing with his stormy weather, it was all a bit mad.  We would never be so superstitious, we tell ourselves.  I'm not sure that's true.  Consider the proposed slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle in Europe in the holy name of Net Zero.  This is the return of pagan lunacy, surely.  Irish farmers are under pressure to 'cull up to 200,000 cows' in order that Ireland might meet its 'climate goals', reported the Financial Times at the weekend.  The Irish government is considering proposals to bump off that amount of cattle over the next three years to help it achieve a 25 percent reduction in its agricultural emissions.  Cows produce methane, you see, and methane is bad.  It's a greenhouse gas.  Farming accounts for 40 percent of Ireland's greenhouse-gas emissions, so it has become a natural target for the Net Zero zealots.  Every EU member state is under pressure to make strides towards Net Zero, and if that entails the sacrifice of livestock, so be it.  Save the planet, slaughter the cows.

Washington power company raises rates to cover increased expense due to climate legislation.  A Washington utility company jacked its rates on residents as a result of the Democrat-passed cap-and-trade program, but was prohibited from informing its customers as to the reason why, according to a new report.  The Center Square reported that the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) approved a request by Puget Sound Energy earlier this month to raise its natural gas rates to cover the costs of Washington's cap-and-trade program, part of the Climate Commitment Act, which was passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature and signed into law by Democrat Governor Jay Inslee.

Save the Rule of Law By Destroying It?  Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.  Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable — a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women's sports and their locker room privacy?  We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of a prior 12 generations.

Portland's Predictable Doom Loop.  At one time not so long ago, Portland leaders turned the sleepy town into a progressive hub for the creative class, spending billions on 19th-century light rail Choo Choo trains to convey bus riders to their planned utopia.  The more the plans failed, the more the planners planned, as Ronald Reagan once said.  Because of the hard hand of the planner class, a corrupt system of regulatory capture, and the certitude of those who know better than we do how to run our lives, Portland leaders never really stopped to consider if anyone wanted what they were selling.  They went on blithely singing kumbaya and giddily handed the match to the activist left, which lit the Molotov cocktail that sparked the city's self-immolation.  Now these leaders have regulated, locked down, and scared away a third of the downtown office buildings.  When San Francisco hit this marker it was called a "doom loop."

Dick's Sporting Goods Is Learning What the Consequences of Going Woke Are.  Go woke, go broke.  That's what conservatives say, and unfortunately, sometimes it's just rhetoric that doesn't materialize.  Still, there are times when the adage proves true.  Enter Dick's Sporting Goods, the woke outdoor company that has prided itself on inserting itself into various cultural battles.  As RedState reported, shareholders were greeted with bad news recently when it was revealed that Dick's saw a 23 percent drop in profit over the last quarter.  That sent the company into a freefall.  On August 21st, the stock price was $141.  Two days later, it was at $108.  That's a dramatic drop for a well-known retail brand with so many years in the game.  The question is, what led us here?  According to Dick's own admission, a sharp rise in retail theft has severely hampered profitability.

New York loses $1 trillion in Wall Street business as firms flee the city: report.  A giant, sucking sound is coming out of Wall Street — and it's siphoning staggering sums of money out of the Big Apple while handing business to Florida and other states farther south.  Nearly 160 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters out of New York since the end of 2019, taking nearly $1 trillion — yes, that's trillion with a "T" — in assets under management with them, according to data from 17,000 companies compiled by Bloomberg.  Looking to dodge rampant crime, stiff taxes and an increasingly exorbitant cost of living, 158 fed-up financial firms representing a whopping $993 billion in assets have packed up and left the Big Apple, taking thousands of high-paid employees with them, the data shows.

Woke blue cities defund themselves.  'Defund the police!' they yelled in 2020, that famous summer of love:  They did that.  Now they're discovering — the hard way — that they're actually defunding themselves. [...] [New York] businesses are fleeing for the same reasons that the people are fleeing:  Bad government.  After all, the picture is largely the same:  Run one of the world's most expensive cities.  Tax them up the wazoo.  Demonize corporations.  Embrace COVID lockdowns.  Defund the cops, or else incentivize them to retire at their desks.  Let the homeless and drug-addicted roam freely.  Let the organized theft rings shut down the retailers and restaurants.  Let every car be subject to smash-and-grab robberies.  Let vital city services, such as the subway, become dangerous no-go zones.  Lose an analyst or two every so often to random violent crime.  Ensure that public schools are not worth going to.  And most important, mock and laugh at those who do the logical thing, which is move someplace else where the costs are lower, the taxes are lower, the bums know they can't camp out in front of someone's headquarters, and the criminals know that they're headed to jail every time they loot a business.

Historic LA hotel devolves into housing projects, repairs cost taxpayers more than $11.5 million.  Built in 1926, The Mayfair Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was a historical treasure, a unique marriage between the glamor of Old Hollywood and the elan of the Roaring Twenties, and then California Democrats got ahold of it.  The Mayfair once hosted the first ever Academy Awards after-party, but now it houses Skid Row. [...] (How could anyone think inviting drug-addled derelicts into a luxury hotel wouldn't end up this way?)  Like stereotypical crazy bums, the transients housed at the Mayfair "punched through walls," trashed appliances and bathrooms, smashed windows to throw objects onto the street below, and left fentanyl-covered tinfoil sheets strewn about.  And, in predictable fashion, the idiotic decisions of the left aren't limited to only affecting leftists, and the havoc spilled out onto the street.

Ukrainian Corruption Disqualifies Biden From Serving Another Term.  In the 30 months since Trump departed the White House, American cities have been in free fall towards becoming crime-ridden infestations of homeless public misfits, drug addicts, and violent criminals.  Uncountable millions of illegal aliens have flooded across the southern border and been distributed around the country at unsustainable cost to America's education system, social service network, and law enforcement organizations.  The country has been commercially strangled by a green terror which implausibly purports to be saving the planet but is contributing to the reduction of the disposable income of the great majority of Americans.  Public education standards are crumbling; the academy and media are largely in the hands of anti-American elements.

Democrats' proposed wealth tax spells doom for entrepreneurs and economic growth.  A group of far-left lawmakers has introduced yet another bill to soak the rich.  The new bill is called the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms Act — the OLIGARCH Act, get it?  It would introduce an entirely new tax on wealth above $120 million, starting at 2% and climbing to 8%.  This new tax would be in addition to the income tax.  Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) claims the legislation is designed to "tax extreme wealth, reduce inequality, and combat the threat to democracy posed by aristocracy."  But it would more accurately be described as an economic devastation bill.  Indeed, it should alarm anyone who wants to start a business, build up wealth for retirement, leave an inheritance for their children, or just see the economy grow for everyone.

Don't expect the greens' 1,600 percent mistake on ocean plastic to get them to change course.  For climate warriors and enviro-radicals, the science (their science, anyway) is always "settled."  That is, until it isn't.  The latest backtrack?  Turns out there's less plastic in the oceans than claimed.  Far less.  Per a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience, just 500,000 metric tons of plastic end up in the world's oceans each year, not the 8 million tons previously bewailed.  That's an overestimation of 1,600%!  Meanwhile, worries about ocean plastic have fueled restrictions on the use of a range of products — shopping bags, utensils, straws — no matter the inconveniences or side effects.

The Result of Incorporating Saul Alinsky's Eight Marxist Rules for Radicals Into The Governance of The Republic.  In just two years the Biden/Obama administration spent the US Government into an additional unsustainable and unheard-of increased National Debt "of an additional $4.9 Trillion in spending".  That reckless spending increased the National Debt from $27.7 Trillion to an unrecoverable National Debt to $32.6 Trillion.  That irresponsible and uncalled-for spending on Climate Change and Social Programs, while terminating the drilling for crude oil on government land, has created the massive inflation Americans are faced with; it is the worst inflation in over 40 years. [...] That massive new spending of $4.9 Trillion in just 2 years, by the Biden/Obama administration, is one of the eight recommended ways to change the US Constitutional Republic into a Socialist State by installing Saul Alinsky's Eight Marxist Rules for Radicals.  The Biden/Obama administration intentionally increased the National Debt to such a large deficit in a short two years, in order that it will never be able to be repaid by the United States.  The annual interest on that National Debt will have to repaid by a constantly increasing taxes on the American people, negatively effecting the US economy, and personal wealth.

Biden's Iranian Hostage Deal.  Since January 20, 2021, the Harris-Biden administration has delivered a relentless cycle of incompetence, ineptitude, incoherence, corruption, subterfuge, and scandals.  The citizen suffers due to inflation, high crime, the open border, crumbling infrastructure, and a lot more.  If they dare to raise their voices they are targeted much like the regime's foremost political opponent, President Donald Trump.  Internationally, the regime has weakened and demeaned the US.  Following its hasty and unplanned withdrawal from Afghanistan that betrayed allies within the country.  It also handed that country back to the most dangerous terror organizations in the world.  The Harris-Biden administration has managed to make the U.S. appear untrustworthy, dishonorable, and unreliable.  The withdrawal doubtlessly emboldened President Putin to intervene in Ukraine after repeated provocation from surrounding NATO countries.  The war in Ukraine continues to this day and there is no way for anyone to know what actually is happening because most of the Western media is pushing a narrative and not covering facts.

Climate and Capitalism.  [Scroll down]  In Rhodes, Greece, this week, a resident published his video of fires being set at night, all at the same time across a ridge of trees.  This is an almost perfect climate psy-op.  Fires, and then film the misery of tourists sleeping in the airport waiting to leave.  And then there is this:  [Tweet]  I'm starting to think it is a world-wide scam of set fires meant to scare us into more regulation, more giveaways.  In Canada we have arrested dozens of fire-setters, and dozens are still being sought.  Fires and fear promote the idea that "nothing has been done," but in fact, behind the scenes, everywhere, the Iron Triangle of the movement has installed palettes of regulation on every town and county, every rangeland, parkland, wilderness, forest and mountain.  Wherever you go, metaphorically or not, there is a sign that says:  Do Not Enter.  It is killing all productive activity, it is killing the economy of every nation.  "Climate change" is now eating capitalism.  It is a profit center for both government and business.  In 2002 Goldman Sachs built a division that sold "climate solutions" by way of tax and carbon credits.  This zero-sum game is trading in the misery of hundreds of millions.

The Trump Indictment and 2024.  Over the past sixty years while America slept and the citizenry reveled in unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Marxist/socialist movement, after decades of living in the shadows, has successfully infiltrated many of the nation's vital institutions while promoting creeping immorality and societal corruption.  The institutions targeted by the American Marxists were those in the fields of education, entertainment, and the media.  The radical left knew that dominion over of these institutions would be the first step in achieving their ultimate goals: control of the Democrat Party, hegemony within the federal bureaucracy, and the domination of the judiciary.  Their success to date has been extraordinary.  Today, liberal (socialist) professors on college campuses outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 17 to 1 (in 1968 it was 2.7 to 1).  This same imbalance also infects the nation's K-12 public schools through the radicalized teachers unions.  As a result, two generations of Americans have been subjected to unending socialist indoctrination and revisionist American history.

Anheuser-Busch's Collapse Continues as It's Forced to Sell Off Some of Its Brands.  Anheuser-Busch's downfall has been a brutal lesson to corporations about how the people have had it with woke culture engagement.  Especially when it comes to being a brand that claimed to represent the heart of America and its values.  Now, A-B is apparently being forced to sell off a few of its brands in order to stay afloat.  These include Shock Top, Breckenridge Brewery, Blue Point Brewing Company, 10 Barrel Brewing Company, Redhook Brewery, Widmer Brothers Brewing, Square Mile Cider Company, and Hiball Energy.  All of these are craft beers, meaning that A-B is cutting a solid chunk off of its craft beer portfolio.

Bidenomics is really just a ploy to destroy American energy.  While jetting across the country trumpeting the supposed success of "Bidenomics," Vice President Kamala Harris had this to say, "Most Americans are a $400 unexpected expense away from bankruptcy."  What's not to love?  The White House must not be seeing the same headlines we are about record inflation, declining income, and concerning job trends.  President Joe Biden's rampant spending has destroyed the economic comfort and prosperity of the previous administration — something even the most devout anti-Trumpers are becoming nostalgic about as family budgets grow tighter and tighter.  Biden erroneously claims that his energy policies are a panacea that will offer Americans the best of both worlds, saving money and protecting the environment.  The president has made poor policy choices about many things — but when it comes to energy, he's never been more wrong and has weakened our country in the process.

The Destruction of Common Law.  By defunding the police in major cities, and by showering leftwing district attorney candidates with millions of dollars in campaign funding, the Left systematically eroded the law as we know it in our major cities.  As a result, downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters.  Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce.  Criminals and homeless now routinely break the law with impunity.  Public violence, defecation, urination, fornication, and injection do not even rate as misdemeanors.  The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable.  Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested.  Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves.  There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden.  Seven-million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.

America's Debt Rating Downgrade Shows Washington Is Still Building Back Bankrupt.  While the press and the American people focused on the Justice Department's latest indictment of President Trump, another no less significant event was taking place on Tuesday afternoon.  Specifically, Fitch Ratings announced it had officially downgraded the United States' credit rating.  The action by Fitch comes a dozen years after Standard and Poor's downgraded the federal government's debt rating, meaning that two of the three credit rating agencies have stripped Washington of its vaunted "AAA" status.  It is but the latest indication of how presidents and politicians from both parties have ignored the serious fiscal problems within our nation — and yet another warning of the reckoning we will ultimately face as a people.

The High Cost of Crime:  Oregon County Loses $1 Billion as Residents Flee Lawless Portland.  Residents who fled Multnomah County, Oregon, in 2020 took over $1 billion in income as they searched for a better life in other areas.  The news is according to an analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Oregonian reported Sunday.  "Numbers gleaned from annual income tax returns provide the most detailed information available on where Americans are moving — and taking their money," the outlet said.

The gas is high.  It's hot here and some countries are cutting back on production.  The heat is the heat and I've lived plenty of it in Texas.  In fact, I remember when our second son was baptized back in 1988 that it was 108 around here.  That holy water must have felt great on that baby's head.  I remember 1980 when we had a whole 30 days of 100-plus temperatures.  What I don't remember was gasoline going up.  So what's the other reason?  Countries cutting back production.  Of course, why is that even an issue when Texas and Alaska could take care of our energy needs?  Why are we suddenly depending on countries for one drop of oil?  The answer is the Biden administration listening to the climate-change fanatics who want to attack the problem by having American families paying more for energy.

And Chicago, and Houston, and Portland, and San Francisco, and St. Louis, and New Orleans, and Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
How the Left's is turning New York into a crime-ravaged, drug-infested nightmare.  Give us pizza or give us death!' So chanted New Yorker Scott LoBaido a few weeks ago in downtown Manhattan before he started hurling large slices of pizza over the gates of New York's City Hall.  LoBaido, a conservative artist and activist, was staging a lone and eccentric protest against a new green crackdown on coal and wood-fired ovens.  Opponents say it will badly hit the city's already struggling small businesses — particularly its iconic pizzerias — which face paying tens of thousands of dollars to install oven filters that must be regularly inspected. [...] The city is suffering a crime epidemic so bad even ice cream and laundry detergent are security- tagged in shops, and endless anti-business measures are driving down earnings, but politicians appear more preoccupied by the culture wars: woke causes and green issues, such as air pollution.  Yet for all the concern about air quality, the authorities have only themselves to blame for the all-pervasive stench of contraband weed on its streets, a consequence of officials' disastrous tinkering with cannabis legalisation on the grounds of 'racial equity', which has led to the proliferation of 1,400 illicit marijuana shops.

In the Name of Climate Change:  Travel Restrictions and the Great Reset.  If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather.  You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn't reported in the news.  But here is what should surprise and shock you even more.  The real reason — a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) — is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.  It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to "reflect, reimagine, and reset the world." The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off.

Liberalism Is a False Gospel and a Counterfeit Religion.  Liberalism is a false and counterfeit religion that is incompatible with the Judeo-Christian worldview that built the United States and much of the western world.  The year 2023 is the 100-year anniversary of J. Gresham Machen's prophetic book Christianity and Liberalism.  This book is just as accurate today as it was prophetic when he wrote it.  His central thesis 100 years ago was that liberalism is its own religion, distinct and incompatible with Christianity.  It acts as a parasite on Christianity, and can only be accurately understood as a separate and false religion.  Machen was right, of course, and the past 100 years of decline in American life bear him witness.  Search the past century across the globe and you will find scores of previously Christian nations that adopted liberalism, declined every meaningful way, and lost their faith.  Most of these Judeo-Christian nations have attempted to accommodate it rather than defeat it.

Our society's 'top brains' have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result.  There's a lot of craziness in the air these days.  But for the most part it seems to be flowing from the top down, not bubbling up from the bottom.  It wasn't farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting "gain of function" research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.  It wasn't shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail.  It hasn't been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of "violence."  Ordinary Americans haven't been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently.

The GOP Death Wish.  The American economy is in freefall.  Our borders are wide open to taxpayer-funded freeloaders and criminals, cities are ridden with crime, filth, drugs, and homelessness.  America is needlessly pushing a hot war with the largest nuclear power in the world.  Our children are being trafficked or indoctrinated with woke sexual and gender deviancy.  Republicans are either silent or playing along.  There is little difference between the DNC and GOP on so many core issues, making the GOP increasingly irrelevant as a political party.  Instead, we are ruled by a uniparty, unified in its goal of self-enrichment and power, with little regard to the well-being of America or the wishes of American voters.  What's the solution?

Toronto principal killed himself after being singled out during DEI training.  This story was already being cited as cause for concern about corporate DEI training even before last week when it took an even darker turn.  Earlier this month the National Post reported that retired Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto was suing the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) over the treatment he received during diversity training sessions. [...] So this training is routine in Canada but what wasn't routine was Bilkszto's reaction.  Instead of going along with it, he stood up to the trainer.  And that quickly resulted in him being told to shut up and sit down because he was white.

Will the European Union Devolve into a Group of Third-World Countries?  For the past 30 years, politicians throughout the E.U. kowtowed to the green parties and eco-terrorists in their countries by declaring war on the carbon atom and the hydrocarbon bond based on the fraudulent man-made global warming hypothesis.  Many politicians in Europe joined the global warming chorus with full-throated support; it assumed the element of noblesse oblige.  In 2018, British prime minister Theresa May stated: "There is a clear moral imperative for developed economies like the U.K. to help those around the world who stand to lose most from the consequences of man-made climate change."  The implication from the prime minister's remarks:  those who don't support the fraudulent hypothesis are immoral.  Today, energy costs in the U.K. have trebled from just two years ago, and rampant inflation throughout the E.U. is at a level not seen since the 1970s.  The price advantage manufacturers once enjoyed in international markets is gone, in the process smashing the continent's once-harmonious labor relations as unions throughout the E.U. in every economic sector from transportation to manufacturing to health care strike for higher wages to offset higher energy and food costs.

Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies.  Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill:  Rates are set to soar, starting next month — and double over the next two years.  If you're a progressive, you can't complain.  What did you think would happen, based on your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?  On Thursday, the state's Public Service Commission OK'd hikes of 9.1% for electricity and 8.4% for gas, starting in August, along with additional jumps though 2025.  At that point, typical bills will have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an extra $840 a year.

The Editor says...
Maybe electric cars aren't such a great idea after all.  Maybe it's not a good idea to eliminate coal-fired power plants.  Maybe your windmills will stop on the hottest day of the summer, or freeze on the coldest day.  Maybe your solar panels won't work at night — oh wait, that's a certainty.

The imposition of transgender madness: The bottom-up approach.  The astounding speed with which a delusional fantasy has been imposed on society — that people can become the opposite sex simply by saying so — requires explanation.  This obliteration of nature's (and God's) most fundamental truth of our lives and the resultant diminishing of the reproduction of our species clearly vectors toward societal and civilizational collapse.  It destroys fertility when surgical and chemical interventions are used, and this dooms the society successfully targeted to decline relative to the rest of the world unaffected by the craze.  (Have you heard about transgenderism spreading in Russia and China?)  The indoctrination of young children into the ideology means that even among those whose bodies are not mutilated or poisoned, the post-adolescent sexual attraction and bonding necessary for the population to remain stable is diminished.  So far, the strategy to impose this on American society has been top-down in nature.  The educational system, from preschool through grad school, has largely been captured by the left, and their bureaucrats and teachers have often eagerly acted as indoctrinators and enforcers.

Austin Is Quickly Turning Into A Blue City [...] With High Levels Of Violence.  These are common scenes particularly over the weekends in Austin Texas with brawls and violence all over the downtown area as people get drunk at the clubs.  The last Republican mayor In Austin was way back in the mid 80s.  [Video clip]

Salesforce CEO Warns San Francisco's Downtown [is] "Never Going Back To The Way It Was".  San Francisco is a 'hellhole' that epitomizes everything wrong with how progressives govern cities.  That's because Democrats in City Hall believe that most criminals are victims — don't arrest them — which allows for open-air drug markets, homelessness, and violent crime to thrive.  Due to failed social justice reform policies, the business conditions in downtown San Francisco have become challenging.  Furthermore, the ongoing structural decline in demand for office space has thwarted any potential economic recovery in the area.  [Tweet with video clip]  Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, the city's largest employer and anchor tenant in its tallest skyscraper, understands the metro area is in trouble.

How does the city bounce back from this?  One of the enduring mysteries of life is how people and societies can see disaster coming and do nothing to avoid it. [...] We are seeing this principle in real time with the collapse of cities like San Francisco and Portland.  They have been liberal bastions for so long that the idea of bucking the Democrat Party is unthinkable, no matter how bad things get.  And they are getting very very bad in both cities.  San Francisco has produced some of the most powerful politicians in California.  Off the top of my head, I can name the current governor, Gavin Newsom, the current VP, Kamala Harris, and of course Senator Diane Feinstein.  Many of the most powerful people in the legislature hail or hailed from the city, and the tradition of moving up the ladder from SF to the heights of power is ancient in political terms.  When the Democrat Party took its radical Left turn the city moved with it — led it, in fact — and the results have been disastrous.

The Classic Psychology Text That Predicted Today's Urban Decay.  It's a question that most Americans who follow the news ask themselves daily:  "How can the residents of so many of the nation's largest cities keep supporting local officials who tolerate the ongoing destruction of their communities?"  Why this May, for example, did the citizens of Chicago — a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math — choose the teachers union-backed candidate, Brandon Johnson, for mayor?  Especially when Johnson's chief opponent, Paul Vallas, had promised the electorate sensible school reforms?  Why, a few years earlier, did San Franciscans elect a mayor, London Breed, whose obvious reluctance to crack down on criminal behavior has since forced the city's largest mall to close, two of its best hotels to declare bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of high-earning taxpayers to move away?  Why has there been no serious movement to get New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to initiate proceedings to remove Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who refuses prosecute "low-level" crimes, all while promising to downgrade felony charges and to decriminalize resisting police arrest?

Imploding Cities Will Drag All of Us Down.  First, a quick refresher on the compounding problems of urban areas.  Chief among them is that big cities are dark blue, and thus they've become crucibles of Left-wing policy failure.  Uncontrolled crime, roving drug and mental-illness zombies, and swarms of sanctuary-recipient asylum scammers are crowding out reasonable people and businesses.  The normals who remain to take advantage of access to cultural events (such as they are) and restaurant variety are also subject to totalitarian social controls and two-tiered justice systems that punish them when they fight back against criminals.  But no matter how desperate the situation becomes, city councils can be counted on to double down on woke policies, then double down again.  Businesses are fleeing.  In the ones that remain, shopping for basic goods has become a frustrating exercise in waiting for an associate to unlock the case so you can grab a razor and some toothpaste.  Add in today's high interest rates, which make owning and running a business prohibitively expensive, and the writing is on the wall.

Blue City Struggles With Police Officer Recruitment After Droves Of Retirements: Report.  New York City is struggling to recruit more police officers after a mass amount of experienced officials retired, according to the New York Post.  The New York Police Department's (NYPD) March officer exam far underscored the amount of applicants the department expected, with 1,300 signing up to take the test compared to the 3,000 expected, sources told the NYP.  This year's second exam, which took place on Thursday, didn't meet expectations, once again, despite incentives given by the NYPD.  "The NYPD's best recruiting tool has always been word of mouth," Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry told the NYP.  "But right now the word is, 'Stay away.'"

10 Paradigm Shifts that Shatter Establishment Illusions.  [#1] Now people understand that the left's real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not "healthy."  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not "justice."  Imposing a "woke" State religion over personal conscience is not "moral."  Aiding and abetting child sex-trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not "compassionate."  Stealing property is not "equitable."  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today's leftism is evil.

Will Someone Please Wake Me From This Nightmare?  When Joe Biden became president, America was on a solid footing, inflation was under control, we were energy independent, the price of gasoline was under $2.00, and things in America were great.  Now most of that has been undone, and nothing is being done about it. [...] While Trump was president, nearly 500 miles of wall were built and immigration was controlled.  Biden has opened the border and invited all to come, and they are coming by the millions.  When Biden became president, America was energy independent and we were even selling energy abroad.  Biden stopped construction of oil pipelines, stopped drilling on public lands, and began a campaign against fossil fuels, the very product that has made America great. [...] Under Trump there was little inflation, prices were fairly stable.  Biden has spent billions by just printing the money.  This is classic inflation and is hurting everyone with higher prices for everything from food to hardware.  This is especially true for gasoline, the price of which is also affected by the Biden energy policies.

Is the 2024 Election the Last Gasp for America?  The American economy is in freefall, Washington, D.C. is spending money we don't have.  Our borders are nonexistent with millions streaming across, many unskilled, illiterate, disease-carrying, criminal, or potential enemy combatants.  We are already engaged in World War III by proxy against the largest nuclear power in the world, for no discernable U.S. national interest other than enriching the military-industrial complex and politicians.  Social norms and traditions are out the window, where men can claim to be women just because they say so, in defiance of biology and common sense, and we must shut up, agree, as well as praise their courage.  Government has been weaponized against political opponents in the manner of the Soviet Union or East Germany, where an elite ruling class exempts itself from justice and the Constitution, while any opposition is crushed under the jackboot of a tyrannical government.  Elections are rigged, not as a conspiracy theory, but in the opinion of most Americans.

'60s Denialism: Affirmative Action's Last Ditch Defense.  [Scroll down]  Almost unnoticed, a labyrinth of soul-crushing social programs was taking root and would soon be institutionalized by the Lyndon Johnson administration under the rubric of "The Great Society."  At the time, the only person brave enough — or crazy enough — to call attention to the damage done by these programs was Johnson's undersecretary of labor (and later U.S. senator), Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  In his remarkably prescient report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965, the same year the Great Society was launched.  "The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling," Moynihan warned.  Causing the dissolution were the sundry social programs that promised women financial security on the real but rarely spoken condition that there be no married father in the household.  Until about 1960, the income gap between backs and whites was narrowing.  After 1960, with the surge in single-parent households, it began to reverse itself.

A Third of Seattle Residents Are Considering Leaving, Citing Crime and Costs.  One-third of Seattle residents are considering packing up and moving elsewhere, largely citing home prices and crime, according to a Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll conducted in June.  Roughly 33 percent of Seattle residents surveyed say they are seriously considering moving out of the city, while 67 percent say they are not.

The underlying, uncomfortable, reality at the core of America's malaise.  Massive corruption in government.  Lying by public officials.  Office holders receiving bribes.  Unjust prosecution of political opponents.  Justice meted based on political affiliation.  News and information dissemination based on allegiance to a particular world view.  Parents denied the right to mold and shape their own children and instead being forced to yield those rights to the state by law.  Forced celebration of deviant behavior with a demand for approval of same, or else.  The compromising of a once muscular military into one which is inundated with self-defeating progressive policies.  And we could go on.  The symptoms of decay noted above are occurring virtually unabated in this country right now, and in the West in general, and are directly linked to the widespread adoption of leftist ideologies.  These have been embraced by many in our institutions, public and private, and have captured the imagination of our youth.  Ironically, they represent policies that only a decade or two ago would have been scorned and reviled by those same individuals who now accept and promote them.

Energy Provider Warns of Impending 'Crisis,' 'Blackout Conditions' Driven By Biden Plans.  The U.S. faces an "impending energy crisis" as the Biden administration pursues a transition away from fossil fuels, an electricity cooperative warned Wednesday.  Moon Lake Electric Association, which serves parts of Utah and Colorado, accused President Joe Biden of being "unrealistic" in his emissions reductions goals, according to Deseret News.  "It's unrealistic and it's too ambitious," CEO Yankton Johnson reportedly said.  "They need to pull back on the throttle, pump the brake and think about what they're going to do to individuals."  Johnson's comments came after the Biden administration announced billions in investments for green energy.  The president seeks to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035, net-zero emissions in the economy by 2050 and 50 percent of new vehicle sales being electric by 2030, according to the White House.

Let's celebrate humility.  As I reflect upon the decadence of the last several decades, I think America would be better served by a Humility Month rather than a Pride Month.  Certainly, there are some very loud voices dominating the culture right now, but no one group has cornered the market on moral decay.  We all bear some responsibility.  The shamelessness and depravity permeating our culture are on a scale far beyond that of previous generations, so we must have gone wrong somewhere.  This depravity is the result of, not the cause of, our problems.  Our misplaced priorities have led us into a snare.  One by one, the things we have given ourselves to instead of God, family, and community have hoisted the banner of pride, asserting their sovereignty over our lives.  Whether it is sports, film, music, shopping, or dining, the enterprises we have pledged our allegiance to have seized the reigns of the culture and are driving us like cattle.  Over the years, we've been seduced and manipulated to compromise our values and rationalize selfishness.  Pride turns life into a game that coerces us to abandon the essential and pursue the frivolous.  Putting points on the board becomes more important than relationships with people.

Christians, It's Time to Learn from Hamtramck, Michigan.  Every June, the LGBT movement throws a tantrum fit that would put any cranky toddler shame.  Their goal?  Acceptance and attention.  It's as if they were toting a screechy, ear-piercing megaphone for the sole purpose of shaming Americans for holding traditional values.  Of course, they enlist other mercenaries to help wage their war on god-fearing Americans — Target, Kohl's, Pet Smart, and even Cracker Barrel.  Corporations, in their zeal to be in the "in-crowd," muck up their logos, apparel, and storefronts with bright, bold, unmissable rainbows.  Public institutions hoist the Pride flag high on their poles, peddle LGBT propaganda, and deck out police cars and firetrucks in a paint box explosion of kaleidoscope colors.  This year, even the White House, in a move that should make anyone with a sense of decorum cringe, chose to display the Rainbow Flag sandwiched between two American flags in a shocking violation of the U.S. Flag Code.  And let's not forget the U.S. Airforce, which deemed it fitting to release a picture of a soldier saluting the Pride flag.  It's like we've stepped into a technicolor dream world where the queering of America is now a national priority.

Corporate America Doesn't Hear Anybody.  Obviously the Democrats don't hear the people. [...] They are complaining that Biden is not getting enough credit for bringing down inflation, inflation that he created.  Oh, and while inflation may be officially at 4%, that's only because the government doesn't include all of the things people need in their inflation calculation.  And it's still significantly higher than when Biden took office.  Nor do they include the devaluation of money which is also inflation that people must deal with.  And real wages have declined as well.

Portland Real Estate Nightmare.  [Scroll down]  Well, for a lot of people and businesses, it's too late.  Such as Kevin Howard, for whom the City of Portland refused to do anything about the homeless people breaking into his property and trashing the place.  And who then fined him because the place was trashed. [... How did this happen?]  Easy.  You let Social Justice Warriors take over your city.  This is the expected outcome.

Summertime in SoCal, and with green recycling, here come the rats, roaches, flies and maggots.  [H]ere in San Diego, where we are under a state mandate to recycle our green garbage — food scraps, food-soiled paper, and yard clippings — fresh new environmental problems are abounding.  According to local T.V. station KFMB:  ["] [...] Some people said they're concerned the waste could attract rodents and other animals.  "We understand it's something that people have to get used to and put into practice," said Director of Environmental Services Department, Renee Robertson.["]  Did I hear that right?  Did she just say we need to get used to having rats and roaches around the old middle-America ranch house now going for a million dollars on the market, with property taxes indexed to it?  I think that's what she's saying, because people are reporting problems because they use the government system.

Living in a Media World.  Our country is now divided into two numerically equivalent ideological blocs.  Not surprisingly, those in the leftist bloc have been generally impervious to what conservatives and Republicans have exposed as scandals in their camp.  And there have been lots of them.  This long train of abuses would include Hunter Biden's acceptance of bribes from foreign governments, his father's likely involvement in Hunter's influence-peddling, the Democrats' weaponization of the administrative state against both political opponents and religious Christians, the witch hunt against Trump carried out on the basis of the discredited Steele dossier, and Biden's and Hillary Clinton's scandalous treatment of classified material.  Democratic iniquities might also include promoting programs to sexualize children, the championing of LGBT and CRT indoctrination in public schools and the military, our humiliating setbacks in foreign affairs, and the sacrifice of American energy independence in pursuit of a Green New Deal benefiting Communist China.

Transgender Lawsuits Reveal Horrors of Procedures.  Kayla Lovdahl is the perfect test case as a 13-year-old who was approved for "transgender surgery:" She could not conceive, at the time, of the possibility of suffering a lifetime of disfigurement and chronic pain.  Ms. Lovdahl, now 18, has retained an attorney, Charles Limandri, who has employed such emotionally charged words as "barbaric and cruel" to describe the medical team's actions in causing his client deep physical and emotional wounds.  Essential to his case is the claim that Lovdahl was hopelessly ignorant of the statistical reality that nearly half of trans surgeries result in serious and life-threatening complications.  How can a 13-year-old grasp what it means to remove perfectly healthy breasts (in female-to-male transition)?  Sanitizing the language, Lovdahl was informed she could opt for "top" and/or "bottom surgery."  She had never heard of the term "double mastectomy" as she was wheeled into surgery for what the medical team had described as "top surgery."  Her harrowing surgical experience was spared "bottom" mutilation.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud.  If Americans cannot trust their government to oversee free and fair elections, then what exactly can Americans trust their government to do?  To guard the country's borders from invasion?  Nope.  To enforce the law impartially and safeguard citizens and their property from violence?  Not anymore.  To vigorously defend Americans' constitutionally protected rights?  Not when the federal government attacks their free speech, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, and freedom from warrantless searches.  To maintain the monetary value of the nation's currency?  Not with reckless money-printing and spending.  To protect American sovereignty and avoid long-term foreign obligations?  Not when the U.N., WHO, and WEF rule from afar.  In every way, the federal government has failed to fulfill its principal obligations to citizens of the United States.

Biden's Economic Program is Made in China.  As reported by New York Times Magazine at the time, Joe Biden's goal was to transform the economy from the get-go: "The Biden Team Wants to Transform the Economy.  Really." Nearly two-and-a-half years later, the damage and chaos of that transformation process are obvious: continuing high inflation (especially energy, food, and gasoline prices), rising interest rates, recession predictions, a stagnant economy, depleted individual savings, sky-high credit card debt, and other indications of stagflation and recession.  Who has benefited from the Biden economy?  Green new deal grifters benefit from the gargantuan tax subsidies and federal spending on transitioning the US economy from hydrocarbon energy sources to "clean" sources, especially solar and wind energy.  The communist Chinese are happy to benefit from Biden economic policies that ultimately mandate and subsidize green products from Chinese companies at the expense of the US companies who produce and use hydrocarbons.

Resistance.  In order to get anywhere, begin any sort of resistance to the WEF, UN or WHO, one has to start with the designation, or belief by a majority of the people, that the current government is presiding over a failed state.  That determination or designation originates from an international definition.  From Britannica, it includes this paragraph:  ["]A failed state is composed of feeble and flawed institutions.  Often, the executive barely functions, while the legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, and armed forces have lost their capacity and professional independence.  A failed state suffers from crumbling infrastructures, faltering utility supplies and educational and health facilities, and deteriorating basic human-development indicators, such as infant mortality and literacy rates.  Failed states create an environment of flourishing corruption and negative growth rates, where honest economic activity cannot flourish.["]

Did You Breathe Smoke Last Week?  This is Why.  [Scroll down]  Meanwhile, Canada has arrested dozens of fire-setters in the last few weeks, and Quebec and Alberta are running full-bore investigations.  The new Premier of Alberta was blocked from Facebook for saying so.  Not one pontificator knows what has happened to the forests since Rio and the 92 Earth Summit.  Since then the regulatory structure created by the U.N.'s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) has been instituted all over the world.  It is a new method of forest management - "sustainable" - that throws over 1000 years of silvaculture.  A forester takes seven years of wickedly difficult education to be able to manage forests.  What the UN did was send a bunch of heavily indoctrinated, radically-undereducated hysterics into the forests - which cover one-third of the world - and proceeded to destroy them with a "no-touch" policy.

This is some of the garbage we can expect with indoctrinated kids and greedy lawyers.  These children say that their lives have been destroyed because of coal and oil so they are suing Montana. [...] Lawsuits and policies should be based on the truth and scientific facts, not on easily manipulated computer models and made up predictions which have consistently been wrong, like this lawsuit and the radical green policies which are being forced on the American people.

Trump's Indictment and the Collapse of Confidence in Our Institutions.  Before turning to the charges facing Trump, consider their larger political setting, which begins with any democratic government's most fundamental responsibilities:  preserving public order, ensuring its citizens' safety, and applying the law fairly.  The institutions charged with those responsibilities are crumbling at the local, state, and federal levels, and millions of voters on both sides of our gaping ideological spectrum know it.  Each blames the other and accepts no blame for themselves.  This collapse of public order is painfully obvious in many major cities, where violent crime, massive organized shoplifting, and homeless encampments have become dangerous facts of ordinary life.  Law-abiding citizens, the backbone of those cities, have found the quality of their lives declining.  They bear much of the blame themselves.  They elected the district attorneys who refuse to prosecute serious crimes and so encourage even more.  They elected the mayors and legislators who justify such rampant disorder under the heart-warming name of "social justice."  How do armed robberies, looting, and gang violence qualify as social justice?

This Is Your City On Democrats: Philadelphia.  Evidently it is the deepest desire of Democratic Party activists to turn the streets of American cities into needle-strewn wastelands of drug addicts openly shooting up and [defecating] on the street.  Because that's the results that the Democratic Party drug- and crime-tolerant policies create time and time again.  Here's a video of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.  [Video clip]

Has Atlanta Seen the Light?  It's no secret that cities take the positives and negatives of the human experience and multiply them exponentially.  Of course, we know that many of the worst tendencies we're seeing in cities today are the result of Democrats' policies.  George Soros-funded district attorneys are refusing to enforce laws and bring criminals to justice, while sanctuary city policies are bringing in illegal immigrants at the expense of law-abiding and tax-paying citizens.  Racial and political animosity that groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa brought into America's cities, short-sighted approaches to homelessness and drug addiction, and pandemic-era government intrusion did untold amounts of damage to urban areas.  The state of our cities has suffered tremendously on the heels of Democrat leadership. [...] And people are fleeing Democrat-run cities in droves.  That's a trend that's likely to continue unless the leadership in cities can get a handle on crime.

How Bad Does It Have to Get?  Murders, street crime, white-collar crime, shoplifting, trespassing, abuse of power, illegal drugs, legal drugs, illegal immigration and open borders, election-tampering, institutional decay, homelessness, illiteracy, phony racism, real racism, corrupt politicians, vengeful district attorneys, child abuse, domestic partner abuse, disregard for human life, a weakened military, the rise of authoritarianism, expanding ignorance, AI, CRT, DIE, poverty, inflation, radical environmentalism, gender fluidity, lowered standards and weakened values, flight from personal responsibility, death of the meritocracy...  the list goes on, and it's getting bigger by the day.

Radio Free America.  [Scroll down]  Woke companies like Walmart, CVS, Target, and even specialty brands like Old Navy were sucked into "doing the right thing" and building in "underserved" areas of big cities.  Now, those very same names are pulling out in droves as they count their losses in the billions, but won't mouth the reasons why as established corporations, they can't survive in buzzing districts.  The truth is obvious, but wokeism won't allow you to say that the principal causes are shoplifting, violent crime, weak or unenforced laws, and courts that return the most profligate and violent offenders for endless rounds of mayhem.

Video shows Austin's 'crown jewel' trail trashed by hidden homeless camps.  Jamie Hammonds said city policies have pushed homeless into areas where the public can't see them[.]  An Austin, Texas, resident is raising awareness of the city's homeless problem and its unseen impact on greenbelt areas.  Jamie Hammonds, an investigative filmmaker who runs the organization Documenting Austin's Streets and Homeless, or DASH, shared videos Wednesday on Twitter, showing a homeless encampment in the Violet Crown Trail after roughly a year of neglect.  "It's destroyed.  It will never be the same," Hammonds tweeted.  A real-estate agent concurred, saying the "environmental damage from these camps is immense."

San Francisco's doom loop accelerates.  The owner of 2 major San Francisco Hotels, including the city's largest hostelry, has announced that it is walking away from its mortgage on the two properties, surrendering them to the lender. [...] "Concerns over street conditions" is a delicate way of describing the takeover of much of downtown SF by drug addicts, currently termed "the unhoused" as if the main problem were high rents, when in fact the thousands of vagrants ruining the city are attracted from all over the country by the tolerance and active financial and social services support they receive.  They leave feces and urine on the streets, shooting up in front of the dwindling crowds of passers-by who have learned to avoid what was not very long ago one of the most attractive and vibrant cities in the world.  The high office vacancy rates, the lower return of workers to offices, and the reduced convention schedule that trouble Park's management are all closely related to the takeover of downtown (and other neighborhoods) by bums and junkies.

Dying San Francisco Sustains Another Massive Blow.  Not too long ago, San Francisco was still a remarkably beautiful city, although even then it could change on a dime.  One could be in the midst of a leisurely stroll down a gorgeous street filled with chic cafes, turn a corner, and find oneself without warning in the middle of a large crowd of menacing homeless drug addicts.  Now, after decades of far-Left misrule that has picked up speed in the wake of the COVID hysteria, the city's dirty, degrading, and dangerous areas are growing rapidly and taking the whole place over, and the city's remaining sane people are fleeing.  The end is near for the Golden Gate City:  the day is approaching when its ruins will bear silent witness to the ways in which Leftism destroys human societies.  In anticipation of that day, a luxury hotel chain is leaving town.

Two of San Fran's largest hotels are bailing out.  Another week and another business is pulling out of the formerly great city of San Francisco.  Well, two businesses actually, though they are owned by the same parent company.  The Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel is the largest in the city.  The Parc 55 Hotel is the fourth largest.  Both are owned by Park Hotels & Resorts, which is stopping payments on a massive loan for the two hotels and allowing them to go into foreclosure.  It is simply no longer safe or profitable to operate such an operation in San Francisco.  The CEO of the company described the move as a "very difficult, but necessary" decision.

Reporter Confronts KJP On Men In Women's Locker Rooms Possibly Driving Up Suicide Rates.  A White House reporter confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about suicide rates increasing among young girls as school administrators allow males in women's locker rooms.  Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley suggested school administrators allowing males into women's locker rooms drives up suicide rates during a Sunday CNN town hall with Jake Tapper.  Haley said, "My daughter ran track in high school.  I don't even know how I would have that conversation with her.  How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms?  And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.  We should be growing strong girls, confident girls."

It's Not About Politics!  Too many people still believe what we see on the news is politics as usual.  It is not.  Politics departed long ago.  What we are witnessing, what we see demonstrated everyday, is good vs. evil. [...] Normalizing homosexuality, pushing transgenderism, even celebrating them is not politics.  Hospitals operating on children, mutilating them, removing perfectly normal reproductive organs or creating faux body parts as a poor substitute is not politics.  Observing major corporations getting into politics like never before is not mere politics.  Watching these same corporations changing their wares to heighten the Left's narrative is not politics.  Major store chains selling clothing to hide genitalia to enhance the cloaking of actual gender or allowing men in women's bathrooms is not politics.  Thousands upon thousands of homeless living on sidewalks in major Democrat cities while allowing hardened criminals to prey on the innocents is not politics.  Authorizing marketing execs to destroy their brand just to normalize abnormality and then watching other companies follow suit is not politics.  Inviting drag queens to display their deviancy to children in public libraries and classrooms and then calling it 'promoting imagination' is not politics.  Finding thousands of ballots over and above the number of voters in any precinct or allowing people to vote without proving who they are is not politics.  Opening borders to millions of unvetted, unknown people from foreign countries the world over is not politics.  Giving up energy independence is not politics.  Punishing political rivals with censorship is not politics.  Spending trillions on what no one can identify is not politics.  Politicians and Deep Staters committing treasonous acts for decades without repercussion is not politics.  Permitting people to 'serve' in Congress and the presidency who are mentally incompetent or even dead is not politics.  Using 'climate change' to amass power and money is not politics.

Is America's collapse inevitable?  [Harold] Robertson gives it heft and dimension by discussing how America began to shift from a meritocracy to a diversity system in the 1960s, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He then explains how it became embedded in American employment culture.  Of course, moving away from a system that discriminated against people based on race is a good thing.  The problem is that, thanks to how "diversity" has been interpreted, we've embraced a whole new style of discrimination.  Now, the most important characteristic a person can bring to a job is skin color, sex, and sexual orientation or "identity."  This metric, when applied across American culture, especially within the government, but with increased aggression in education and the workplace, practically ensures that the people responsible for America's public and private systems won't be the "best"; they'll just be the most "diverse."

Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis.  At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated.  In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths.  A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people.  The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast's gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack.  Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports.  A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio.  Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off.  Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.  While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention.

Is the Sleeping Conservative Dragon Finally Waking Up?  How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?  They don't see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues.  Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.  They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.  Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.  In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time.  In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.  Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.  How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

The Editor says...
The sleeping dragon might wake up, but if the elections are corrupt, will it matter?

The Party's Over.  The red fascists masquerading as our Democrat political party have obliterated the home of Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ.  What remains is a shell, a Trojan Horse packed full of crazy-eyed warriors prepared at every moment to commit murder and mayhem to advance their power.  There is no polite answer to the armed killer at your door.  In too many places, the police have been depopulated and terrorized.  Our prosecutors have been emasculated and suborned.  Even our armed forces are being hollowed out and rendered unfit for combat.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.  [Scroll down]  Debauchery is an oft-recurring theme in the demise of empires.  Societies develop an abnormally immature obsession with sex.  An obsession that requires increasing deviancy to satiate coupled with concurrent abuse of children and the marginalization and exploitation of women.  Meanwhile, the use of drugs and alcohol expands exponentially.  Debauchery is a symptom of the absence of meaning in people's lives leading to the self-destruction of society and concomitantly a loss of a sense of duty and patriotism.  Other symptoms common among many empires in the last stages of decline include:
  •   Massive and growing disparities between rich and poor and an undisciplined and over-extended military.
  •   An intensification of internal political hatreds and a corresponding inability to reconcile in order to save the empire.
  •   An ever increasing level of self-serving corruption and patronage among the ruling class.
  •   A massive influx of unassimilated foreigners whose allegiance and cultural ties are with their native lands and not the host nation and who do not feel obligated to defend the empire.
  •   Severe financial and economic crises linked to the unending debasement of the currency.
  •   An ongoing and irreversible decline in monotheistic religions that emphasize self-sacrifice, temperance, a sense of duty as well as honor and integrity.
Additionally, while the decline of empires is precipitated by internal factors, the final collapse is marked by defeat at the hands of powerful external enemies.

America Is Destined for Dictatorship.  Fathers are increasingly nonexistent in the lives of kids who are routinely abused, sexually, emotionally, and otherwise, in state-run institutions.  Everybody talks about the abuse the Catholic Church has tolerated with respect to pedophile priests, but the public schools are infinitely worse.  Parents who do care enough to oppose it are tarred as domestic terrorists and targeted by the Justice Department.  Extended families exist as real connections less and less.  We're terrible at love and romance, worse at raising our children.  We have to stage organized boycotts of the Disneys and Targets of the world because organic signals from the market aren't strong enough to dissuade stupid woke corporations from bombarding us with smut.  And those who attempt to uphold timeless societal standards are derided as "culture warriors" and prudes.  The internet is covered with videos of looting, mob violence, street chaos, murder, beatings, carjackings, and other mayhem.  People break out their phones to document the horrors and earn clicks on social media rather than act to stop it.  There is no confidence in our governing institutions, and there shouldn't be.  They're mercilessly corrupt.

Arrest of Chicago 'Peacekeeper' police substitute demonstrates the folly of 'defund the police'.  A man wearing the vest of the new "Peacekeeper" corps deployed over the Memorial Day weekend, to stem the mayhem on a holiday weekend that has become an opportunity for murder tallies to soar, was arrested for a violent attack. [...] One of the many fantasies of the progressives is that there is something inherently wrong or dangerous with police.  Instead of armed police capable of using the threat of violence to restrain offenders, unarmed social worker-like alternatives can reduce violence by sympathizing with offenders and understanding the root causes of their behavior.  The Chicago Police Department's 1,700 vacancies are so catastrophic that Democrat politicians are desperate to deflect blame for their support of defund the police and anti-cop measures.  Chicago's new mayor, Brandon Johnson, ditched his former defund-the-police rhetoric during the campaign but still won't commit to adding funds to the police.

The Consequences of American Meritocracy in the Rearview.  While some differences persist between races or between sexes, the reality is, Americans of all stripes have more opportunity than virtually any place on the planet.  Indeed, black median household income in the United States ($38,800) is higher than that of every country in the world but four, while at the same time, the poorest 20% of Americans are richer on average than most Europeans.  And the "gender wage gap" is gone, too.  What's more, advancement is alive and well, demonstrated by the fact that 20% of America's richest citizens are self-made, starting their lives in poor households.  The fact that 60% of are self-made from the middle class or below shows exactly how much opportunity there is in America.  But a funny thing happened on the way to leaving stereotypes and its discrimination behind and focusing on content of character; the nation was hijacked by the party of the KKK and Jim Crow.  Suddenly, at the very moment when America had achieved something very close to a true meritocracy, the modern Democrat put its only vehicle to power, the Victim Industrial Complex, into overdrive.

How to Destroy a People.  Wokeness is not about "rights" — it is about favoritism on a colossal scale.  It is about transforming America into a Marxist totalitarian state based on a coalition of groups antagonistic to traditional American identity.  And so, ultimately, it is about destroying America as we have known it for over 200 years.  The special consideration that these groups demand comes at the expense of ordinary citizens — those decent, hardworking, family-oriented citizens who now find themselves forced to the back of the bus.  Ordinary Americans pay the higher taxes necessary to fund the privileges that marginal groups now claim; ordinary folks are expected to nod in agreement as their children are subjected to woke brainwashing; ordinary people are told they must swallow the idea that the needs of homosexuals, transgenders, transvestites, criminals, illegal aliens, environmentalist radicals, communists, atheists, and anarchists come first — in education, hiring, culture, politics, and the news.  There is little space or funding left for everyday Americans, who are told that they are less important and "outdated" and even "hate-filled" just because of their noble beliefs in Christianity, self-responsibility, decency, and goodness.

The Extensive Corruption of Morals in the USA.  [Scroll down]  Thus, we are not surprised to learn that the district attorneys of many cities, including New York, do not prosecute prostitution any longer, but treat it as a form of maladjustment to be treated therapeutically, not punished as a legal and moral wrong.  Lotteries today have invaded millions of bodegas and grocery stores.  Casinos are no longer just to be found in Nevada, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, but exist in states throughout the nation.  Swearing is common in corporate offices and boardrooms.  The F-word has become commonplace; when this writer worked in a corporate division of industrial engineers even in the 1990s, it was the expletive of choice.  In our era, instead of cruelty to animals, as existed in the early 19th century, we see the destruction of millions of babies, many of whom are dissected while alive in order to retrieve their body parts and sell them.

Let's Check In And See How The Largest Metropolitian Areas In The United States Are Doing.  Our largest cities are being run by progressive politicians that have been working very hard to implement extremely ambitious progressive agendas.  So how is that working out?  In this article, I am going to check in on the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States to see how they are doing.  Have they been transformed into "liberal utopias" that can serve as examples to show the rest of the world how they should be doing things?  Not exactly.  Instead, conditions have gotten really bad in each one of them and things are getting worse with each passing day.

Convicted Murderer Freed By Innocence Project Becomes Drug Dealer And Murders A Man.  Shaurn Thomas, a black man who was freed for murder in Philadelphia by the Innocence Project and given $4 million in restitution by the state, allegedly became a drug dealer upon release, killed a man for owing him a $1,200 drug debt and told his accomplice it was his "third" homicide.  Shaurn Thomas was a millionaire, but prosecutors say he killed a man over a $1,200 drug debt.  Thomas was paid more than $4 million three years ago after spending 24 years behind bars for a murder conviction that was later overturned.  [Video clip]

A new whistleblower describes the horrors of "gender-affirming care" at Texas Children's Hospital.  [Scroll down]  No.  It won't turn out well.  There's absolutely no proof that a transgender surgery will "cure" patients' depression or whatever mental health issue they're going through, which I believe is real.  We have a generation of kids with mental health problems.  It's very sad.  And we need to treat those problems correctly, not by recommending that they change genders to fix their mental health problem.  That's never worked.  It never will work.  There's no proof that it will work anywhere in the literature.  So yes, we're ruining them.  They're going to wake up in ten years and discover that they're infertile, that they can't have children, that their sexuality is completely dysfunctional.  That they can't function as a normal human being.  And ultimately, I believe that that realization is going to cause them to harm themselves — when they wake up and realize that they've already been ruined.

Manufacturing Mental Illness.  We must all understand that "transgenderism" is a mental disorder.  But not just any mental disorder.  This one is being force-fed into the minds of our children from the earliest of ages.  We are "manufacturing' mental illness.  We are creating psychopaths in the "laboratories" of our modern American culture.  There was a time when sexual predators were not allowed within 1000 yards of a school building.  But now, schools — both public and private — are inviting them in specifically to indoctrinate and groom children of all ages, even in pre-school.  Pity the one who would dare to stand against this evil — they'll be labeled as "hateful bigots," ostracized from their communities and sometimes even jailed, for daring to stand in the gap to protect children.

Things Really Are Looking Up Under Biden.  [Scroll down]  The problem is that they are all the wrong things.  Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts.  Those are all way up under Biden.  To show this, we've put together a series of charts. [...] During President Donald Trump's entire four years in office, the Consumer Price Index climbed a total of 7.3%.  In less than two-and-half-years under Biden, prices have shot up 16%.  That's not because of Putin's war.  It's not because of greedy oil companies.  It's not because cattle farmers don't have enough competition.  Nor is it because of any of the other lame excuses Biden has peddled.  The one and only reason prices are skyrocketing is Biden's $5 trillion spending spree.

The Union Is Not a Suicide Pact.  From my point of view, never have so many Americans been so consciously aware that things must change.  The federal government's response to the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks has been endless war and the construction of a national security surveillance state that now targets Americans as "domestic enemies."  Its response to mass communication through social media has been the implementation of State-sanctioned censorship.  Its response to widespread calls for border security has been mass sponsorship of illegal immigration.  Its response to Americans' rising demands for personal freedom has been COVID lockdowns, a centrally directed economy, and a declaration of war against "white supremacy."

The Cataclysm to Come.  The United States, ripped apart internally, has become ever less willing and able to lead internationally.  The doctrines that built the United States and Western civilization, assimilated from ancient cultures over thousands of years, are being methodically dissolved.  America is entering an uncharted, revolutionary time.  The foundation of American life, abundant food, energy autonomy, a sound economy, sound education at all levels, and enforceable and equal application of the law, are eroding.  Our society is "fundamentally changing," and these changes are not for the better.  Hard-left fanatics have absorbed the Democrat party and are transforming the country with woke and equality-of-result agendas.  Prosperity and leisure have misled a complacent society into thinking the modern age no longer needs to worry about law and order.

Is Sanity Returning?  I'm referring to the firestorm rejection consumers are giving to Anheuser-Busch (AB), specifically to buying and drinking Bud Lite. [...] AB's executives, Hollywood celebs, academia, TV networks, Big Media, Big Tech, most large corporations, and most government agencies have collectively decided they know what's best for you, know exactly what you need, and have proceeded to shove it down our throats while forcing their political insanity onto society.  You must hate President Trump — Check; every TV network and celebrity continually echoes that mantra.  We will teach racist ideology to your children, and you'll learn to love it — Check; Democrat-controlled school boards cram Critical Race Theory (CRT) into every school curriculum.  Demand gun control/gun confiscation — Check; every mass-shooting is not because the shooter is deranged or mentally ill; no, it's the gun's fault and Dems demand guns be confiscated.  Americans must have and support open borders to flood the country with illegals and change the voter base — Check; Biden and Dems have refused to control the border, resulting in five million (but who's counting) illegals in slightly over two years (thanks, Joe).  America needs a weakened military more focused on White rage than defeating our enemies — Check; all service branches are struggling to recruit new members.  So, given the large numbers of idiotic, woke businesses and lunatic government/military agendas, Anheuser-Busch managed to outstupid them all.  AB used a girly-man transgender to advertise Bud Lite (BL) to the average working man.

Utility Scale Solar Kills Jobs.  Does it matter that utility scale solar has a negative effect on the environment — destroying farmland, forests, wetland, recreational land?  Does it matter that property values are driven down?  Does it matter that the mining of cobalt, lithium, rare earths and copper to build solar panels and battery energy storage systems is done by slave labor in the Congo and China?

When reality hits, it will hit hard.  The work ethic has vanished in large portions of the population.  The military cannot find enough recruits.  We are now at the stage of super-saturation, with corruption, debt, and debauchery leading the list.  All this has come about due to one cause — to keep the government in power, at any cost to the people being ruled.  The impending disturbance that will bring it all crashing down cannot be precisely foretold, but that is because there are so many possible events that it is inevitable that one of them will occur.  One need only look at the headlines to see it.  Black swans abound.  Worse yet, many threats are under-reported, or distorted to conceal their true magnitude.  Is it hopeless?  The short answer is yes.  Nothing in the short term can pay off the debt, restore the work ethic, and return public morals to the levels of sanity.

All This Failure Is Deliberate.  I recently had a reader ask, "Why is Joe Biden still President?" [...] Everything Biden has done has been a disaster.  The economy is teetering.  The border is non-existent.  The banking system and the dollar are crumbling.  Our enemies are taking advantage of the weakness they perceive in the White House.  Crime is out of control in most of our once-great cities.  Traditional morality and decency are in the toilet.  Our children are being butchered and groomed for the hedonistic pleasure of a cadre of sexual deviants.  Women athletes are losing hard-earned rights because of the "transgender" movement, something that almost no one had heard of five years ago.  Government spending is without restraint and, as a result, inflation has soared, and America's middle class is being squeezed into near oblivion.  The education system continues to produce semi-literates who will do — what? — in the future.  No patriot wants to join the military anymore.  The list of Joe Biden's cataclysms is endless, but my space in this column isn't, so I mention only a few of the most egregious catastrophes this man and his ideology have foisted upon the nation.  Why is he still President indeed?

The age of manufactured crises.  This week, with the eclipsing of Title 42, the U.S. southern border has gone from a hot mess to a full-blown emergency.  We were pushed into the conflict with Ukraine and Russia as well.  Before that was the debacle in Afghanistan.  Our leaders killed drilling for oil and terminated pipeline projects which led to elevated gas prices and fueled inflation.  If inflation was a concern, you'd never notice it from our leaders.  They pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to make inflation worse (and had the gall to call it an Inflation Reduction Act.)  Even when there isn't a crisis, the current administration creates one.  For example, claiming gun violence and trans-oppression are national emergencies.  You can almost hear them, "Let's make loans easier for people with bad credit ratings," which is destined to ignite a housing crisis down the road.  If that isn't enough, looming on the horizon is a Taiwan crisis, the Sudan, and perhaps an incident or two with North Korea.  Rather than get in front of an issue and calm it, actions are taken (or not taken) to ensure that problems are allowed to fester and explode.

Liberals sure like dead black men.  We are a nation led by a party that is bent on destruction.  On the West Coast, Democrats are destroying dams in the name of nature.  Elsewhere, they are destroying nuclear plants in the name of safety.  They are destroying coal plants in the name of global warming.  They are destroying sections of interstates in the name of racism.  Black men kill black men by the thousand each year.  Liberals ignore those actual murders.  Instead, they turn the media spotlight on the very rare occasion when a black man dies at the hands of a white person.  The murkier the details, the louder liberals screech.  Liberals are playing America.  When President Obama said if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, he created this monster we still grapple nearly a decade later.  Martin was beating George Zimmerman's head against a sidewalk when the victim pulled his gun and killed his assailant.  The death of another teen thug, Michael D. Brown, gave libs an excuse to destroy Ferguson, Missouri, a quiet suburb that black people used to escape St. Louis.  The list goes on, ending in the overdose death of George Floyd while in police custody.  Liberals used their rationalization to destroy cities.

Never-ending Daycare as a Way of Life.  Teenagers today would not survive in that world where there were no cellphones, Internet, constant entertainment and "safe spaces."  I have never heard the term "safe" as much as I have heard over the last couple years.  The world is not safe regardless of how anyone perceives it.  For those who hold this perception as true, I suggest going to a foreign country and experiencing how different America truly is. [...] What happened?  We, as a group, decided to get soft.  Technology has provided an environment where one can live an easy and soft life.  We subconsciously agreed to not let anything bad happen to our children.  Everyone won and everyone was told they were the best.  Even when they weren't even close.  This fiction twisted our American youth with no non-painful remedy.  We sent these kids out into the world with a distorted view that everything was going to go their way and when it did not it was acceptable to throw a temper tantrum and blame others.

What Have We Learned?  We've learned that white liberals will ignore crime stats and sacrifice their kids to black bullies simply to show the world how "not racist" they are.  They will take a useless/dangerous shot — and, astonishingly, give it to their kids — to avoid being called a "conservative."  Libs will cheer for an obese, mentally ill man when he dons a dress and beats their daughter in a "beauty" pageant.  Progressives don't see a problem with turning adult males with Down Syndrome into drag queens.  They will ignore any news that doesn't come from a state-sanctioned news source, lest they be called a "conspiracy theorist."  Liberals will dutifully prove they aren't "transphobic" by applauding — extra loudly — as a bearded lady steals their daughter's place on the college swim team.  Kids of liberals seem to pay the high price of mommy signaling her "virtue" to the world.

The Impending Thermidor Reaction in Jacobin America.  [Scroll down]  So, the world became topsy-turvy.  Throwing a firebomb into a police-occupied patrol car earned a light sentence, while protesting illegally at the Capitol won a decade in prison.  An American who did not get vaccinated was to be thrown out of the U.S. military; an illegal alien crossing the border unlawfully without a vaccination might earn a free phone and free lodging in a big-city hotel.  The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass.  The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

American Despotism.  Democratic long-term rule over cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago shows the country's trajectory.  Gentrifying cosmopolitans drive out middle-class voters with high rents and plan tent cities of drug users and street defecators.  Homicides in major cities rose 44 percent from 2019-20, another 5 percent from 2020-21.  Nationwide they rose 30 percent, a 60-year high.  Even as the homeless filled cities like Los Angeles, the elites welcomed in millions more illegal immigrants, who bring the Mexican drug cartels' wars with them.  As Houston reported skyrocketing homicides, the Harris County sheriff reminded deputies to share their personal pronouns in introductions.  No longer prosecuting property theft, cities like Dallas and San Fran- cisco released criminals from prison to terrorize the public and only enforced violations on citizens who could pay fines.  The city of Chicago decided not to prosecute gangsters involved in a deadly public shoot-out because they were engaged in "mutual combat."

A Grand Alliance to Overcome the Elite Betrayal of America.  For the first time in history, the ruling class of a powerful nation has abandoned its fellow citizens.  What is happening in America today is more than a return to feudalism, although the new economic model into which we're being herded is correctly compared to feudalism.  The reality is actually much worse: America's elites view ordinary citizens as no longer necessary.  Because of globalism, they are replaceable.  Because of automation, they are superfluous.  Because of environmentalism, they are unsustainable.  These factors explain what is otherwise inexplicable: Constitutional conservatives and Christians, and the values they profess, are now stigmatized by establishment institutions as often, if not more often, than they are praised.  Nationalism and religious faith empower individuals and communities to resist a ruling class that has abandoned them.  That makes them a threat.  They recognize that the ideology of America's ruling elites is itself leading to disaster.  They recognize that America's elites have decided the nation's middle class is disposable, and this is the real reason they are pushing an agenda of woke degeneracy and extreme environmentalism, designed to lower birthrates and reduce standards of living.

Why do liberals support legislation that obviously harms them?  The reality is that the U.S. economy is hardly growing, inflation is still at more than 5%, and the Chinese are arming rapidly while America's defense budget shrinks in real terms.  Biden's progressive policies have set us on a course of self-destruction.  Everyday life is noticeably worse than it was when Biden took office, what with lower real wages, supply chain shortages, higher taxes (many of them hidden from view, like the 1% tax on share buybacks that, in effect, constitute a wealth tax on investors and retirees), weakness overseas, and a weakening dollar.  Every visit to the grocery reveals the misery spreading across America: there are fewer shoppers, each of them purchasing less.  Even such a successful and well run company as Kroger saw fourth-quarter 2022 results decline from 2021 with EPS of 0.62 vs. 0.75 and gross margins decline.  Layoffs are mounting in the tech sector and other industries, and banks have become more selective in making and renewing loans.  The office rental market is hard pressed, and, on top of declines in 2022, home builders are "on the verge of a steeper downturn as buyers pull back."  America is headed toward self-destruction, yet almost half of Democrats want Biden to run again.

Your favorite snacks really ARE shrinking.  If you've picked up a bag of Doritos recently and thought it had less chips in it, you're not going crazy.  Some of America's favorite snacks have shrunk by up to 20 percent in the last 25 years as companies cost-cut amid rising inflation, a move dubbed 'shrinkflation'.  It is not just chips.  Fast food, cereals, soda, ice cream and dressings have all been kept at the same price or even made more expensive despite shrinking in size.

The 2024 Presidential Election.  America is at a tipping point.  Will we continue the downward spiral into a fascist third-world dictatorship?  Can we change course back to a constitutional republic that values the free will of men and women, freedom of speech and assembly, the rule of law, and equal justice?  Already in the descent to an authoritarian state, free speech is suppressed and thought is censored and replaced by Orwellian New Speak enforced by the thought police.  The free press is transformed into shameless state-run propaganda outlets that run the approved false narrative of the day.  The state takes guns away under the guise of public safety.  The thought enforcers of the state supersede local control of the police.  Scapegoats are created.  Yes, the evil of the 1930s is again rising.

Modern day brown shirts.  Goal #15 of the CPUSA, which was read into the Congressional Record in 1963, stated:  "Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States."  Some of the other listed CPUSA goals that have been not-so-coincidentally pursued by radical Democrat Party activists over the past several decades include:
  •   Infiltrate the press.
  •   Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
  •   Get control of the schools.
  •   Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity.
  •   Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity (now to include "transsexualism") as "normal, natural, healthy."
We have all been sleeping while the radical Left — the militant arm of the Democrat Party — has achieved most of these objectives over the past 50 years!  All of this nonsense has been normalized to our collective detriment.

The Disposable Biden.  By any national metric, we're all far worse off now than we were before Biden stumbled through the doors of the Oval Office like a lobotomized polio victim.  His "stiff gait" is an indicator of serious neurological decline which has become a brand of sorts.  It's Biden's version of Trump's rambunctious mane.  But, instead of signaling a raucous virility, Biden's halting and unbalanced gate communicates fundamental weakness and morbidity.  The leader of the free world?  How about sock puppet? [...] Our institutions have been poisoned by feckless, political appointees.  But, the watershed moment in deep state corruption manifested itself when Barack Obama sauntered into the White House, and Karl Marx followed with him.  Every apparatus of deep state power fell under the full control of left wing radicals, installed by the Obama administration — a phalanx of unelected officials that still occupy key positions today.

The truth about morality.  The birth-control pill helped to reduce the stigma of losing one's virginity before marriage.  This, in turn, indirectly reduced the stigma of premarital pregnancy.  This, in turn, reduced the perceived need for the birth control pill.  Once the initial phase of these events had occurred, the floodgates were opened, and what quickly followed was what is called, the sexual revolution.  This revolution was supposed to have freed women from the injustice of sexual repression.  Instead, it led to millions of women becoming pregnant and abandoned, left on their own, to raise their fatherless children.  Many of them were, as a result, raised in poverty and amid crime.  The welfare state sought to correct this mistake by subsidizing single motherhood.  This, in turn, predictably increased what it subsidized.  Today, the harm wrought by the abandonment of sexual morality has left us with a society that cannot even recognize the good and natural differences between the sexes, even to the point of denying that there are two complementary sexes, and certainly denying that they are a naturally ordained partnership, one without which, society suffers consequences so pervasive that many people call them good.

The real surprise here is that New York City still has tourists!
New York City is starting to smell like dirty bong water, disgusting even the tourists.  [Scroll down]  The bottom line here is that the failure to enforce pot laws and the decriminalization of marijuana use inevitably leads to public consumption and a lot of bums whose lives revolve around pot-smoking as a lifestyle choice, camping out on the streets.  The link between homeless encampments and pot smoking is very strong.  The failure to clear those encampments or enforce any laws against petty crime means lots more pot stench to breathe in.  The other issue is that excessive pot-smoking is linked to a lot of crime.  Medical studies have shown that pot-smoking in young men with genetic vulnerabilities, is connected to the emergence of schizophrenia.  Many schizophreniacs commit hard, impulsive violent crimes.  Virtually all mass shooters are prodigious pot consumers.  Pot consumption is a part of this whole dysfunctional picture.

America's Transgender Craze.  Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. [...] Who can forget the mediocre male swimmier Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female?  Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter will even compete in the upcoming Olympics and do so as a woman.  A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London marathon.  Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.  What is going on?  Is America experiencing a mass psychosis where men wake up as "women" and demand to be treated as females?  Has our water supply been massively contaminated by estrogen?  Or are we just experiencing a harmless fad like purple hair?  This men-becoming-women trend is the other side of what occurred decades back as women increasingly moved into traditional male fields.

A Woman by Any Other Name is Still a Woman.  A famous line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", meaning that things are what they are, regardless of what you choose to name them.  This is why modern man uses language to precisely define people, places, and things, irrespective of how we might feel about said things.  The same can be applied to men and women, or boys and girls.  They are what they are, regardless of how we choose to name them.  Such thinking was common sense for centuries, but now in our post-enlightenment culture, accepted descriptors are somehow verboten, requiring a new language with cumbersome verbosity replacing simple one or two syllable words.

Feminism's Strange Trans Fruit.  Leaving the fight against the trans movement, specifically the men who demand that we all play along with their supposedly feminine identities, entirely up to women would relinquishing to feminists (and their many male allies and puppetmasters) exactly what they want.  They want it to be impossible for the public to see a distinction between feminist and woman, as if all females are enthusiastic participants in a feminist Borg collective.  In fact, one of the most potent tools of feminism in recent decades has been to say "Women need X" when the truth is that feminists want X and don't care what the rest of women actually want.  This conceals feminists' actual, far smaller numbers.

It's Never Been About Tucker, Trump, or Fox News.  America is going to hell in a handbasket.  Not in the surreal world created by TV and social media, but in the real world.  A civilizational inferno has engulfed America and the people we've elected to fight it have done nothing of substance to contain it.  We're not dealing with people who merely disagree on how to put the fire out.  We're dealing with political pyromaniacs who set the fires, watch them burn, and work to stop anyone who tries to put them out.  They're facilitating illegal immigration, weaponizing government, redefining crime and punishment, changing the definition of inflation to spend more, corrupting our election system, cheering and funding a tyrannical gender revolution, and butchering history to institutionalize a cultish gospel of black victimhood.

The Greatest Threat to America.  America has recently witnessed an assault on freedom of speech, watched the White House send condolences to the trans community after one of its members murdered innocent children at a Christian school, and learned of a proposed tax plan that would hurt the finances of millions of Americans by adding four trillion dollars in new taxes.  But perhaps most indicative of a threat from within, this administration has ushered in a period of unprecedented domestic chaos by attempting to forcefully vaccinate citizens, prioritize DEI over equality and common sense, and crater military enlistment by promoting wokeness.  Every administration presides over some level of disagreement on issues amongst the general public, but nothing compares to the confusion they are causing young American children to endure, especially during such a crucial time in life for a child's development.  All these problems will have a devastating impact on America's long-term future if not stopped dead in their tracks.

The Ruling Class's Stalinist Purge.  Whenever human dignity is pushed to the shadows because agents of the State bully and taunt those with character, evil grows.  Whenever individuals are forced to betray their consciences to save loved ones from wretched fates, evil grows.  Whenever government institutions demand reverence for lies while blaspheming religious truth, evil grows.  Whenever people are punished for their beliefs, ostracized for their dissent, or purged from the public square, evil grows.

Insanity is being normalized.  Imagine waiting for all the possible information about the food on your plate and waiting to eat until it is all processed and discovered.  You would simply starve to death and die.  So you eat, based upon the experience that broccoli and prime rib will sustain you.  A nice glass of wine (which one day is, one day isn't, and a third day is supposed to be good for you) is a nice touch as well.  We just act because we must, based on common sense.  You work with what you have and what you know and make the best decisions possible.  It's how we must navigate the world.  So what happens when you dump something like "critical theory" into everything?  The whole point of critical theory is to take simple and understood concepts and turn them into a jumble of gobbledygook in which your normal understanding of what things are and how things work into a total mess.  That mess is created, actually, with a purpose.  That purpose is that we are subjected to a tyranny of those who claim to be in the know about the real state of the world, and the means is destroying your heuristic.  Your understanding of how the world works becomes destroyed.  It is paralyzing.

Murders jumped 10% since 2021 in major Democrat-led US cities thanks to soft-on-crime policies: study.  The murder rates in major US Cities have soared more than 10% in the past two years — with most homicides occurring in Democratic areas with soft-on-crime policies.  In a study released by WalletHub Wednesday, researchers found that Memphis, Tennesse; New Orleans, Louisana; Richmond, Virginia; Washington, DC; and Detroit, Michigan are suffering from the biggest homicide rate problems.  All five cities are led by left-wing mayors.  After comparing the rise in murder rates in 45 of the country's most populated cities between 2021 and 2023, scholars noticed that killings were rising faster in Democrat-led cities than in their Republican counterparts.  Though the Covid-19 pandemic can be blamed for the initial jump in homicides, scholars theorized that soft-on-crime policing has exacerbated the issue in progressive cities.

Adolescent Menopause In Autistic Girls: Is This What We Really Want?  When an adolescent girl claims she is really a boy in the wrong body, these are safe assumptions:
  •   She is likely to be on the autism spectrum and experiencing difficulties associated with that condition.
  •   She is likely to have engaged in suicidal or self-harm ideation.
  •   She is likely suffering from other issues like sexual trauma, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
  •   She is likely already in the throes of puberty — physiologically, mentally, socially, and spiritually — and absolutely miserable.
Puberty blockers will stop bone and breast development, may leave a girl short and stunted for life, and will put a girl into menopause, adding tortuous suffering on top of everything she's already experiencing with puberty and her teen years.

Biden's theme is "finish the job."  Have you seen the job thus far?  What's happened to the economy under Biden's policies?  Despite the glowing reviews from the White House press briefing lectern, real wages have gone down, not up.  Income levels are down and people have drained their savings trying to keep up with rising prices.  All of that was directly driven by inflation which has remained at or above 5% for almost all of the Biden presidency.  And that inflation was a direct result of the trillions of dollars in imaginary money that was pumped into the system in the name of "stimulus."  None of this is any sort of partisan politicking or hyperbole.  The figures are all out there for everyone to see.  And then there's the situation that started on the southern border almost immediately after Joe Biden issued his first executive orders.  They don't call it the Biden Border Crisis for nothing.  We are now up to more than 6.3 million illegal immigrants that have invaded the country since January 2021.

The great sorting that's taking place in America.  [Scroll down]  Lastly, of course, there was the leftists' highly political response to COVID, which divided liberty lovers from those with totalitarian instincts.  At this point, many conservatives want nothing to do with the GOP.  All these trends have accelerated under Biden and are exploding at a rate that is impossible for Americans to ignore, whether in terms of border security, economic policies, national security, military readiness or, most significantly, the transformation of America's very fabric (racial, sexual, the family unit, etc.).  No wonder, then, that we're experiencing a Great Sorting. [...] What's also a sea change is the way in which the COVID experience shook Americans' faith in science and medicine, in public schools, and in academia.  That support was normative in the 20th century.  These changes are accelerating.

My Monday rant on saving civilization.  Justice, to the Left, means people destroying things, stealing things, committing violence, and tossing people out of the public and economic square.  Creating inflation in order to eliminate the middle class.  [Tweet]  We live in a society now where killing babies and old people is considered a positive good, and paying people not to work in the midst of a huge labor shortage is considered just.  Where performing sterilization on children before they even reach puberty is to be celebrated.  In Minnesota, in just one day, the Minnesota Senate passed 3 bills that shock the conscience:  banning so-called conversion therapy for transgender people, which is just giving counseling to troubled youth and not a cult reprogramming as implied; making Minnesota an abortion sanctuary where non-custodial parents can take their children for "care;" and the same "sanctuary" law that allows such parents to get "gender-affirming" care for children despite not having custody rights and violating court orders.  The Democrats cheered and clapped after they passed all 3 bills.  This is their vision of a just society.  It is, literally, evil.  The intentional destruction of our society.

RFK Jr.  Says Middle Class Was 'Systematically' Wiped Out by COVID-19 Lockdowns.  Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said COVID-19 lockdowns across the United States decimated the middle class, suggesting that it has yet to recover.  "The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class," Kennedy told Fox News over the weekend, "and we have wiped out the middle class in the country systematically."  The 69-year-old, who is a prominent skeptic of vaccines, stated that COVID-19-related policies benefited the elite ruling class at the cost of the middle class.  Those lockdowns, he asserted, shifted $4 trillion in wealth from the middle class to a "new aristocracy of billionaires."  Those lockdowns "created 500 new billionaires," Kennedy stated.  "The Oxfam report, which came out this week, shows that the billionaires that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, the people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Bezos, Bloomberg, etc., increased their wealth by 30 percent during the pandemic.  From the lockdowns.  And [Bezos's] Amazon got to shut down all of its competitors."

Eric Adams: New York City Is Being 'Destroyed' by President Joe Biden's Migrant Crisis.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said New York City is being "destroyed" by President Joe Biden's migrant crisis during a panel discussion in Washington, DC, hosted by the African American Mayors Association.  "The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis," Adams bluntly stated. [...] Adams seemingly took a shot at other New York City officials, accusing them of not fighting hard enough to get federal resources to the city.

The Editor says...
Does the mayor think New York City is the only place that's being affected?  Has he changed his mind about the wide-open Mexican border?  Why is more federal spending the answer to every problem?

Marijuana: One Problem After Another.  Last month, Oklahoma voters rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana.  Hopefully, this means the word about all the problems associated with marijuana use is getting around.  In New York City, licenses for legal pot shops have been slow in coming so illegal shops have proliferated, leading to the sale of illegal drugs and attracting more than 500 violent robberies last year alone.  Mayor Eric Adams noted there are as many as 1,500 of these illegal shops in the City.  They open near schools and target kids. "We are losing our grip," he said.  Licensed shops also target kids with candy-flavored gummies and other cannabis products.  It's Joe Camel all over again.  Legalized marijuana is also a factor in Colorado's rising crime rates.  It attracted criminals to the state initially, and now the homeless and others are committing armed robbery and burglary to get the money to buy marijuana.  The same pattern is playing out in other states.  Legalizing marijuana was supposed to reduce crime but, instead, the illegal drug market has mushroomed and violence has increased.

Austin Has Turned Into Another Liberal Hellhole.  Massive spikes in crime, violence, and homelessness thanks to the city being run by liberals have put Austin on the fast track to becoming the next leftist statistic.  [Video clip]

A Lesson in Corporate Wokeness: The Disaster After Making Aunt Jemima a Pariah.  In 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter upheaval seen across the country, companies were bending the knee on a regular basis.  Many brands and corporations came out with statements and pledges about altering their practices and evolving their corporate structures, with "diversity" being thrown about in their mea culpa.  Of course, lost in these self-congratulatory announcements was the unspoken admission they did not realize they were making:  If you are promising to no longer be "racist," that means you are stating you had previously been a racist company.  In the flurry of these Wall Street struggle sessions was a number of brands eradicating their corporate mascots that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.  Uncle Ben has disappeared from boxes of rice.  Land O'Lakes removed the famed Native American woman from its boxes, leaving the land and lakes on its packaging.  Joining these dispatched designs was the classic breakfast staple brand Aunt Jemima.

New York City is Discovering that Legalizing Marijuana Wasn't Really a Great Idea.  Decriminalizing marijuana, we've been told to the point of stupor for years, would simply be a matter of recognizing the way society has changed and coming to a mature accommodation of a widespread current practice.  It would free up valuable police resources to deal with actual crimes and real criminals, and end a longstanding injustice in which — you guessed it! — people of color were, we were told, disproportionately targeted for arrest and prosecution.  So the state of New York has legalized marijuana, and how's it going?  Doritos and Patchouli oil sales through the roof?  Maybe.  But there have been a lot of unexpected downsides.

DIE Means the Death of Military Professionalism.  Since 2018, from record highs at the end of last century and into the post-9/11 era, positive civilian impressions of the military plummeted.  This decreased trust is, in no small measure, due to bipartisan public perceptions of a politicized military from both the left and right.  A 2022 Ronald Reagan Institute survey noted that half of respondents attributed military politicization to a "woke" agenda.  It is a sentiment certainly shared by some in civilian leadership and many current military members and veterans.  The Reagan Institute polling does not define "woke."  Ipsos polling, however, suggests that the meaning of "woke" can be fluid.  Although "woke" may have different definitions, for many, it is associated prominently with Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).

Your Doctor Asking For Your Pronouns Isn't Just Annoying, It's A Sign Of The Industry's Decline.  Last summer, I went to establish care at a new doctor's office.  My beloved pediatrician, one of the few true family doctors left in the industry, had once kindly offered to keep seeing me until I have my own children, but I was in the midst of a post-college move, and that was no longer feasible.  So I found myself in a waiting room wading through the moat of new-patient forms that stand between patients and doctors all across America.  As many of those forms now do, this one wanted to know not only my sexual orientation and sex, but also the so-called gender I was "assigned at birth," whether I identified as transgender, and my preferred pronouns.  As if that weren't enough, when the nurse walked me back into the doctor's office, she proceeded to ask me the same questions again.  I might have pointed out that I'd already had to endure this interrogation once — I know I made a face.  Looking back, I wish I'd thought fast enough to remind her that sex is an immutable characteristic that is neither "assigned" nor "reassigned," but I was just ready to get out of there.  Needless to say, I never went back.  A colleague of mine had a similar experience filling out an online form for his daughter's upcoming medical visit.  After spending 20 minutes trying unsuccessfully to click "submit," he realized that while he'd already selected "female" under the tab for "gender," there was a small, separate box he had overlooked labeled "sex" where he had to select "female" again.  Plenty of patients have been forced to jump through hoops like these.

The War on Pronouns is Really a War on Language.  One recent example I noticed was linked by msn.com and included the headline, "Non-Binary Ex-Biden Staffer Sam Brinton's Family Calls Them A Liar, Claims Their Abuse Story Never Happened."  The headline is incomprehensible by traditional rules of grammar.  The reader would not know who is meant by "Them" and "Their."  Even if we are familiar with Sam Brinton and his story, we would not know what people his family calls "a liar."  The plural words tell us that there are multiple third parties that Brinton's family accuses.  We are misled and distracted by those plural pronouns.  An innocent reader would not have concluded that Brinton, himself, is the real target unless the reader undertook the process of clicking on the link and reading the article.  The reader would then have to remember the new mandate that requires us to misread plural pronouns as applicable to single people — as the individual subject's whim dictates.  Singular is now plural.  Plural is now singular.  Words have no meaning.

Welcome to the cornfield.  [Scroll down]  To lift that fog it is crucial that the language that allows it to occur be fought at every opportunity — and we can start with refusing to allow a few undeniably false and manipulative terms that have entered the societal conversation to be used as cudgels for the progressive/woke/equitarian power and manipulation complex.  Misinformation, denialism, disinformation, malinformation, trigger, safe space, equity, systemic, existential, intersectionality, zero anything, toxic, cis, they, zir, anything-ist, anything-ism, and on and on and on — all these words and terms are used to distort meaning, undermine objective facts, and purposefully use a devious combination of familiarity and confusion to lead society down a path it would never even consider if it could truly and immediately decipher their impact.

When Did the U.S. Become East Germany?  How long will it be before dissent is criminalized in this country?  Mothers and fathers are being stripped of their parental rights, and children are being told to be the functionaries of government.  The Sanderses and AOCs would love nothing more than to elist them to spy on their families and report their involvement in disinformation, misinformation, and "anti-government" activities.  Wealth redistribution schemes are disguised as green policies.  Our retail shelves have in recent times looked like the bare counters of communist East Berlin.  We're told that we have to make do with less, and fewer choices are in our best interest.  Our economy would be full-on GDR-ed if the Sanderses and Ocasio-Cortezes had their way.  The left is unrelenting in its ambition to take more of the economy out of the private sector and place it in the hands of elected Democrats and administrative tyrants.

Can We Do Anything About America's Decline?  Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline — until it began to implode.  Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns?  Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence?  Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process?  Or all that and more?  Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country. [...] America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968 — only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

The Revenge of Moriarty.  [Scroll down]  Unfortunately, the dark spiderweb enveloping America is being woven not by one isolated fiend but by a multitude of them, disciples of a sick and toxic leftist ideology.  And for far too long, conservatives stood by and let the spiderweb spread, thread by thread, until we too became caught in it.  Now, infamies once thought unfathomable or unspeakable by a moral society are being more than embraced, in fact mandated.  The radical Democrats doing this have taken power from the docile normal people, aided by their education-brainwashed acolytes.  Hence, the foundations of the country have lost substance while a perverse fantasy carries governmental — if not yet constitutional — weight.

The shoplifting blues.  Once upon a time, we used to call shoplifting stealing.  But recently, shoplifting has been the latest episode of "No justice no peace."  In other words, there are many blue city district attorneys who don't think that shoplifting is worth arresting you.  Let them steal and let the corporate cats eat their losses.  Well, it turns out that the corporate cats have limits and can't just sit back and let their stores get sacked.

Let's be blunt — legal weed is turning New York workers into zombies.  Not just because decriminalized marijuana led to proliferating mayhem in the five boroughs.  Not just because stinky smoke hangs everywhere, seeping into subway cars and even Broadway theaters — the overture to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center was "accompanied by an acrid aroma that wasn't Liza's flowers," my friend Stephen M. Silverman recently remarked.  It's also because of a forbidden-to-utter truth, in an age where raising the minimum wage ever higher has become mantra — namely, a license to get high has turned service employees into zombies.

British Columbia breaks new overdose records one month after decriminalizing all drugs.  Seven years after the province of British Columbia declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency, and just one month after the decriminalization of all drugs, overdoses continue to skyrocket.  According to the Canadian Press, B.C. tragically set three new overdose records this March, just the second month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's federal government allowed the province to decriminalize all drugs starting February 1, 2023, in an effort to combat the crisis.

The West Declares War on Itself.  For Americans who cherish self-government, free speech, and personal liberty, the reality of today's America is jolting.  How can Hillary Clinton's campaign, Barack Obama's FBI, and an assortment of sordid Intelligence Community actors conspire to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy in a veritable coup d'état without suffering any legal consequences?  How can the IRS target Americans for their political viewpoints and be rewarded with bigger budgets and more armed agents?  How can the FBI illegally spy on a presidential campaign, target parents concerned over the content of their children's public education, and label half of America "extremists," and not be disbanded?  How can the Department of (in)Justice seek to punish Americans' speech and religious faith as impermissible expressions of "hate" and deprive Americans of their Second Amendment protections without being immediately defunded as a threat to the Bill of Rights?

The public sector unions can't print money.  Chicago, Portland, Milwaukee, etc. are all a big mess.  It goes like this:  the taxpayers move out and the public sector unions elect their man.  So what happens now?  We will see, but this may be a blessing in disguise because the finances of these cities are going nowhere. [...] At some point, many of these cities will run out of money because the check from the state legislature, or COVID, is not in the mail.  The businesses will move out and take their taxes with them.  And the schools will collapse because they can't cover costs.  You can strike all you want but the teachers of Chicago may have to make concessions or lose their jobs.  That's not what they voted for but that's what they will get.  So reality is around the corner and it's not pretty.

Oregon is dealt a blow [by its own socialist policies].  As much as Oregon has to offer, our housing unaffordability, homelessness, increasing taxation, drug addiction crisis, untreated mental illness, gun violence, traffic deaths and educational mediocrity are changing the calculus for many about where to live, raise a family or retire.  A year's decline in the state's population does not spell our doom — at least not yet.  But the census provides bracing data that shows too many people have decided Oregon is no longer where their future lies.  The state depends on population growth to fill jobs, provide tax dollars for public services and inject the energy and perspectives that build thriving neighborhoods and communities.  A stagnant or declining population instead dictates a future of cuts and diminished opportunities that can lead to even more people moving out.

Is It Time to Panic Yet Over the State of America?  The economy is a mess with daily news stories about another country abandoning the U.S. dollar for trade and commerce, favoring the Russian ruble, Chinese yuan, or gold, but no longer the U.S. dollar.  What happens as these countries, now making up most of the world population, start dumping dollars?  Today's current inflation will look the good old days.  As these dollars otherwise held and used by many countries flood back into the U.S., "too many dollars chasing too few goods" will go into overdrive, fueling hyperinflation, destroying the savings and pensions of most Americans, leading to economic misery as we see in Argentina or Venezuela.  Politicians are oblivious, those of both parties continuing to throw money into a losing proxy war in Ukraine, adding to a national debt that we soon will be unable to even pay the interest on.  Is that panic time?

The common denominator in the recent big problem banks: ESG.  Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both were multi-billion-dollar bank failures.  First Republic and Credit Suisse were multi-billion-dollar banks that's required large cash infusions to avoid failure.  Writing in the Washington Examiner, Paul Tice points out that all four institutions followed PC prescriptions for enlightened corporate leadership, basically the recipe for ESG (and DEI). [...] The line connecting ESG policies to the bank failures is indirect, or, if you will, a dotted line.  The proximate cause of the SVB failure was not loans to politically correct environmental startups, but rather too many long term Treasury securities in its portfolio of assets.  But the fact is clear, at least in the case of SVB with which I am most familiar, that management took their eyes off the ball of risk management.  Risk management roles remained unfilled for a time, and some risk managers clearly prioritized ESG over actually, you know, managing risk.

The Trump Trials: Changing the Subject.  Going into a presidential election year, the incumbent president looks to be facing a difficult reelection campaign.  Persistently high inflation numbers remain a problem.  Energy prices are still up.  America's southern border is being overrun with illegal border-crossers and fentanyl.  Major bank failures have raised the specter of a banking crisis.  There are multiple House of Representatives investigations covering Biden family finances, the weaponization of government agencies, China, and the origins of COVID.  For the current administration and its supporters, the answer is as easy as it is familiar:  change the subject to Donald Trump.

The end of cities.  I recently reviewed the results of the mayoral election in Chicago, which appear to have sounded the death knell for America's third-largest city.  The buildings will remain and the people without the means to escape will still huddle in their homes (at least those who have homes), hoping to avoid being the next statistic in a crime wave that shows no signs of abating.  Commerce has slowed to a crawl and its once-famous entertainment district is now too dangerous for most to risk an evening out on the town.  At the Washington Examiner, Stephen Moore takes a similarly dim view of Chicago's prospects, but he notes that the Windy City is not alone in its downward slide.  Many cities across the United States are simply becoming unlivable.  And the real tragedy in all of this is that the decline was completely avoidable.  But an epidemic of suicidally dangerous liberal policies has opened the gates for the barbarians that were always waiting outside.

Donald Trump, Tiberius Gracchus, And America's Imminent End.  [Scroll down]  It has taken less than 20 years since Barack Obama promised to "fundamentally transform" America for the country to change from a functioning but imperfect republic into a farce of a country characterized by a banana-republic-level tyranny.  With a complicit bureaucracy, Obama used the IRS to target political opponents, the Justice Department to coerce banks into blacklisting businesses he didn't like, and Obamacare to give government unprecedented control over Americans' health decisions while doubling the cost.  He unconstitutionally opened the immigration spigot that has now become a torrent.  Within six months of taking office, Obama would set the tone for an administration that would set race relations back 50 years.  His "evolution" on gay marriage would give cover to the spineless Supreme Court to impose that travesty on the country and lay the ground for the fascist LBTQ hellscape America endures today.  And finally, he weakened two of the most foundational elements of American society:  The military and residential communities.

What Would a Real Manchurian Candidate Do Differently than Joe Biden?  The Biden regime has taken a wrecking ball to the economy.  In one of his first acts, Biden shut down domestic oil and gas production, which spiked gasoline prices to stratospheric heights.  The Democrats' Infrastructure Bill, the Orwellian "Inflation Reduction Act", and the bloated Omnibus spending bill added trillions to the national debt and brought US inflation to 40-year highs.  Other symptoms of the horrible Biden economy include (1) the personal savings rate is near seventeen-year lows, according to the St.  Louis Fed, (2) credit card debt is at record levels, according to the St. Louis Fed, and (3) real wages in the United States fell, year-over-year from April 2021 to November 2022, according to the Mises Institute.  Then there is the relentless push to transition the US economy to green technology through the implementation of environmental, societal, and governance standards that led to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the continuing US banking crisis.

Is America lost?  I have been struggling with a near depression this past week regarding the current state of the country.  Objectively speaking, the State of the Union is not strong.  Inflation is out of control, our banking system is teetering on the brink, our legal system is being turned into a political weapon, our cities are becoming crime-ridden war zones, our education system is collapsing, and our moral boundaries have eroded.  There's more, but that is enough to make one cry.  Everyday Americans are at least peripherally aware that things are amiss.  They tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track.  But when given the opportunity to actually do something about the rot, enough Americans go to the polls and choose to continue the policies that have brought us to this point.

Downtown S.F. on the brink: It's worse than it looks.  The downtown area, the city's primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows.  The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.  "A general economic decline is what we're trying to avoid," said Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, a business group that advocates on behalf of several major employers in San Francisco.  The group is working with the city on short-term ideas to bring more people back downtown, but Rose agrees that the problem needs a rethink in the long run.

San Francisco, RIP?  [S]omething like three-quarters of San Franciscans who deserted the city during covid have not returned.  The same phenomenon has been observed in cities like Portland and Minneapolis, while other cities, like Salt Lake City, have rapidly bounced back.  But Salt Lake City is not run by liberal goofballs. [...] When you go downtown and you don't feel safe and you see people "using the street as a toilet," you stop going downtown.  There is nothing mysterious about this.

America's Broken Windows.  The U.S. government actively engages in viewpoint discrimination and political censorship.  J6 political prisoners rot in jail.  Churches are firebombed for refusing to redefine the institution of marriage or insisting on protecting the sanctity of every unborn life.  Children are sexually groomed in the classroom for the pleasure of perverted adults.  Medical doctors castrate and mutilate confused minors before they have had a chance to truly live.  News media spread endless waves of State-controlled propaganda while accusing political dissenters of being propagandists.  Intellectuals publish a bloated collection of narrow groupthink while accusing free thinkers of being too dumb to understand the issues.  Patriotic Americans who love their country are branded "domestic terrorists" while anti-American zealots who insist America is irredeemably racist are rewarded with prizes.  A presidential candidate who destroyed subpoenaed evidence and fabricated an international Russian conspiracy that divided the nation suffers no legal consequences, yet an elected president who took no salary while surviving one Deep State attack after the next is persecuted still today.  These are the rotten fruits of Marxist seeds.

Will you like what's coming?  At the rate things are going, we'd better start preparing for life under perpetual Democrat or Uniparty governance.  Here are just a few points to ponder about what that life might be like.  Feel free to share with Woke family and friends.  Do you like the dark, i.e. living in the dark and carrying flashlights and candles after the sun goes down?  You'd better because there will be lots of opportunity once Uniparty-induced brownouts and blackouts take hold because of our power grid's inability to supply dependable power as the war on fossil fuels takes hold.  Exaggerated?  Read about California in the last 20 years.  Do you like extreme heat in your house in the summer?  See above. [...] Do you like extreme cold in your house in the winter?  See above.  By the way, don't depend on firewood.  They'll ban it.  CO2, you know.

Could It Happen Here?  It Is Happening Here.  My field of study in graduate school was communism.  As a fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia's School of International Affairs, I was, if I remember correctly, one of seven students in the entire university to major in what was known at the time as "Communist Affairs."  I cite this in order to make this point:  In my wildest dreams, I never imagined what I was studying would ever apply to the United States of America, the freest country in world history.  I assumed that communism was, for various reasons, something that happened elsewhere — most obviously, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia and North Korea.  What were those various reasons?  One was the absence of freedom in the history of those countries.  Another was that all those countries were, with the exception of Cuba, outside of Western civilization.

Top 11 Priorities for America in order to save the Republic.  Now that the USA is experiencing a second communist POTUS (Obama then Beijing Biden), all morals are being flipped upside down, rights to free speech and press are being flushed down the toilet, and the infrastructure of functionality is being crippled, on purpose, by the powers that be in Washington D.C.  Somehow Beijing Biden got 80,000,000 votes, even though every campaign event he threw had fewer people attend than a bad middle school basketball game on a rainy day.  Somehow, peaceful US citizens are in jail (without a trial) for over two years for protesting a crooked election, while violent criminals from Antifa and Black Lives Matter walk the streets after destroying property, businesses, and lives protesting staged events.  Somehow, US citizens are supposed to support Ukraine, where the leaders are corrupt Nazi sympathizers, and send them all of our money and weapons, while the USA crumbles from inflation, supply chain issues, lack of proper military defense, and a demented leader who molests children at his speaking events.

When Will This Climate Madness End?  What do gas ranges, Dutch farmers, and moose have in common?  In a normal everyday context, very little.  But in the world of apocalyptic climate change, everything. [...] The enlightened climate cult solution is to ban everything that adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and embrace everything that lowers the concentration of greenhouse gases.  For example, gas ranges and ovens are bad because they use fossil fuels like natural gas and propane to cook food.  If gas stoves are banned, electric ranges and ovens can fill the gap.  No worries, right?  The same argument can be made for fossil-fueled vehicles.  Ban them, and switch over to electric vehicles.  Ditto for fossil-fueled power generating stations.  Ban them, switch to renewable sources, and have a happy day.  This sort of logic extends to another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.  In the Netherlands, the Dutch Government is trying to force up to 3,000 farms to close to meet European Union pollution limits on nitrogen oxides and ammonia.  This means that almost no form of agriculture is safe from climate change diktats.

Why a desperate America may soon annex its 51st state.  US government finances are appallingly bad.  The national debt exceeds 100% of GDP, annual deficits run into the trillions of dollars with no end in sight, and major trust funds for Social Security and Medicare will soon run out of money.  Political incompetence is mind-blowing; politicians fail to be able to even identify problems, let alone understand them, let alone reach compromises to solve them.  Ditto for central bank incompetence.  These people simply cannot understand how, by keeping interest rates at zero for nearly a decade and conjuring trillions of dollars out of thin air, they engineered record high inflation.  And they also fail to understand how their actions to 'fix' inflation are causing widespread havoc in the economy and financial system.  Social divisions across the country are extreme.  Censorship and cancel culture prevail, and corporations now wag their fingers at their own customers to "be better".  The education system is in pitiful shape, with many politicians and school board officials turning classrooms into activist training camps.  The population is terribly unhealthy.  Obesity and drug addiction are epidemics.  Plus there's an obvious mental health crisis that drives far too many people to commit horrific acts of violence on innocent people, including children.  National security is in decline.  Military readiness is down, yet top officials seem more concerned about diversity and inclusion rather than the ability to prevail in war.  The rule of law has been perverted, including for political purposes and self-aggrandizement.

Austin Seems to Be Circling the Liberal Drain as a Massive Brawl Engulfs the Street Saturday Night.  [Video clip only.]

Crisis breeds fascism.  Democrats and RINOs never let a crisis go to waste because a crisis allows them to expand their powers.  9/11 is just one example.  Bush and company used it to add a Cabinet-level department, make the unpatriotic PATRIOT Act law, and start two wars they later would abandon.  Washington does not wait for a crisis to come along.  The deep state turned President Trump's actually peaceful protest on the National Mall on January 6 into what they called an insurrection.  DC now has the power to jail dissidents.  They also beta-tested their facial recognition apparatus.  The border crisis allows Democrats to flood Republican states with illegal aliens by sending them to Wyoming and other states instead of sending them home.  I don't know where to begin in enumerating the extensions of power under covid.  It was overplayed by DC which jacked up the numbers by giving hospitals cash incentives to label deaths as being with (not necessarily from) covid.

It All Began With the Pill.  If the Nobel Prize Committee had the category of Most Influential Invention of the Last Century, one candidate might be the Pill, the contraceptive that came into widespread use in the 1960s and triggered a chain reaction of one tectonic, societal earthquake after another.  I was a college student at the time and watched it happen. [...] The Pill's advent ignited a tsunami of fornication, a.k.a. premarital sex and adultery, that led to a further tsunami of millions of couples divorcing, the invention of no-fault divorce, millions of tears, and millions of broken families.  The Pill produced "Women's Lib" and women like Hillary "Lady Macbeth" Clinton, who sneered at motherhood and wanted a "career" just like a man.

The green foods time bomb.  Green propagandists continue to inflict lethal damage to our electricity industry here in Australia — and it has become unreliable and expensive.  City food supplies cannot survive without reliable refrigeration at every level, from farms to retail stores.  Thus, unreliable green power supplies will produce unreliable food supplies.  Their intrusive green energy infrastructure is also nibbling away at our grasslands and farms, thus reducing their capacity to produce food.  Less recognized is the damage green propagandists are doing to our health and our food supply by attacking animal foods, and promoting grains, vegetables, seeds, and fake foods for humans.

How Much Longer Can Western Governments Spit on Their People?  Ordinary citizens did not empower central banks to print money and manipulate markets, so as to create a ticking financial time bomb that will almost certainly unleash the world's worst economic depression — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not spend taxpayer funds on biological weapons programs that may or may not have led to the release of COVID from a Chinese lab — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to throw out common sense, the Scientific Method, and an elementary school-level understanding of medical ethics to impose draconian lockdowns, mass surveillance, and coerced experimental injections on a global scale before either the pathogenic disease or its reputed "vaccine" could be properly studied — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to have their businesses shut down and livelihoods destroyed — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose to eviscerate Western economies in the name of "science" — governments did.  Ordinary citizens did not choose the largest welfare and stimulus programs in world history, nor the unprecedented levels of inflation that were the obvious consequence — governments did.  And ordinary citizens have certainly not chosen to have the World Economic Forum's Western acolytes scoop up farmland, ban hydrocarbon mining, and impose strict carbon limits that have logically unleashed runaway food and fuel prices, economic insecurity, and depleted savings — that self-defeating strategy was the brainchild of Klaus Schwab and his merry band of WEF arsonists.  Yet from COVID to currency collapse, Western powers insist on escaping blame.

The Federal Reserve shot itself in the foot.  By now, most understand that SVB failed due to an extreme mismatch in maturities between its deposits and its assets.  Can you believe that the Federal Reserve has fallen prey to the same mistake?  Further, the Feds' own actions caused its problems.  Ever since the Federal Reserve started printing U.S. dollars in 2008, called Quantitative Easing (Q.E.), we have expressed grave concern that the Treasury bonds the Fed was buying were short-term and therefore subject to a rising interest rate environment.  Further, those Treasuries decline in face value as rates rise.  That has all come to pass.  The Federal Reserve shot itself in the foot: since the same entity that printed dollars (Q.E.) invested those dollars (Treasuries), and then raised interest rates (FOMC), which impacted its income and its balance sheet (the value of the Treasuries also declined when the Fed raised rates), the Federal Reserve is the instrument of its own demise.

Why patriotism and hope in America are collapsing.  Americans are losing faith and interest in their country and its future.  There is no other way to read the devastating results of an opinion poll published on Monday [3/27/2023] by the Wall Street Journal. It finds that only 38% of respondents think patriotism is very important, not much more than half the number who thought so as recently as 1998, when the poll was first conducted.  Likewise, there has been a massive decline of interest in religion:  Thirty-nine percent now say it is very important compared to 62% 25 years ago.  America was founded in large part by people who wanted the freedom to practice their different faiths unmolested.  Thus, a founding purpose of America is being rapidly discarded by the inhabitants of the current culture.  Having children was regarded as very important by 59% of respondents a generation ago, but by only 30% now, effectively a halving of concern to perpetuate the nation with succeeding generations.

Overcoming America's Political Paralysis.  Why are some Americans having such a hard time figuring out what is happening to our country?  And for those who do see, why are so few taking action?  One in four Americans say they know someone who died from the COVID vaccine, and 50% now have less trust in government health experts.  Sixty-seven percent say they "weren't surprised" hearing that COVID came from a Chinese lab.  Most voters agree that the FBI has been weaponized by the current administration, and 61% believe that government agents helped provoke the J6 riot.  Ninety-one percent think bail should be set for criminals who may be a danger to the community.  Fifty-four percent think Biden is lying about his family connections to China.  Fifty-five percent of Arizona voters say issues in Maricopa County likely affected the 2022 results.  Sixty percent think climate change is a false religion, not scientific fact.  Most Americans now have zero trust in their government — the way it responds to health crises, the fairness of our law enforcement agencies, or its ability to conduct free and fair elections.  We think our president is a puppet of China.  So why does life seem to continue as normal?  In other countries, when elections are stolen or Social Security benefits are taken, it means rioting in the streets.  Why do we put up with policies pushing climate change and wokeism that make zero sense?  Who could entertain the idea that children can be given sex change treatments when just a few years ago, they were expelled from school for taking an aspirin without permission?

Holding the right people responsible for the global energy crisis.  America's grid is in decline and about to get far worse due to policies that 1) reward unreliable electricity, 2) prematurely shut down coal plants, 3) criminalize nuclear, and 4) force electric vehicle use.  The root cause of our grid's reliability problems is simple:  America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed.  And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind.  Nationally, as demand has increased over the last 10 years we have seen a decline in reliable capacity (gas, coal, oil, nuclear, hydro, battery storage) by 5%.  Will batteries make unreliable solar/wind reliable?  No.  Battery storage is expensive and can only provide a given "capacity" (e.g., 1 GW) for a few hours, and only then if fully charged.  Planned batteries are nowhere near enough to compensate for solar and wind's unreliability.

Warriors Don't Want to Fight for a Woke, Anti-American Military.  The House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel held a hearing last week to discuss the growing national security crisis arising from the military's cratering recruitment numbers.  A potpourri of Pentagon nincompoops all universally lauded the Defense Department's ideological obsession with "lived experiences" and "diversity for diversity's sake."  While championing the Marxist military's decision to waste over six million man-hours of training on the dangers of "extremism" and "white privilege" and the seminal importance of "diversity, equity, and inclusion," not one Pentagon official could muster a real answer as to why recruiting numbers are so disastrous.  The touchy-feely, group hug-loving mandarins proved experts in Critical Race Theory but poor problem-solvers when tasked with the actual duties of their jobs — building and maintaining lethal military forces filled with top-notch warriors who will fight to win.  Intentionally dividing Americans against each other and pouring salt in old wounds obliterate personnel cohesiveness.

There is a Simple Fix to Economic Chaos.  Some of us have been saying this for a very long time:  green will bring down the world.  Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101.  It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results.  That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy.  It has skewed every single market.  No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within.  This.  This is what threatens to bring down the world.  Green is built on subsidies.  And not just government subsidy.  Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth.

The problem with trying to understand Democrats.  As a former member of the Democrat party, I still stay in touch with many of its members who are my close friends.  However, one thing that strikes me is that my friends are almost universally in denial of what the current administration has brought upon this once great nation in just two years of being in office.  The reality of a soaring crime rate in our nation's cities, runaway inflation that was once termed "transitory," our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan — which served as the catalyst for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, all seem to elude them, as if it never happened.  When presented with any hard evidence or facts, they are not only in denial, but typically push back with emotion minus facts as if they live in an alternate universe where they can pick and choose the "facts" that fit their own party's narrative.

Woke-Poisoned Hollywood Has Doomed the Once-Unbeatable Movie Industry.  Hollywood, specifically the film industry, is going through a legitimate, serious, and potentially fatal phase.  No one likes the movies anymore.  The key to a healthy industry — audience goodwill — is evaporating quickly.

The ripple effect of Joe Biden's mismanagement.  The banking crisis is like a brick thrown into our economic pond.  Busted banks don't just sink silently to the bottom, never to be heard of again.  Their plunge sends ripples out across the entire surface that wash into every financial inlet of our lives.  If you think this has nothing to do with you because you didn't invest in Silicon Valley Bank or keep an account there, think again.  The spreading circles of its demise will splash you if you merely feel the pinch of high interest rates or buy groceries. [...] Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ignored the $250,000 upper limit on secured deposits and, to "stop the contagion," implicitly guaranteed all $17.6 trillion deposited at U.S. banks.  This put Washington on the hook for twice as much as the Federal Reserve actually has.  It means, as has been noted, that depositors are freed from market discipline — they can't lose their stash — so they needn't be careful where they put their money.  They'll go to banks that offer big rewards by taking big risks.  This is a short-term rescue at the cost of long-term instability.

Banks Might Have Stabilized, But The Biden Contagion Is Still Spreading.  'The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient," Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday in an effort to calm depositors worried about more bank failures.  That was the same day the Fed raised interest rates another quarter point to deal with inflation that has been running at four-decade highs for nearly two years.  The two problems, along with so many others that families are confronting right now, have a common cause:  President Joe Biden's disastrous economic policies.  While another banking crisis might have been contained — a reassurance we take with a grain of salt — the Biden crisis will continue to metastasize as long as he and his administration are calling the shots.

Government Isn't the Victim; It's the Perpetrator.  Around the country, almost every problem Americans endure is a result of Big Government action or inaction.  Government overspending and central bank money-printing have crushed the value of ordinary Americans' income and savings.  The Intelligence Community's use of the PATRIOT Act and other unconstitutional tools to violate Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches has not only eliminated privacy, but also made every citizen a suspect.  The Biden administration's choice to leave America's borders wide open has exacerbated crime, drug addiction, and identity theft while breaking city budgets and local communities.  Washington, D.C.'s endless bureaucratic rule-making touches every part of every American's life.  What products can be bought and sold?  What can a citizen do on or with his private property?  What speech should be censored because the government judges its content "hateful" or unacceptably contrary to the bureaucracy's official point of view?  While Congress never stops passing laws, agencies never stop exponentially compounding those laws with new standards, rules, and regulations that micromanage everything Americans do.

San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen begs for more police in her district after voting to defund in 2020.  A San Francisco district supervisor is calling for more policing in the crime-ridden city — despite advocating to defund the police in 2020.  Hillary Ronen, Democrat, represents District 9 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  During a Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on Wednesday, she made an impassioned plea to add more officers to the Mission District, which she represents.  Ronen was attacking San Francisco's police chief for spending a large amount of overtime on an anti-retail theft program instead of prioritizing police presence in her district.

How to Prevent More Meltdowns like Silicon Valley Bank.  The Fed was more aggressive during the COVID pandemic.  When federal and state governments locked down the economy, the government determined that it should pay the people it put out of work.  The Fed became so aggressive with Q.E. that the presses that printed money had trouble keeping up.  Money was so easy to obtain from the government that billions were fraudulently delivered to criminals.  Some of this easy money found its way into bank deposits, which were used to purchase securities paying very low interest rates.  To the surprise of the Fed and Janet Yellen, inflation resulted from their policy of free money.  They couldn't believe it.  They said it was transitory and then blamed Putin, Trump, oil executives, greed, and a virus.  While there are many reasons for inflation, the primary reason is quantitative easing and the flood of cash the Fed poured into the economy for a decade.  After waffling for months, the Fed decided that inflation was real and started raising interest rates in an attempt to control the inflation it created.

Geopolitical Catastrophes Multiply as American Power and Influence Crash to New Postwar Lows.  In only two years, Joe Biden's presidency has produced multiple catastrophes from which recovery will be difficult, if it is even possible.  Domestically, we see the banking system teetering on insolvency, as the rapid escalation in interest rates has devalued long term Treasury notes that used to be considered a safe place for banks to park funds in excess of what could be safely lent.  The reason for these Federal Reserve interest rate hikes is the inflation that was immediately triggered by Biden's jihad against domestica oil, gas, and coal production, that triggered an inflationary spiral that continues today, devaluing the life savings of thrifty Americans, and pushing food and energy costs up so fast that many families have had to drastically reduce their standard of living.  Bad as these catastrophes are, the potential for serious damage to the welfare of the American people from the military and diplomatic policies of the Biden administration is much worse.  Losing a war — or even just fighting a nuclear war — makes a mere Depression look like a day at the beach.

Really?  There was high inflation under Jimmy Carter, and the banks didn't collapse.
The Banking Mess Is Another Consequence of Biden's High Inflation.  The complexities around, and solutions to, the current banking crisis lie well beyond my core competency, so I'll leave those matters to others.  What I will say is that it's indisputable that much of the upheaval can be traced back to the Biden administration's disastrous inflationary policies, which have forced the Fed to hike up interest rates as a form an anti-inflation 'chemotherapy' for the overheated US economy — actions that have, in turn, directly and heavily contributed to unpleasant externalities like the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature banks.  Biden and his team were directly warned about the highly risky spending they were jamming through in partisan, Democrat-passed behemoths, including by respected Democratic economists.  They didn't listen, then pretended the warnings never happened once the resulting "transitory" inflation was undeniably non-transitory after all.

SVB loaned millions to useless startups making greenie things no one wanted to buy — WSJ's Strassel.  Is there anything more ... Soviet ... than a bank that lends money to companies making things no one wants to buy?  That's the missing puzzle piece we needed on why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has found it, persuasively arguing that yes, the failure of the bank was indeed premised on ESG, which descended into wokester lending priorities, creating the abnormal conditions that left the bank ripe for a meltdown.

The Left's Criminal Abuse Of The Young.  Democrats have long portrayed themselves as the great guardians of the children.  In truth, they are destroying the young.  The harm they've done to children, teens and young adults has spiked in recent years, from scaremongering about global warming to pandemic lockdowns that have unnerved a generation to teaching them a divisive, politically charged curriculum.  According to an online medical journal, the University of Calgary has determined there was a spike "in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents" during the period of "social isolation" that coincides with the pandemic lockdowns.  The university conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing more than 11 million pediatric emergency department visits in 18 countries, and compared "the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021."

Putting 'diversity' and 'equity' first nearly crashed the economy.  Several years back I asked what it would take to halt the diversity, inclusion, equity obsession in America.  What would it take to get back to excellence and competence as the only criteria for employment?  Perhaps it would require the bridges to start falling down.  Though I suspect that if they did then certain people would claim they'd only fallen because of "structural racism."  Still, this week we had a good reminder of just how over-tolerant we have been of this insane, anti-excellence agenda.  Because although the bridges haven't yet started to collapse, the banks have.  And one reason is that the banks in question prioritized equity over excellence.

Elections Have Consequences; Stolen Elections Have Catastrophes.  "Put the adults back in charge," they whined.  "Donald Trump will break the world," they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty's underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup's celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty's installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.

Failing Accountability Leads to Chaos.  Trust in our institutions is collapsing, according to a recent Gallup survey.  Less than a quarter of the public is confident in:
  •   The Supreme Court — 25 percent confidence
  •   The Presidency — 23 percent confidence
  •   Newspapers — 16 percent confidence
  •   The criminal justice system — 14 percent confidence
  •   Big business — 14 percent confidence
  •   Television news — 11 percent confidence
  •   Congress — a whopping 7 percent confidence
The only institutions that exceed 50 percent public confidence are the military and small businesses. [...] [T]hose institutions remain necessary for a civilized society to function.  They provide order.  But when they fail:
  •   Media doesn't inform
  •   Bureaucrats don't serve
  •   Commerce doesn't provide prosperity
  •   Schools don't prepare future citizens
  •   Law enforcement doesn't protect
  •   Judges don't ensure fairness
  •   Politicians don't lead

The Biden Economy Is Falling Apart.  The Biden Economy — hailed Monday morning by Presidentish Joe Biden as "strong" — seems like it's falling apart, everything, everywhere all at once.  NYSE halted trading of Charles Schwab, whose shares fell by more than 20%, and even a few Etsy sellers have been impacted by the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) collapse. [...] What went wrong?  In a word: Inflation.  In a few more words:  The higher interest rates needed to combat inflation smashed the cheap-money expectations that SVB's bond portfolios required.  Other sectors of the economy that have become addicted to historically low interest rates include high-tech, particularly startup firms, and the housing market.

Biden blames Trump deregulation for Silicon Valley Bank failure.  President Biden said Monday that the U.S. banking system is "safe and secure" following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and closure of Signature Bank last week.  "Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.  Your deposits will be there when you need them," Biden said in remarks at the White House before leaving for a three-day visit to California and Nevada.  Biden blamed the bank collapses on former President Trump's 2018 decision to scrap some Obama-era banking rules.

Inflation was only 'transitory' they said.  First off: These collapses did not occur in two days.  The problems have compounded over time and should have been very easy to spot by regulators and "experts" on Wall Street.  The collapses were not caused by too few regulations.  For years, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low.  Those low rates caused investors to chase up the value of stocks, houses, commercial real estate, crypto currencies, and other things.  But those low rates did not punish the poor and middle class with rapidly rising prices on food, energy and other necessities.  Trump kept inflation low with energy independence, fewer regulations, and lower taxes.  Energy prices affect almost everything we use and do.  In 2020 when we were hit with COVID, we flooded the economy with money to help businesses the government forcibly closed and individuals who had lost their jobs.  We had supply chain problems.  But we still didn't have high inflation because we still had low energy prices thanks to Trump's policies of domestic energy production.  From April 2020 to the end of 2020, jobs grew 16 million (much faster than under Biden); still, no high inflation.

Putting God's Wisdom Back In The Classroom.  Perhaps the single biggest factor contributing to America's rising crime rate can be traced back to 1962.  That was when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a voluntary, non-denominational prayer recited by school kids in New York State classrooms violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  For the record, the prayer that ignited that controversy reads as follows:  "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."  These 22 words were so repellant to Steven Engel, a founding member of the New York Civil Liberties Union, that he became the lead plaintiff in the effort to prohibit the recitation of them.  After years of dogged effort, Engel succeeded in preventing children from acknowledging God in school.  What has replaced prayer in schools during the 61 years since the Engel v. Vitale decision?  New York City Mayor Eric Adams knows.  Adams, a retired NYPD captain, told the city's religious leaders during an Interfaith Breakfast in Manhattan earlier this month, "When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools."

Chilling Contrast in Army Recruitment Ads From Russia, the U.S., China, and Britain Point to Ominous Future.  While "woke" has insidiously metastasized throughout American society, the rapidly spreading cancer perhaps portends most ominously for its continuing effect on America's Armed Forces.  The Twins of Woke, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley have worked tirelessly to transform the greatest fighting force on the planet from "a few good men" to even fewer self-identified genders with self-assigned pronouns.  If it wasn't the U.S. military we were talking about, the failed social experiment would be somewhat humorous — instead of a potentially clear and present danger to the security of the United States.  As it stands, I'd have a hard time suggesting enlistment to a loved one or friend.  [Video clip]

You think crime is out of control in New York City now?  Just wait.  New York City cops are resigning at a "record-breaking pace in 2023, and there is no sign that the bleeding will slow.  [Tweet]  Bad crime policy leads to more crime.  Fewer police to keep the city safe leads to more crime on top of that.  It's not hard to see how this ends.

Ranchers say their jobs have become "1,000 times harder" in the 2 years Biden has been in office.  The economy is a disaster, as anyone could see.  But for ranchers who have to operate on razor-thin margins, it's unlike anything they've seen in decades.  It's harder than ever to be a man working the land.  And besides that, the undue burden of the Biden administration's draconian rules and regulations is making it impossible.

Oh, nothing - just the second largest bank failure in U.S. history today.  Part of what happened is explained in [a] series of tweets.  SVB, thanks to the COVID emergency rules adopted by Jerome Powell — who is still in charge of the Federal Reserve — was no longer required to hold any cash on hand to meet its "reserve requirement." [...] Why that detail matters is because this bank's problems started with an announcement Wednesday that it was in the middle of a cash crunch and looking at a possible sale as a way of raising funds.

Conservatives Point to 'Bidenflation' as Cause of Silicon Valley Bank Closure.  Prominent conservatives throughout politics and media reacted to the sudden closure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday.  Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is already standing firm against bailouts for the bank, and many are pointing to "Bidenflation" as a driver of the implosion.  Gaetz appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room where Bannon asserted that the closure was "100 percent because of Biden's policies."

It's Not Hard to See the Future of America Under this Manchurian President.  President Biden is not only compromised but exemplifies the ultimate Manchurian President.  I also see him as a traitor to our nation — plain and simple.  His actions and deeds, controlled by those we do not yet see, are purposefully destroying our democracy, legal system, freedoms, independence, and republic. [...][ It's evident that Biden is but a simple puppet, a marionette.  The question is, who exactly are the puppeteer(s) pulling his strings?  I also believe Biden, like his son, is compromised by the Chinese and the Russians.  Just look at the actions he's taken since January 2021. [...] Whomever his puppeteers are, they are undoubtedly far left, not favorable towards America, view our Constitution with disdain, and look to change America forever.  They pull the strings of their marionette named Biden, the Manchurian President, from behind the red Marxist and fascist curtains.  The strings are pulled to purposefully change America from a champion of liberty, opportunity, freedom, and democracy to an autocracy, dictatorship, and tyrannical system.

Cruz: Biden Enriched Cartels Whose Revenue Increased 26x Since 2018, We Need to Pressure Mexico, Not Invade It.  On Tuesday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Jesse Watters Primetime," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated that President Joe Biden "is the best thing that ever happened to the Mexican drug cartels" and cited the massive surge in cartel revenue since 2018 and argued that the solution to cartel violence isn't to invade Mexico or go to war with it, but rather, to pressure the country to act against cartel violence.  Cruz said, "Well, listen, those who kill American citizens must be held accountable.  And, at the first instance, this wouldn't happen if we had responsible presidential leadership.  Joe Biden created the chaos at the border.  Joe Biden stopped building the wall.  He reinstated catch and release.  He pulled out of Remain in Mexico.  And what Joe Biden has done is he's turned these vicious narcoterrorists into multibillionaires. [...]"

Life Among the Ruins.  We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism.  The signs unfortunately appear everywhere.  Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.  Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned.  Yet no one knows — or even seems to worry about — how to stop it.  So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated.  Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking.  The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers.  In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities — which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.  All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence.  The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault — with de facto immunity.  Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.

Walmart Closing its Last Two Stores in Portland, Oregon in March.  In late March, Walmart is closing the last two locations it has in Portland, Oregon.  The company's official line about the closings is that it has to do with store performances, customer needs, and other corporate speak.  Does anyone doubt that this probably has a lot to do with theft?  Portland is a hotbed of leftism, and for the last few years, shoplifting has become a norm for the left.

What's the Real Reason Political Anxiety Is So High?  [#1] Governmental power and control.  The only reason we have anxiety, stress, and worry about what happens in government is because the government is ridiculously, uncomfortably powerful.  If our political enemies (whoever they happen to be) take power, they could exert tremendous control over our lives.  So on some level, a bit of anxiety is reasonable.  [#2] It doesn't help that we're in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.  Media companies come in all shapes and sizes, from corporate juggernauts to independent journalists, and everyone is racing to publish news stories for the public to consume on a constant basis.  There is no more reading the morning paper; we are constantly bombarded with information.  Even if some of this information is positive, it's easy to become overwhelmed and feel anxious as a result.  [#3] Bad media incentives.  It's ironic that the very news organizations publishing stories about high rates of political anxiety are the same ones (perhaps) intentionally stoking those anxieties.  Media companies aren't necessarily incentivized to tell the truth or commit to quality journalism; instead, they're incentivized to get clicks and attention.

The Day Your Doctor Won't Treat You If You Aren't the Right Kind of Patient Is Closer Than You Might Think.  Could the day come when you are denied medical treatment because you're white, male, or a member of some other group of "oppressors"?  Of course it could, and it's coming sooner than you might think.  Even in solidly red Tennessee, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote in 2020, a new report has revealed what the Tennessee Star on Friday called "the pervasive infiltration of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies in Tennessee medical school curricula and programs."  Could this have an impact on the quality of your medical treatment?

Injustice of the Court.  I was encouraged to look at sacrifice for my nation as the highest honor.  I saluted the flag, got choked up at the sound of the national anthem.  Now, I have to ask what purpose would my sacrifice serve?  Would it be to keep Hunter's diary a secret?  Would it be to hide all the crimes of pedophilia among our representatives, senators, presidents and judges?  Would my sacrifice be to see drag queens in Kindergarten?  Would it be to keep political prisoners of the current regime?  Would it be to fund extortion and brutality of parents concerned about their children and the schools they go to?  The problem that has been created is that as a patriotic son of the founding ideals, I would have to fight against all of that, against the crooked institutions of today.  I could not, in good conscience fight to sustain this treason.  It's a paradox created by their lies and deceit that I could not fight for the government of my nation, but am forced to try and bring it to heel, to bring it back under control.

Beating the Balrog.  What we are seeing is evil so strong that it's almost bubbling up out of the ground.  The pivotal evidence is the way we are treating children.  The Left likes to talk about "systemic racism," but I argue that what we're truly seeing is systemic, Satanic, child abuse.  If we don't rip children limb-from-limb from the womb (and sell their body parts), we raise many of them in households where they are ill-fed, ignored by parents too busy to really pay attention, and too secular to take them to church.  We send them off to government schools that have failed horridly (A third of our children cannot read at grade level, then we lock them out of their schools, where they at least had friends.  Then we have stuck them with an overload of questionable vaccines, and now we have allowed sexualization at an alarming pace culminating in the schools getting involved in grooming young children for sex with adults and, even worse, sexual mutilation without parental consent.  This is not just human evil.  We've gone back to the time of Baal and Moloch, idols that demanded human — i.e.  child — sacrifice.

Joe Biden Puts Liberal Theories to the Test.  Theory 2 — Government spending is good for the economy:  Whenever the American economy suffers a downturn, the left defaults to one government solution.  The theory is that sufficient government spending will trigger economic growth.  Leftists tax the population, give a little bit back to the citizens, spend the rest on liberal causes, and call it stimulus.  Joe tested this theory by spending nearly $5 trillion on various COVID relief, infrastructure, and inflation reduction boondoggles.  Did it help the economy?  No.  Instead we've gotten:
  •   inflation at a 40-year high;
  •   families spending more to service the national debt than they do on their home mortgages;
  •   a $7-trillion loss in stock market value — much of which is our retirement savings; and
  •   a $9,000 drop in personal savings in one year.

Are You Tired of Having Your Intelligence Insulted Yet?  You, most likely being a mere normal, are probably looking around at the current state of things and wondering just how we managed to get to this point.  Food prices continue to skyrocket, energy prices remain stubbornly high, and if you were thinking about buying a house, you can forget about it with current interest rates.  Meanwhile, real wages are down, meaning your buying power is diminished coming and going.  That's just a small taste of what Americans are going through, and you'd expect the nation's leadership to provide some guidance among the malaise.  At the very least, you'd think they could admit there's a problem.  Instead, the Biden administration insults your intelligence.  [Tweet]

Crime and No Punishment in Massachusetts.  The Massachusetts state legislature must have failed to pass a 142-strikes-and-you're-out legislation just days earlier.  The liberal legislature deems such legislation too harsh on misunderstood criminals, who deserve just one more chance.  The criminal in question, Derek M.  Lindsay, was the berserker dad who made national news in May 2007 after he got into a fight with parents and police at a McDonald's playground after telling his kid to push the other kids out of the way to get to Ronald McDonald.  But that was among his least serious offenses.  More recently, he had been charged in March of this year with attempted murder for stabbing someone at a local tattoo parlor.  So naturally, the local judges let this model citizen go free back into society back in March.  Thus, his 143rd arraignment this week.  Throughout Massachusetts, but particularly in the City of Taunton, such events are commonplace.

The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex.  Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values.  The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren't yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative.  Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.  They are now.  Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution — including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands — has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation's proper functioning.  From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy.  So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy.  Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers.

Cloward & Piven Are Laughing All The Way To The Welfare Agency.  Food shortages are ubiquitous.  Baby formula to Brussels sprouts to ground meat to eggs continue to run in short supply as prices rise.  Suspicious fires, bombings, and "accidents" at food processing plants are blamed without explanation along with droughts, avian flu, and the dreaded (supposed) COVID-19 super-duper "sub-variants."  Government regulations reducing the application of certain fertilizers on farms in Holland, Spain, France are proliferating, forcing crop, flock, and herd reductions.  Results: farms closing, creating more food shortages, unemployment, and increasing welfare rolls.  Public outcry and political pressure have been suppressed through ignorance caused by the media.

Ultra-Wealthy Flee the Big Apple as High Crime and Excessive Taxation Chase Them Away.  I'm not a math whiz, but I'm not incapable either, so let's do some calculations... 1,452 residents worth over $25 million left in 2021, plus a whole bunch before that.  That's a lot of deserters.  I plug that into my Excel spreadsheet and it says, "a whole lot of tax revenue just fled for the hills."  You might think, well, New York has plenty of taxpayers, it's not that big a deal.  But consider this: the top one percent of earners in New York account for close to half of the state's income tax revenue.

Taking Back America.  As I travel, I constantly see tattered American flags blowing in the wind.  They are a metaphor for the state of the Union.  It is emblematic of how our country is being hollowed out.  We have a Manchurian leader who is gutting us of our rights.  The latest assault is Biden's determination to put us under the domination of the World Health Organization, who will determine our health care. [...] In fact, the goal of Marxists is the total annihilation of freedom.  No matter how many times the communist dream is proven to result in nothing but misery, it seems to get resurrected.  And historical ignorance is the means by which the next generation gets sucked in.  Consequently, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt that used to invite visitors into the Museum of Natural History is taken down.  On the other hand, a statue of career criminal George Floyd is erected despite the fact that Floyd committed three armed robberies, three violent home invasions, six burglaries, three car thefts, beat four victims senseless and held a gun to a very pregnant belly of his robbery victim.

The 'Great Awokening' Is Transforming Science and Medicine.  The "great awokening" touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education.  One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.  A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently.  As many have noted, this "student-led initiative" sounds cult-like.

Thanks to rampant leftism, Austin, Texas, heads for Mad Max territory.  I lived in Austin, Texas, in the mid-1980s and found it a lovable city.  It had a vibrant cultural community, beautiful neighborhoods, and a massive campus that felt surprisingly safe and normal for a girl who had graduated from the degrading madness of UC Berkeley.  Now, though, Austin is a city in thrall to hard leftism, and the only vibrant thing there is the out-of-control crime.  In 2020, Austin moved to the forefront of leftist-run cities that enthusiastically embraced the defund the police mantra. [...] Leftism promises heaven and invariably delivers hell.  Cities with leftist governance have more crime, more filth, more homelessness, more public urination and defecation, and more underperforming schools than conservatively run cities.  What works to maintain a city is what always works: Policies that encourage responsibility and discourage crime.  Abandon those principles and, suddenly, once-shiny American cities begin to look like Mad Max outtakes.

The collapse of civilization on the altar of equity and diversity.  The Biden administration has gone stark raving mad.  While they surely know better, they are moving ahead with the false notion that "diversity is our strength," that forced "equity" will make the country a better place.  It began under the Obama administration, the purposeful ginning up of the most vile racism since slavery; but this time Black against White.  Before Obama took office, there was actually near racial harmony in America.  The American left has become so radical now, "diversity hires" are now a thing.  We are following in the footsteps of South Africa and mandating racial quotas.  What has that meant for South Africa?  Their economy is in near collapse.  Their electric grid is failing because no one knows how to fix it.  The country is wracked by violence.  Mandated equity, the primacy of race over merit, means civilizational failure.  Why have there been so many near misses in air traffic?  Why so many railway derailments?  Why horrific events like the murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis?  Those cops were clearly not qualified to be Memphis police.  When standards are done away with, this is a predictable consequence.

5 'dirtiest' cities in America run by Democratic mayors, study says.  The top five dirtiest cities in the country are run by Democrat mayors, a new study has found.  Among 152 of the biggest cities across the United States, Houston won the No. 1 spot for dirtiest city, followed by Newark, New Jersey, San Bernardino, California, Detroit and Jersey City, New Jersey, according to a study released Thursday by LawnStarter.  LawnStarter measured each city across four categories: pollution, which measures things like air quality and greenhouse gas emissions; living conditions, like the percentage of homes containing mold or rats; infrastructure, which measures waste output and regulations; and consumer satisfaction, or the percentage of residents who find the city dirty.  Houston, which is run by Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner, ranked No. 1 in overall score for the dirtiest city.  It ranked third in the nation on pollution, fourth on poor living conditions, 12th on infrastructure and 34th on consumer satisfaction.

LA Times Asks: 'What's the Matter With Portland?' Answer: Leftist Ideology.  "What's the matter with Portland?"  That was the question asked in a lengthy and interesting report in The Los Angeles Times.  The piece was enlightening in the sense that it did capture the mentality that has led to the city's awesome dysfunction.  It highlights how despite that dysfunction — rising crime, rampant open-air drug use, and many other signs of urban decay — many of the city's residents are simply unwilling to acknowledge how ideology and bad policy have turned the Oregon city that should be quite pleasant to reside into a shell of its former self.  Some residents, such as Flora Gonzalez, who lives in a blue-collar neighborhood now beset by crime, can see clearly what the problem is.

What Kind of Military Does Our Country Need?  Much has been said and written about America's increasingly woke, politicized military and its negative impacts on recruiting and readiness.  Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attracted widespread criticism when he spoke of "white rage" and reportedly hid nuclear codes from President Trump while telling his Red Chinese counterpart he would provide advance warning of any planned U.S. attack on China.  Even cadets and midshipmen at the nation's military academies are undergoing woke indoctrination in Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, "toxic masculinity," and so-called Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, which many military experts fear will harm unit integrity, morale, and war-fighting capability.  And now there is a new wrinkle at our academies:  the Spectrum Club, which "actively bridges the relationship between Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Questioning (LGBTQ) cadets [and midshipmen] and their allies" and "serves as a safe haven for LGBTQ cadets [and midshipmen] when they need support[.]"  Since the introduction of women to our military academies in 1976, our armed services have struggled mightily with the issue of sexual fraternization among cadets and midshipmen.  Why, then, would these institutions not only permit, but celebrate clubs based solely on sexual orientation?  One doubts whether heterosexual clubs would be approved, nor should they be.  And do we really want future military leaders who are so fragile as to require "safe spaces"?

America Is Becoming a Corrupt Country.  James Q. Wilson and George Kelling introduced the concept of "Broken Windows" in an essay in 1982.  In essence, they said that allowing a neighborhood to decay physically will lead to a rise in crime.  The existence of disorder makes more disorder more acceptable.  In what may have been the most successful anti-crime experiment in history, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton applied this theory in a stunning reversal of crime in New York.  The Big Apple became one of the safest cities in the world.  In recent years, as liberals have rejected the enforcement of the law against small crimes, the rapid decay of communities has been tragic further proof that "Broken Windows" was right.  If you send a signal that crime is acceptable, you will get more criminals.  If you send a signal that corrupt government officials are acceptable, corruption will become a way of life.

Here's your proof of a rigged and stolen 2020 election.  It's clear the election of 2020 was rigged and fixed.  We all know it.  And Kari Lake's stolen election in 2022 was even worse.  The theft of Kari Lake's Arizona election makes Bernie Madoff look like a small-time shoplifter.  But I'm not talking about any of that.  To me the proof the 2020 election was stolen is the state of the nation.  Open your eyes.  The consequences of a stolen election are all around us.  The supply chain is crippled.  Highways, ports and infrastructure are crumbling.  Blue states are banning trucks from the roads.  Grocery prices are skyrocketing.  Egg farms are burning to the ground.  Eggs cost $10 per dozen — if you can find them.  Over 100 food plants have burned to the ground in the past year.  Trains are derailing.  The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment may be the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history.  Experts are calling it "our Chernobyl."  There is a mushroom cloud of deadly chemicals floating over the farm belt.  Animals are dying.  Fish are dead.  People are sick.  And it just happens to have poisoned hundreds of thousands of acres of prime Midwest farmland.  The same exact thing that's happening to food and farmland is happening to energy.  Under former President Donald Trump we had energy independence and cheap, plentiful energy.  Under President Joe Biden we have soaring gas and electricity prices, energy shortages and depletion of our national fuel reserve.  In the middle of this, our government is desperate to ban gas stoves.

Biden installed: What could possibly go wrong?  Whoever pulled the strings to install Biden should go to prison.  Whoever is really calling the shots and implementing such terrible policy — lockdowns, vax mandates, restricting the capture of domestic energy, mandating DIE, ESG, CRT, etc. throughout every institution and corporation in the US — should be sent to prison for treason.  Whomever they are, they are traitors to this nation; they're waging a war against the American citizenry.  The vaccines alone have killed thousands; their pro-criminal policies have killed countless innocents; the open border has caused the deaths of thousands of migrants, and of law-abiding Americans who fell victim to criminal aliens and/or the fentanyl crisis.  The economy is the worst it's been in four decades.  Our national debt is $31 trillion — the interest alone is $750 billion a year.  None of this is sustainable.  The "green agenda" is climate communism to control how we all live.  If their "15-minute cities" come to America, there will be a second Civil War.  They want to mandate EVs but there is not enough lithium on the planet to put everyone in an electric vehicle.  That is a fantasy that will never be realized.

Destroying Meritocracy Is Deadly.  After Christmas, Southwest Airlines simply canceled 71 percent of its flights.  It blamed staff shortages due to storms.  The airline seemed incapable of ensuring enough of their pilots, attendants, crews, and airport staff could get to work.  The Federal Aviation Administration in January canceled all flight departures from the United States for two hours due a computer safety system collapse.  Thousands of additional flights were canceled, many for over 24 hours.  Something has gone terribly wrong.  Either the Department of Transportation and its Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or the head of the FAA, or the quality of either ground crews, pilots, or air traffic controllers — or all combined — are putting American travelers at mortal risk.  If not corrected, these near-death airline experiences and the near collapse of the U.S. commercial aviation system presage catastrophes to come. [...] Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotes for government pilot training programs.  United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women.  Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

Real and Fake Worlds: Why the Trains are Failing.  In the olden days, you didn't need a college degree to get a real job.  You took an IQ test to get a job.  In Griggs v.  Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.  Employers thus started to required university degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and mentorship.  All the smart kids were forced to attend college.  Most of them realized, "If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation."  Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle.  Millions of smart kids got left behind.  We should care not for their sake, but our own.

The Libertarian-Socialist Axis.  Policies inspired by socialists make it easier for private corporate and financial interests to form monopolies, since the regulatory excess inspired by socialist ideals drives smaller potential competitors out of business.  Examples are plentiful.  Complying with environmental regulations requires an overhead burden that will overwhelm the financial capacity of a small company, but can be absorbed easily by large companies.  Complying with union work rules and wage demands is easy for monopolistic companies because they pass the higher labor costs on to consumers.  But similar compliance kills companies too small to have a captive market.  Enforced scarcity caused by mandates designed to combat "climate change" allows vertically integrated companies to raise prices, reap big profits, and expand, since their underlying costs haven't changed.  In short, socialism eliminates competition, which empowers the biggest corporations on earth to get even bigger.

Why Biden infringes on the right to bear arms.  Advocating that guns are the reason for increasing crime is a distraction from failing crime-control policies.  These policies are the reason crime has steadily risen: 1) a decrease in prosecuting violent crimes,  2) an increase in catch and release bail,  3) defunding cities' and towns' police forces,  4) an increase in early prison release, and  5) an increase in little or no jail time for violent offenders.  Those are the real reasons for increased violent gun related crimes, not law-abiding citizens' gun ownership.  The philosophy that the police and prisons are the reason for high crime is wrong and not the belief of mainstream America.  The Left would love for everyone to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens result in high rates of gun-related crimes.

When We Describe America's Largest Cities As "War Zones", We Aren't Exaggerating One Bit.  Denver was once such a nice place to live.  So what happened?  Unfortunately, it appears that illegal immigration is fueling much of the crime that is happening in the Mile High City, and every year it just gets even worse.

Those Abandoning Blue States Should Abandon Democrats, Too.  A recent New York Post article declared that, in a "staggering exodus," in 2022, more residents of New York moved to Florida "than any other year in history." [...] In what is almost certainly an effort to cover for Democrats, CBS News practically ignores the politics of the Blue State Exodus and benignly points to "more affordable housing and plentiful jobs" in red states as the main reasons for citizens fleeing Democrat-dominated states.  CBS News brushes off the idea that higher taxes in blue states are contributing to this mass exodus, and it fails to mention at all crime, COVID-lockdown policies, and the like as reasons for the growing number of "leftugees."  Much, and likely the vast majority, of the population loss in blue states is due to those fleeing even higher-taxed and more crime-ridden large U.S. cities.

Targeting kids for addiction.  There is no doubt that the well-funded and decades-long push for marijuana legalization has been successful.  Maryland will soon join the sad reality that marijuana is now legal recreationally in 21 states and D.C., and legal medically in 37 states.  Proponents of marijuana legalization tout that making the drug lawful will decrease arrests.  But what is it doing to our communities and why have they started to target children at younger and younger ages?  Addiction-for-profit industries have always targeted young audiences.  The younger the addict, the longer the cycle of addiction, the greater the profit.

Dem-Led City Reports Highest Violent Crime Rate In 15 Years After Defunding Police.  Seattle's violent crime rate rose to its highest point in 15 years in 2022, with reported homicides surging by about 24% compared to 2021, according to the Seattle Police Department's (SPD) Year-End Crime Report, more than a year after the city cut its police budget.  Rapes and aggravated assaults increased by about 4% and 5% respectively, contributing to 5,591 total reported violent offenses, a roughly 4% spike, the report shows.  Though arson and burglaries declined, 1,596 more motor vehicle thefts were reported, and Seattle ended up with an around 4% higher overall crime in 2022 despite a fourth-quarter reduction.  Seattle's City Council reduced SPD funding by almost 17% in its 2021 budget following the George Floyd protests of summer 2020.  The city's 2023 budget funds Democratic Mayor Bruce Harrell's officer recruitment and retention plan but eliminates 30 unfilled SPD positions, The Seattle Times reported.

The Mess of an Address.  After listening to the State of the Union address, Americans know why the latest Reuters poll has President Joe Biden at 41 percent approval.  Vice President Kamala Harris polls even lower — despite the obsequious efforts of the most biased media in history that has, in effect, merged with the Democratic Party.  The nation was reminded again why only 37% of Biden's own party want him to run again.  Only a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction under his leadership.  Given all that, what could a president possibly tell a nation when he entered office inheriting a 1.4% inflation rate only to spike it to 7%?  How did Americans' 30-year mortgages of 2.7% soar to 6.5% in less than two years?  How does a president explain that eggs climbed to $7 a dozen, or a thin steak hit $15 a pound, or a sheet of plywood reached $95?  How does a president explain to Americans that gas averaged $2.39 a gallon when he took office and, even after draining the strategic petroleum reserve, it is still $3.50 a gallon — and recently spiked at $5 a gallon in many states.  Can Biden explain why once affordable, or even cheap natural gas more than tripled in price in less than a year?  What can a president say when in his first two years over 5 million foreign nationals poured into the United States — all illegally across a nonexistent border?

A Century of Homicides.  The revolving door crime wave exploded in the 1960s, putting the criminals back on the street before the police could fill out the paperwork.  Over the last year I talked to a thousand people about crime and not one, including criminal justice professionals and elected officials, could tell me how this revolving door started in the 1960s.  Some suggested the Great Society, drugs, or the disintegration of the American family, but these came later.  Crime shot up like a Saturn V rocket because it was deliberate policy to open up the jails and let criminals walk.  Supreme Court justices, other top judges, intellectuals, criminologists, and the U.S. attorney general all proclaimed prison confinement a medieval idea and that behavioral 'scientists' would simply rehabilitate the criminals.  The results were disastrous.  Homicides more than doubled and all other categories of crime quadrupled or more.  Progressives refused to reverse course and fought against sentencing reform for decades.

The left took over an important cultural institution while you weren't looking.  If you were raised in America, you probably grew up reading books published in the "Little Golden Books" series.  It's likely, too, that parents associate that label with trusted and wholesome products.  Well, they're probably still wholesome (no sex, obscenities, or other nasty things in these books), but recent content has taken both a shallow and a leftward turn, with the Little Golden Books starting early to turn your kids on to pop culture and to "wokify" them.

Denver: Rocky Mountain Hellhole.  Seven years ago, Business Insider published, "14 reasons why Denver is the best place to live in America."  They recommended everyone consider Denver as "your next hometown" citing a strong job market, low unemployment, great restaurants, and practical perks such as a low crime rate and good schools.  That was then.  How is Denver doing now as "trendy and desirable"?  In answering that question, the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle published, "Denver becoming America's crime capital."  That's quite the turnaround in less than a decade, especially when we think of New York City, Baltimore, or Philadelphia as America's crime capitals.

Here's Everything Biden Won't Tell You About The Disastrous State Of Our Union.  The state of our union is a complete, unmitigated disaster.  The economy is in shambles, the border is two years into the worst migrant influx in U.S. history, taxpayer dollars are flying into the hands of a corrupt Eastern European regime without oversight, and our No. 1 enemy — Red China — has compromised our president, our politicians, our phones, and our skies.  Much as he did in his lie-riddled speech last year, President Joe Biden will likely try to use his State of the Union address to Congress this week to credit himself for helping the nation back onto its feet.  In reality, he's done nothing but subject Americans to more crippling crises that prompt historic levels of disapproval.  In an unprecedented "level of sustained pessimism," 71 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.

Ten Righteous Men.  Typical of a Marxist regime, none of our valued institutions are functioning in a reliable way.  Our children are being abused by the very institutions designed to open the wonders of the world to them.  Our young men, who should be in the prime of their lives, are dropping dead in the midst of the games they love to play.  Our money is no longer worth much, we're finding it harder and harder to fuel our homes and automobiles, and we're seeing iconic businesses fold all around us.  What with Ukraine and woke ideology, the military we have proudly depended on to protect us is unprepared and poorly supplied.

Canadian Government Forces Dairy Farmer to Dump 30,000 Liters of Milk Because He Exceeded His Quota.  A dairy farmer from Southern Ontario, Canada has spoken out about how the Canadian government makes farms dump thousands of liters of fresh milk because they have gone over the quota.  In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen and widely shared by Bushels Per Acre on Twitter, Canadian dairy farmer Jerry Human expresses his outrage at the Canadian government and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) for wasting hundreds of liters of fresh milk despite inflation.  "Right now, during the winter months, you milk quite a bit more milk because the feed is very consistent.  And if you do a good job, you will produce quite a bit of milk.  But right now, we're over our quota, and it's regulated by the government, and [implemented] by the DFO," said Human.  "Look at this milk running away.  It's the end of the month [and] I dump 30,000 liters of milk and it breaks my heart.  This year Canadian milk is $7 a liter."

The disappearing law-enforcement presence in San Francisco.  Last month a group of business owners in Seattle gathered for a town hall to discuss persistent crime in the city.  All of the owners had experienced break-ins, often several of them in a year.  And the cost to repair broken windows and doors was often more than the value of whatever thieves had stolen.  Several of the owners had been dropped by their insurance because they'd made too many claims.  They wondered why the police never seemed to have time to walk around their neighborhood at night to keep the thieves at bay.  The situation doesn't seem to be much different in San Francisco.  When Joe Vernieri, the owner of the Black Magic Voodoo Lounge, reported his bar had been broken into it took police 15 hours to respond and even then they responded in the middle of the night when no one was around. [...] So as far as Vernieri is concerned there are no police in San Francisco.  None that will help him.

Democrats' Trojan horse is taking on a life of its own.  Biden was the Democrat left's version of the Trojan horse.  Get the 78-year-old inside the White House pretending to be a gift to the American people, and then let the real puppet masters emerge and change the nation's demographics, destroy the economy, and transform every social norm.  For two years, Biden did precisely what the Democrat socialists wanted him to do:  run to podiums, mumble, and then wander away.  Smile, wave, and lie.  And in the process, the southern border became an open floodgate for illegal aliens and deadly drugs.  Inflation halted the buying power of most Americans, and American streets became crime-infested homeless camps.  Uncle Joe:  the gift that kept on giving.

Who could not have predicted this?
Migrants turn NYC hotel into violent, drug-infested 'free-for-all': employee.  A once-trendy Manhattan hotel has become a wild "free-for-all" of sex, drugs and violence after the city began housing migrants there, an employee claimed Tuesday [1/31/2023].  Row NYC worker Felipe Rodriguez — who told The Post earlier this month that migrants were throwing away "tons" of prepared food at the hotel — said the facility has now descended into anarchy.  "Chaos, total chaos," Rodriguez told "Fox & Friends" when asked to describe conditions at the hotel. "There's no accountability.  There is no daily supervision to show these people that ... 'You don't destroy your hotel.  You are only there temporarily.  This is not your home.'

The root of our problems as a nation.  When a six-year-old brought a gun to school and shot his teacher, the first thought was that it was an accident.  When upon further review it was announced that it was intentional and deliberate, a sort of shock wave went through the population.  This was not just another incident, not just another step along the road to perdition.  Society is no longer slouching toward Gomorrah.  Like the expanding cosmos, the headlong race toward the edge of the cliff is actually accelerating.  This was a quantum leap, an order-of-magnitude increase.  When one observes the breathtaking increase in moral degeneracy, one is reminded of the biblical warning that the beast, knowing that his time is short, is seeking to devour whom he may. [...] Society is becoming more and more disoriented, less structured in terms of norms, and, as an inevitable result, more dysfunctional.  Indeed, the definition of what is "normal" has become so vague as to have lost all practical meaning.  If everything is normal, then nothing is.  If everything is a matter of personal opinion, then facts become irrelevant.  If your truth is not my truth, nor mine yours, then there can be no social contract.  Dysfunctional societies must eventually collapse.  Whether from internal strife or external invasion, they cannot survive.

Anarchy, American-Style.  The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist.  But it was waged against — not from — the establishment.  Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to "turn on, tune in, drop out" from them.  The current revolution is much different — and far more dangerous — for at least three reasons.  The current Left has no intention of "dropping out."  Why would it?  It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked — corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia.  In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power — money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture — are in the hands of the Left.  They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime.  Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Whoopi Goldberg asks if 'we need to see White people get beat up' to see change, then quickly clarifies.  "The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg wondered on Monday if "we need to see White people get beat up" to see meaningful police reform before clarifying that she was "not suggesting that" following the death of Tyre Nichols.  "Do we need to see White people also get beat before anybody will do anything?  I'm not suggesting that.  So don't write us and tell me what a racist I am.  I'm just asking is that what people have to see in order to wake up and realize this affects us all?" Goldberg asked.  She also wondered when this brutality would "finally lead to some police reform from the ground up."

The Editor says...
There has already been "police reform from the ground up," which is why they only hire black officers, whether they are fit for service or not.

There Is Nothing Democrats Won't Destroy.  The left has changed the definition of words to help their division.  "Woman" has no meaning now, and men win the awards created expressly to celebrate them.  It has to be weird for the old feminists, most of whom look like men now, to know they've plowed the road for men to dominate as women.  Can't wait till Rachel Levine demands the return of Virginia Slims advertising so he can be on them under the banner, "You've come a long way, baby."  But few words have been bastardized more than "community."  It used to mean your neighborhood and the people in it; from the kids you grew up with to the old guy in the corner house everyone was slightly afraid of but who was secretly always nice.  Now it means people who share your skin tone or sexual proclivities.

Germans believe their country is going down the tubes [again].  Fewer and fewer Germans are satisfied with their state.  This is the result of a recent Allensbach survey.  Some 80 percent of all Germans are of the opinion that the state is inhibiting itself in its development through too much bureaucracy.  This also means that fewer and fewer believe in a good economic future.  Only 39 percent still think that Germany will still be one of the leaders in the world economy in 15 years.  In the past, this number used to be almost 60 percent.  Some 68 percent of all Germans are dissatisfied with so-called digital progress.  Only 14 percent of Germans believe that Germany has emerged stronger from the crises of recent years.  And half believe that many things are no longer working properly in their country.  This is not good for the German government, nor is it an optimistic assessment of the future.

Warning: The Anti-Police Movement Is Deadly.  In the Bay Area, criminal homicides increased from 295 in 2021 to 309 in 2022 — 50% higher than 2019.  Oakland had 120 homicides in 2022, a 60% increase over 2019.  And the share of murder victims who were black rose from 53% in 2019 to 58% in 2021.  In other words, in the two years after millions of Americans promised through their checkbooks, their lawn signs, and their social media updates to do everything in their power to protect black lives, the killing of African Americans skyrocketed.

This migrant mess is ruining NYC's Midtown.  Why is Mayor Eric Adams destroying Midtown?  The pulsing heart of the city, the theater, restaurant and tourism district, has not fully recovered from the COVID lockdown yet is already full of homeless hotels with their associated problems.  Now the mayor has announced he's going to turn yet another hotel into a shelter for illegal migrants in the middle of the Theater District.  The Paramount Hotel, a 600-room, Renaissance-style gem opposite the Richard Rodgers Theatre where "Hamilton" has been playing since 2015, is the fifth Midtown hotel converted to an "emergency" shelter in as many months.  Earlier this month, tourists were paying $330 a night to stay there and prices hit as high as $1,000 around New Year's Eve.

Another Day, Another Walgreens Getting Robbed.  No one blinked, they are so used to it because of California's crazy laws that benefit criminals and punish honest business owners.  [Video clip]

America's Future is Bleak When Only 27% of the Younger Generations are Proud to be American.  As recently as 2004, 91% of Americans were extremely or very proud to be American and the United States ranked first in the world in national pride.  However, in less than twenty years there has been a stunning reversal that portends a dire future for the United States as a precipitous erosion in national pride has undermined societal confidence, self-reliance, optimism, and cohesion.  A recent poll revealed that a record low of just 68% of the citizenry are extremely or very proud to be American.  However, underlying that overall dismal outcome is the reality that among the two youngest generations only 38% of Millennials and 16% of Gen Z are proud to be American despite being the beneficiaries of living in a unfathomably prosperous nation that has not known any profound national adversity since the Great Depression.  What we are seeing play out is the reality of demographic change in America as the younger mal-educated generations account for over half of the populace and are increasingly becoming culturally and politically influential.  Within these generations an overwhelming majority have been indoctrinated by socialist/Marxist ideologues to believe that a capitalist United States as founded is irredeemable and must be transformed.

You brought your problems upon yourself.
Eric Adams: 'Unfair' for Sanctuary Cities to Carry the Weight of the Border Crisis.  New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) once again took to the airwaves to say Democratic cities who declared themselves to be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants are being stretched thin due to the large number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.  New York City has had to open a fifth shelter for recent arrivals from the southern border, which is in addition to using hotels and homeless shelters to house people coming from Latin America and even parts of Asia.  "Well, I believe that when I took the trip to El Paso, you can see firsthand the impact of how it not only harm the foundation of El Paso, but look at Chicago, Houston, Washington, New York City, this is just unfair for cities to carry the weight of a national problem," Adams told MSNBC on Wednesday.  "We're going to open for more hotels, emergency hotels...  This as a major financial impact on New York City and cities across this country that are receiving the brunt of it."  Adams said the Biden White House claims there is a person who is in charge of helping American cities with the immigration problem, but he does not who the person is.

Seattle Is Running Out of Morgue Space Due to the Fentanyl Crisis.  When you run a city on the values of (personal) truth, (social) justice, and the (anti) American way of life, there are bound to be consequences, no matter how hard you try to ignore them.  That may include the spike in violence in New York City, the crime and homelessness throughout California, or the general collapse of Portland, Ore., on every front.  For Seattle, it includes those things and a fentanyl crisis that is claiming lives at an alarming rate.  The rate is so high that the King County Coroner is running out of places to store the bodies.

The greenie left is coming for your coffee.  It wasn't enough that the greenie left came for our light bulbs, our flush toilets, our guns, our plastic straws, our gas stoves, or our hamburgers.  Now they're coming for our coffee. [...] What they want, of course, is to take away more stuff from us, the better to control us.  It wasn't enough to target our gas-powered cars and tell us to take the bus.  It wasn't enough to take away our electricity and natural gas in the name of 'going green' and tell consumers to freeze in winter.  It wasn't enough to howl for an end to jet travel while greenie leftists bought carbon indulgences and continued to jet about with their private planes.  It wasn't enough to take away our plastic bags, to ensure that we only use unsanitary bacteria-filled cloth recycle bags.  It wasn't enough to take away our meat and tell us to eat bugs.  All these are things they are — no, really — trying to take away.  In some cases, they have succeeded at such schemes, too, all for a phony and chimerical quest to stop global warming, which somehow never happens.

Black Lives Matter and the enduring legacy of 'defund the police'.  Over at the Free Press, author Leighton Woodhouse has an excellent article about the ongoing legacy of Black Lives Matter and the "defund the police" movement they helped usher in to cities across America.  Regular readers know this is a particular bugaboo of mine.  That's not just because it was a brutal issue for Democrats who jumped on the bandwagon in 2020.  It's mostly because it's such a shining example of how progressive enthusiasm for fundamental change can often result in complete disaster.  Committing to defunding the police without a plan to replace them with something better is one of the dumbest things the left has done in my lifetime and as such it should be used as an object lesson of what not to do for many years to come.

A Massive Effort at Moral Rebuilding Is Necessary.  I think it fair to say that political economy in our time does not take the home seriously, because it does not take virtue and vice seriously, as the political economists themselves are mainly content with the withering of religious life — they having been brought up in, and having accepted, the dissolution of sexual morals that is rendering America a nation of broken homes, amputated families, fatherless children, and dispirited lovelessness between young men and women, some of whom are condemned to loneliness because they do not sin, and others condemned to that and worse because they do. [...] In all our rush to define the essence of marriage out of our consciousness by extending the category to couples who by definition cannot perform the marital act, we have heard hardly a whisper about all the moral and social questions that bear upon marriage — no whisper at all about divorce, for example, and none at all about how you can possibly promote sexual continence, let alone chastity, while countenancing and blessing actions that presume incontinence and unchastity and that far surpass them in physical and moral harm.

Will Any of You Leftists Wake Up?  The policies being pursued by Democrats at every level of government are visiting wholesale destruction on our economy, our culture and our future.  Whether we're talking about Biden and the Democrats spending trillions of dollars, drawing us into hyperinflation and unsustainable debt, or the freakish efforts of the LGBTQ educrats to proselytize, indoctrinate and impose horrific sex change surgeries on our children that have led to an unprecedented level of child suicide, the devastation is incalculable.  I suppose the rationale for deifying the LGBTQ agenda is to curb population growth?  Have Gay, lesbian and transgender people become the modern heroes of the environment because they are not part of the contemptible "breeders" crowd?  Meanwhile, at the same time, you leftists promote open borders to bring millions into this country precisely because our dwindling population doesn't provide you with the goods and services you want at prices you want.  The rationalizations would be hilarious were they not so universally destructive.

Shocking!  Who could have predicted this?
After Seattle Defunded Its Police, Local Business Owners Say Crime Is Worse Than Ever.  Two years after Seattle slashed its police budget, local business owners say crime has skyrocketed, with police unable to deal with thefts, homelessness and open-air drug use that plague the city.  Seattle and broader King County had more than 13,000 homeless people within its boundaries in 2022, more than every other similar area except Los Angeles County and New York City, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, while the Seattle Police Department (SPD) lost more than 130 officers, KOMO News reported, as homicides, shootings and motor vehicle thefts increased.  Local business owners say law enforcement is failing to effectively deter the rampant drug use and theft disturbing their livelihoods[.]  Rohan Joseph, owner of Elliot Bay Community Fitness in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, has been posting videos on Twitter for months of people doing drugs, trying to sleep or otherwise causing disturbances outside his business.

Does DC want to be the carjacking capital of the USA?  Washington, D.C.'s city council has just provided incontrovertible proof of the willful incompetence of the gun control movement.  The same people who want to outlaw the possession of firearms by law-abiding people passed legislation to reduce penalties for carjacking, home invasion, and similar violent crimes.  Use of a gun to commit a violent felony in the nation's capital can now be punished by no more than four years in prison.  This makes it clear that the D.C. city council has no real desire to keep firearms away from violent criminals who really shouldn't have them, and the legislation is so dysfunctional that Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is certainly no conservative, intends to veto it.  It also makes Washington, D.C. the ideal place for carjackers, robbers, home invaders, and gun felons to ply their trades because, in contrast to almost every other jurisdiction in the United States, they won't get much prison time.  If you want to stick a gun in somebody's face to demand money, then you should do it in D.C., where you can't get more than four years (unless U.S. attorneys step in, as discussed below).  If you want to force somebody out of a car at gunpoint, then D.C. is the place to do it.  If you do it in Florida, you can get up to life in prison.

First 2023 Murder in Seattle Carried Out by Thug Freed by Bail Fund.  Most people have stopped paying attention to bail funds aside from the time that Kamala Harris tweeted support for the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the BLM race riots.  While MFF's policy of bailing out arrested criminals has proven fatal, it's not the only bail fund with lethal consequences.  The Seattle and Portland bail funds have had their own death toll.  Including the first murder of 2023 in Seattle. [...] There have been a number of cases of bail funds freeing domestic abusers only for it to end in violence and even murder.  And, each time, the bail fund claims that it could never have seen this coming.

Republicans, Don't Botch the Hearings.  Here are the questions Americans have:
  What is causing inflation, and why are energy costs so high?
  Why is fentanyl killing tens of thousands of Americans?
  Why is our southern border wide open?
  Can we trust the FBI and DOJ?
  What is causing the spike in inner-city crime?
  Why are we letting China steal American data, patents, and military secrets?
  Where did COVID come from?  Do the vaccines work?  Are people really "dying suddenly"?
  Why is our education system failing our children?

Get Ready for 'Climate Change Death' Tracking.  Anyone following the regime's playbook already understands that when you disagree with it, you'll be accused of killing someone.  Don't take the vaccine, don't lock down, or don't wear a mask — you're killing grandma.  Question voting and balloting procedures, and your words will provoke a deadly insurrection.  Suggest that a man can't get pregnant, and you're guilty of stochastic terrorism.  The regime characterizes conservatives as killers for their opinions, yet its partisans celebrate abortion up to parturition.  It wants to let murderers out of jail, and is now moving to destigmatize the "dignified" culling of the elderly and infirm.  Climate change is the platform from which the regime seeks to achieve power by creating a rationale for laws and regulations that dictate where and how people can move, live, purchase, and work.  So it makes sense that climate change would re-emerge as a priority just as the world moves on from a pandemic, where the body count of those dying "from" or "with" Covid was used to justify repressive policies such as lockdowns, shutdowns, election process changes, and the prevention of the practice of your religious faith.

Like Paul Revere, a Massachusetts Republican Sends Warning.  The fact is that progressives have been actively working to take over the Democrat party — city by city, and state by state — for years.  Even though progressives are never the majority anywhere, they've gotten their grubby little mitts on all the levers of power, corrupting voting laws and elections, instituting destructive policies, and securing permanent rule for themselves.  Places like California, New York, Illinois -- and sadly, Massachusetts — might be past saving at this point.  No wonder so many are leaving.  Progressives have finally succeeded in taking over the Democrat party at the national level, too.  They've shoved aside all the normal, moderate Democrats, like the kind you used to see.  Can you think of a current Democrat politician who doesn't stick to the progressive narrative, even when it's obviously ridiculous?

The Scariest Developments to Watch Out For in 2023.  In just the past two years, our national government has spent roughly $13 trillion and authorized spending trillions more.  Politicians use words and phrases like "investments," "long-term savings," "reducing inflation," "protecting Ukraine's sovereignty," etc. to justify this.  Clearly, they are either lying or living in a fantasy world.  Most of the money is being used to pay off campaign contributors and special interest groups, such as the climate change lobby, or to make politicians look good.  Inflation spiked to nine percent in June 2022, so the Federal Open Market Committee began raising interest rates to fight it.  As interest rates rose, the stock market tanked.  In 2023, interest rates will likely increase further, possibly sparking a worldwide recession.  Neither is good news for investors.

Latest Inflation Report Shows How Insane Grocery Costs Have Gotten.  Even as fuel oil costs fell 16.6 percent in December, the cost for the necessary expense to keep homes warm through the winter is still 41.5 percent more expensive than it was one year ago.  Meanwhile, electricity costs for Americans advanced 14.3 percent over the last 12 months and piped utility gas bills increased 19.3 percent in 2022.  The more stable core CPI number — which excludes food and energy — increased 0.3 percent in December, an acceleration from November 2022's 0.2 percent increase, for an annual core inflation rate of 5.7 percent as most indexes continued to see prices rise.  Among the indexes that continue to spike is food, up 10.4 percent in the last 12 months.

What Caused the Political Hysteria?  The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump — past, present, and future.  The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump "conservatives" assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.  Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him.  And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.  In this context, the Republicans retaking control of the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind.  Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden's lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?  Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president's State of the Union address on national television?

In McCarthy Negotiations, GOP Landed On [the] 'Most Significant Win For Conservatives In A Decade'.  Life expectancy in the United States is at its lowest level since 1996.  Teen suicide rates spiked nearly 30 percent in the last decade.  Though drug overdose deaths declined from a record high in 2021, they remain 50 percent higher than just five years ago.  In the second quarter of 2022, the majority of workers lost a median 8.5 percent in real wages — a 25-year high.  Marriage and fertility rates are falling.  A heightened nuclear threat looms amidst the invasion of Ukraine.  In the last fiscal year, the government recorded 2.76 million illegal crossings at our southern border, as tens of thousands of desperate people stream into the country every month, trafficked by cartels.  American happiness is at a record low.  So is institutional trust.  It's in this dismal context that Kevin McCarthy's bid for the House speakership faltered over the course of four frenzied days last week.

A Rendezvous With Rwanda?  America is an increasingly multiracial society.  Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked.  Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.  Usually multiracial nations and empires — Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires — require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm.  Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.  In most such places, pride, solidarity — and even safety — are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing.  The individual's primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other's overriding loyalties.  The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss.  It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a "content-of-our-character" ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture.  But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

Movie Attendance Collapses 48% over Four Very Woke Years.  Between 2018 and 2022, movie theater attendance dropped in half, and I do not want to hear any excuses about the pandemic.  People will go to the theater to see a movie that appeals to them.  Spider-Man: No Way Home proved this last year.  Top Gun: Maverick proved it this year.  Avatar: Way of the Water is proving it right now.  And those are just the blockbusters. [...] In other words, blaming streaming or the China Flu on the collapse of the movie business is anti-science, so please do shut up.

Nancy Pelosi calls House Democrats 'The greatest collection of intellect, integrity, and imagination assembled.  Just when one thinks one has heard everything, one is proven wrong.  Outgoing speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently wrote her last "Dear Colleague" letter to her Democrat co-conspirators/comrades.  In this missive, she stated, "During the 117th Congress, President Biden and Congressional Democrats have put forth a shining vision of justice for all.  Together, we have worked tirelessly to infuse this value into our legislative efforts.  We can all take immense pride in our achievements toward that goal, which is making a real difference in the lives of the American people."  Justice?  For all?  Tell that to all those still rotting in prison, without conviction or charge, for strolling through the People's House on January 6, 2021.  Tell that to those who were snatched from their homes in the wee hours of the morning by armed feds when a simple summons to appear would have sufficed.  Tell that to all those whose jobs were considered unessential.  Tell that to all those in the military who were discharged because they wouldn't accept an experimental substance into their bodies.  Tell that to all those who have lost loved ones to violent crime, rates of which skyrocketed in the past two years due to Democrat policies — or to those who have lost loved ones to fentanyl because Democrats absolutely refuse to police our southern border.  And tell it to America's rapidly dwindling middle class, beset by historic inflation, supply chain problems, and rising taxes.

Trump Hatred Is Not Cheap.  We have a close family friend who voted for Joe Biden. [...] We'll call her Pat.  She voted for gropey Joe even though she disagrees with almost all the radicalism that he and the Democrats are pushing.  Her reasoning is quite simple.  She refused to vote for Donald Trump because he is too personally offensive to her. [...] It didn't take long to realize that the Trump alternative — Joe Biden — came with some hidden costs of his own, that Pat didn't know about.  Now that we're two years into his presidency, we can actually quantify some of those costs.  Immediately upon assuming office Joe got with his pals in Congress and went on a spending binge.  We shouldn't be surprised.  That's what socialists do — spend other people's money.  Joe, San Fran Nan, and little Chucky Schumer had a grand time, spending almost five trillion bucks and driving the national debt up another three trillion dollars.  But Joe never considered the post-party hangover — a 40-year high inflation level.  That ear-popping inflation isn't going down either, unless there are some serious changes in fiscal behavior.  With the recently passed omnibus spending bill, there's no indication that anybody, in either party, intends to change behavior.  The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has found that inflation alone is costing American families an addition $635 per month.  That's the equivalent of a nice car payment to fund Joe's big spending, energy choking, regulation expanding, experiment with banana republicism.

The Coup We Never Knew.  Did someone or something seize control of the United States? [...] Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings?  How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas — furious over a court decision on abortion?  How could these mobs so easily throng our justices' homes, with placards declaring "[...]"?  Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth?  And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?  How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call?  Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television?  Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

8 of the 10 Neediest Cities in America Have Something in Common.  A recent study showed that the 10 neediest cities in the U.S. have a few things in common.  The most glaring commonality of this list is that eight out of the top ten cities had a Democrat at the helm at the time the survey took place.  Wallethub.com released the tragic list showing which cities are starting 2023 with a thud.  They used 28 indicators including poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc.  There are not a lot of surprises in this list of 182 towns across the U.S.  Detroit comes in as the neediest town in America.  Motor City has been dying for decades.  Corruption and plunging car sales have gutted this once-beautiful town since the 1970s.  If you think getting a cab in Hockeytown is hard, try calling an ambulance.  Budget cuts reduced EMS crews to just 15 more than a decade ago.  Detroit also scored third place for "food insecurity" as well as "inadequate plumbing."

The War On Truckers, Refrigerators, And Your Well-Being.  In the same way our "superiors" think that their food comes from the grocery store rather than a farm or ranch, they must believe that those items magically appear on the shelves.  Otherwise, why would the ruling class, made up of and zealously backed by elites, go to war against trucks?  Just before Christmas, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that it calls a "key step toward accelerating zero-emissions future," and part of "the historic Clean Truck Plan, which is moving America's highly polluting heavy-duty trucking fleet towards low-carbon and electric technologies."  Enforcement of course will mean fewer trucks on the road.  For many drivers, the cost of working under the new regime will be too high.  "Truckers and manufacturers warn that the rule is too stringent and costly, and that compliance could send higher prices through the economy that is already suffering from high energy costs and high inflation," says the Institute for Energy Research.

Rebellion Against the People.  It was not so long ago that competition was the breeding ground for excellence, now any mention of competition is hissed at with emotional tantrums by those who could not compete on any level and it's drawn the whole nation into an acceptance of failure.  One need look no further than the two institutions of importance, the schools and the military to see the end result.  The majority of our students cannot pass rudimentary tests in the critical studies, but they can emote.  Our military is so confused about its mission that it ranks success as acceptance of perversion rather than marksmanship.  The question thus arises, what is left to support?  What is there now that an American can devote oneself to that is not now decidedly un-American?

The Tyranny in America.  It never ceases to amaze me when I hear media talking heads plaintively ask, "Why won't Biden or Harris visit the border?"  They ask the question genuinely believing that if either the President or the Vice President saw the looming existential disaster, it would change their minds.  Such naiveté confirms Dr. King's idea that "nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."  Daily, we see the dictatorial moves by Biden and his administration.  We view the tears of those at the southern border who fear for their lives and property.  As the illegals surge into the country, sexual exploitation, human trafficking, crime, rampant drug use, violence, disease, death, and soul-searing fear continue to suffocate Americans. [...] Of course, illegal immigration will continue.  In the next two years of Biden's rule, another five million illegals will enter the country and thus an entrenched dictatorship will take hold.

Only an economic illiterate could say that Biden's policies are working well.  Here is a headline in Yahoo Finance on December 30th: "This week in Bidenomics: It was a pretty good year."  The author is Rick Newman, whose title is "Senior Columnist.  Newman admits that the S & P 500 was down 20% for the year, the Dow Jones was down 10%, and the Nasdaq was down 34%.  Nevertheless, he brags that gas prices are down from their high to $3.15 per gallon, never acknowledging that gas was $2.17 when Biden won the election.  Bragging about prices that are up 45% in two years does not show any ability to think cognitively.  Diesel prices are also down from their Biden-era high.  Still, their Biden-era "low" is $4.53, which is 90% higher than the $2.38 price for diesel when Biden was elected.  Crude oil is around $80 or up 100% from $40 when Biden was elected.  That is what happens when one of your major goals is to destroy industries that provide reasonably priced energy.

We Must Convince People That The Fascist Far Left Wants To Destroy The US.  Events are part of an overall plan that has a specific purpose that proves it's not just incompetence.  Leftists desperately had to suppress the Biden laptop scandal because it showed that they were under foreign influence.  We know now that if the people had been aware of this, history would have been changed.  That influence explains why we are diminishing our energy capabilities while giving the red Chinese a free pass.  The purpose is to weaken us compared to them.  That influence explains why we are diminishing our military capabilities by shoveling cash and weapons into Ukraine.  That influence explains why we are committing national suicide with an open border that not only weakens us to the point of a Cloward-Piven implosion but also provides all manner of military infiltration opportunities.  That open border also is giving leftists a great opportunity to take a page from the history of the Opium wars and destabilize the US with a flood of Fentanyl.

Under Wokeism, Animal Farm Comes to Life.  Have you read George Orwell's perennially popular and spookily prescient book Animal Farm?  Written in 1945, it is recognized as one of the most foundational books of the 20th century and the book's satire vs. the reality of today is striking. [...] It takes intellectual rigor to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly.  It is challenging especially for the young and those who:
  a.   Did not acquire a good grounding in reason or academic discipline through education
  b.   Have never experienced real suffering or failure
  c.   Have been deprived of appropriate role models
Yet, warts and all, since our country was created, we've seen an unbroken string of generally successful adults, until recently. [...] One reason why we have so many developmental problems now is the pervasiveness of substance abuse such as the massive amount of fentanyl crossing our borders which has become proof of an undeclared war against us.  And so is the sedition, subversion, and treacherous behavior of those knowingly subverting our young and our institutions. [...] If you are over 40, remember how we used to live.  Put aside the mistakes we made but recall the successes, achievements, and good our country has been able to accomplish in the past: all that is now a quickly receding memory.  There is no easy way forward, but there is one legitimate way forward.  We must stop those hiding in our midst from continuing to destroy us under the guise of free speech.

Liz Warren's Disappearing Act.  It's been one lie after another from the Democrats in D.C., compounded with economic policies that could only make matters as bad as possible.  When President Trump left office in January 2021, the national average for gasoline was around $2.30/gallon.  Biden immediately signed a series of anti-energy executive orders restricting fracking, oil exploration, and fossil-fuel production.  He did this for two reasons:  1) To counter and negate anything that President Trump had done, simply out of infantile spite;  2) To curry approval and favorable publicity with the Green New Deal faction and their supporters.  Predictably, retail gasoline pricing spiked.  It was soon in the mid-$3.00 range, more than a dollar over where it was under President Trump.  This was well before Russia invaded Ukraine.  This was not "Putin's price increase."  This was all Biden.  As fuel went up, transportation/delivery costs increased and pricing for all goods started to go up.  This was an absolutely unnecessary tax on the American public, diluting consumer's buying power and sapping their confidence.  The Biden energy policy's effect on overall consumer pricing would have been bad enough if that's all that there was.  But it wasn't, not by a long shot.

Biden's Unopposed Imposition of Stalinism.  The majority of Americans are against open borders.  Once again, what we want doesn't seem to matter.  A steady wave of illegal immigration is what Biden wants and no one seems the least bit interested in putting an end to it.  Millions of unvetted migrants are streaming across the border and being shipped to secret destinations in direct violation of U.S. immigration law.  This is nothing short of treasonous.  The import of deadly drugs, violent criminals, terrorists, and COVID spreaders constitutes the worst public safety issue since World War II.  At a time when runaway inflation is driving millions of Americans into the poorhouse, we are being forced to provide public assistance to millions of freeloading non-citizens.  Local communities are being torn apart by the influx of refugees. [...] None of this is happening by accident.  "It is becoming harder not to conclude that the border crisis is intentional," said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. "Nobody is this incompetent."  Of course it is intentional.  Biden knows exactly what he is doing.  He gets his stooges, DHS Secretary Mayorkas and Press Secretary Jean-Pierre, to deny that the border is open, but we know they are lying through their teeth.

The Democrats' war on the family.  It wasn't that long ago when older men dressed as women twerking with children at city-sponsored parades or schools adopting unisex locker rooms or medical clinics exploiting gender dysphoria to pad their bottom line all would have been considered child abuse.  But today, Joe Biden, the Catholic who once stood by his religion, tweets, "Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.  There is no room for compromise..."  As they say, one thing leads to another.  This swift and headlong lurch into androgyny started a while ago when the revolutionaries realized before you can deconstruct the West you've got to deconstruct Western notions of the family.  The Human Rights Campaign's Welcoming Schools program celebrates transgender youth and normalizes gender fluidity in kindergarten.  Planned Parenthood, when they're not doing their best to eliminate families, says "no worries," we're sexual beings beginning at birth.

Life Expectancy Craters in Biden's America of Fentanyl ODs and COVID Jabs.  During the two years that President Joe Biden has occupied the White House, life expectancy in the United States has fallen to its lowest level since 1996 as official figures show that drug overdose deaths reached their highest levels in recorded history last year.  Data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveals that life expectancy in the US declined by more than a year between 2014 and 2020, from 78.9 years to 77.8 years, the Daily Mail reported.  Health authorities blamed a number of factors for the decline, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation and lockdowns that followed as well as drug overdoses, suicide, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and homicide.

Krasner's Philly: Win your freedom after 25 years on Death Row, get executed on the street.  It continually baffles me why these Democratic bastions go for the most mediocre — sometimes outright malevolent — hands down worst choices every single time.  City residents watch their world dissolve around them, solely through the actions of the very individuals they return to office time and time again, yet nothing but nothing will shake them free of their mindless devotion to their own destruction.  New York City's a terrific example of that mindset.  So is Philadelphia. [...] In January, the city is due to reassess whether their new community-based programs to reduce gun violence have produced results.  That will depend on what their definition of "results" is and how lucrative the community found the grants from the programs.

US life expectancy reaches 25-year low, according to CDC.  The life expectancy for the average U.S. citizen has hit a 25-year low, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Life expectancy for people born in the U.S. during 2021 stands at 76.4 years, the lowest on record since 1996.  Life expectancy for those born in 2019 was 78.8 years — a drop of 2.4 years, according to CDC data.  This marks a dramatic reversal from the steady growth in expected longevity of U.S. citizens for the past two decades.  CDC officials blamed the drop on two factors — the COVID-19 pandemic and a rapidly growing epidemic of substance abuse and drug addiction.

The Editor says...
Allow me to translate, embellish or amplify the last sentence in the excerpt above:  [#1] Every illness under the sun was counted as Covid-19, if the patient was in a hospital with a financial incentive to blame Covid, and [#2] "a rapidly growing epidemic of substance abuse" refers to the tidal wave of fentanyl coming over the unenforced border.

The Swamp strikes back.  The U.S. is currently in the midst of myriad crises due to the Democrats.  The border is unguarded, causing millions to illegally enter the U.S. The Border Patrol says there have been over 5 million border crossing incidents that were tracked.  High inflation is draining savings and placing hardships on citizens while the crime wave has placed citizens in peril.  None of the Biden-backed initiatives such as the Inflation Reduction Act nor the infrastructure bill nor his climate initiative addresses the citizens' suffering.  Beyond their misgovernance, the tyrannical Democrats have displayed a propensity for totalitarianism.  The Democrats have branded citizens as domestic terrorists for being from another party.  Protests are a fundamental right in a democracy, but the Democrats have seized this right from their political opponents.

What Eddie Fisher Said.  [Scroll down]  Many of today's troubles, I believe, are due to malicious intentions by a powerful few.  Everything that is wrong in the world today is totally unnecessary because it has been engineered deliberately by malicious enemies of our nation.  Just four years ago, America was booming.  The stock market was in an unprecedented surge, wages were higher than ever for all, including minority groups, unemployment was historically low and natural resources were plentiful.  Peace was happening in the Middle East; our military forces were being restored to strength and expanding and we had worldwide respect once again.  At the helm of the administration was a leader despised by the elite GOP and the Left but responsible for all of the benefits mentioned.  So, what happened?

El Paso's migrant state of emergency is a taste of what nation faces as Biden shrugs at border crisis.  Oscar Leeser, the Democratic mayor of El Paso, has bent over backward not to "embarrass" the head of his party, President Joe Biden.  As migrants poured across the border, unmetered and unvetted, he quietly grappled with the strain on the city's resources.  He provided the shelter and food the federal government wouldn't.  Hestruck private deals with Mayor Eric Adams to alleviate the crush, busing some people to New York.  Even as the City Council begged him to point outwhat was happening, he refused.  He insisted he'd been told by the Biden administration that if he was patient, they would help.  This went on for months.  On Saturday, Leeser's patience finally broke.  He declared a state of emergency, admitting what had been obvious for nearly two years:  The border is out of control, and President Biden isn't doing anything about it.

10 Steps to Save America.  Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong — and very abruptly — with the United States.  They are certain that our wounds are almost all self-inflicted.  The current pathologies are not a result of a natural disaster, an exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an existential war.  Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel costs amid "normal" seven-percent-plus annual inflation, bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation abroad — all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a sick patient.  Our crises are not as the Left maintains — a nine-person Supreme Court, the Electoral College, or the filibuster — all distractions from existential problems the Left largely created.

Belgium's Energy Suicide?  Belgium's situation is dramatic.  While our neighbors have taken and are taking measures to cushion the energy crisis, maintain their budgetary health and guarantee their energy supply, Belgium is in a situation of clear and obvious failure on all three counts.  I will only deal here with the energy misery, which is entirely avoidable and caused by the anti-nuclear tendencies of two environmentalist political parties, Ecolo and The Greens.  Security of energy supply seems, for some officials, to be an abstract concept.  It is anything but.  In practice, when energy security is not guaranteed, it means load-shedding, blackouts and an explosion in energy costs, as well as, for many, having to choose between "heat or eat".

Condo prices in San Francisco plummet as drug abuse and crime soar.  Luxury condo prices in the heart of downtown San Francisco have plummeted as drug abuse and crime have spiraled out control — and as many techies continue to work remotely.  Data analyzed by Compass shows the Golden Gate city — once pegged as the hottest real estate market globally — has since fallen fast.  The median sale price of a two-bedroom condo, for example, has fallen 16.5% since 2021, while sale prices in surrounding areas have slipped only 7%, according to the market report.

The Commercial Impacts of COVID Will Last for Years.  Have you noticed that things have changed in our country over the last three years?  In 2019, my truck broke down.  I got it into the shop the next day to be fixed.  In 2022, I needed a mechanic to service the brakes on one of our cars.  It took three weeks to get the car into a garage.  We also had a fender-bender this year.  It took two months to get an appointment for an estimate — not even to get someone to actually fix the damage. [...] Those are minor annoyances.  Things get a bit more serious when we look at the medical industry. [...] Are you noticing a pattern?  Prior to COVID, everything worked.  After COVID, every industry is struggling to meet customer needs.

Our Parasitic Generation.  Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?  We are $31 trillion in collective debt.  The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits.  The military is politicized and short of recruits.  We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies' cynical stereotypes.  Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections.  We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it.  The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware — and hard-earned deterrence.  We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula.  Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities.  Medieval London's roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco.  Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Crumbling States of America.  Our union is crumbling, our borders are smashed, and our respect has been obliterated.  No one fears America therefore evil runs wild.  And with corruption embedded so deeply into the ability of the people to elect the persons of their own choice (i.e.  Maricopa County, AZ allowing 294k plus votes to be counted that had no persons attached to the ballot) the outlook seems dire.  What the circumstance requires is a fighter, a builder, and someone who stands up to our enemies and for our way of life.  In other words the exact opposite of what incompetent buffoons currently in charge offer.

NYPD resignations shoot up by 30% as 1,225 officers ditch the US's biggest police force.  Thousands of New York City police officers have ditched the country's biggest police force and fled to other states for higher salaries.  Police department recruiters from other states, including Florida and Colorado have rushed to the Big Apple to persuade some of the city's 34,000 officers into relocating in exchange for higher pay and better work environments.  The retention rate among NYPD officers is rocky, especially since 1,225 officers have resigned through November before reaching five years at the police force, according to the New York Times.  About 3,200 total have left this year, including retirees.

The terrible consequences of stolen elections and government corruption.  [Scroll down] The results of their treachery?  A legitimately life-threatening energy crisis due to Biden's cancelling of pipelines and drilling which spread and intensified the inflation we are enduring.  The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan gave the Bagram Air Base to China and billions of dollars' worth of high-tech U.S. military equipment to the Taliban.  Biden threw open the southern border; and well over two million migrants have entered the country.  Where are they now?  Who knows?  Many of the unaccompanied children are obviously being trafficked.  Biden is absolutely in business with the cartel sex-traffickers.  This administration's irresponsible spending has increased the national debt to $131 trillion, and yet they continue to throw billions we do not have to Ukraine to protect a border that is irrelevant to Americans; it's part of their scheme to take Putin down but the war has killed thousands of Ukranian civilians with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's complicity.  Where have the billions of dollars gone?  Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants an audit; the Democrats say 'no.' [...] Biden wants to forgive billions in student loans; he wants working taxpayers who could not afford college to pay for those who did but are slackers.  He wants to continue to subsidize millions of illegal migrants he's ushered into the country.  Homeless Americans, nearly all of them mentally ill and/or drug-addicted, are abandoned onto the streets of Democrat-run cities like detritus but Biden ignores them.

The Experts Finally Discover Why 'LGBTQ Youth' Are Suicidal.  Liberal and tolerant Public Health experts seem to have finally sussed out, based on hard clinical research, the true sources of LGBTQ+++ youth suicidality. [...] It's obviously just a major coincidence that suicidality increases when pop culture floods children's corporate media programming to celebrate "Transgender Day of Visibility" and libbed-out parents encourage their four-year-old children to "explore their genders."  This is clearly not disorienting or confusing for children.

Are We Living in a 'Post-Truth' Society?  The online Cambridge dictionary defines "post-truth" to mean "relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts." Given this definition, I personally believe much of the United States has transitioned to a "post-truth" society, and many of us will become casualties of this new paradigm before harsh reality steers our nation back to an "objective truth"-based decision-making. [...] What caused our society to reach this tipping point?  I believe that objective truth is dying from a thousand little cuts and these cuts are a purposeful strategy to destroy our society and groom a population so it can be manipulated through feelings.  I will mention a few below (I am sure the reader can come up with dozens more):
  •   Participation Trophies (avoid the trauma of losing and starve the intuition of how to win)
  •   Eliminate Traditional Roles (break down the nuclear family by eliminating mothers and fathers, the distinction between men and women)
  •   Changing Definitions of Words (causing words to have no objective meaning, crippling our ability to communicate with each other rationally)
  •   Toxic Masculinity (discourage boys from becoming men who know how to manage the risks needed to provide for and protect a family)
  •   Teach children how to avoid trauma with trigger warnings and safe spaces (teaches children to avoid facts and data that would promote rational thought leading to objective truth and an informed intuition)
  •   Censor Speech (so that "my truth" will not be confronted by "the truth")
All these assaults on the truth are carefully planned and promoted by those who want to tear down our country to replace it with a new paradigm.

Extreme Danger: "Boring" Election Issues.  Some of you may have heard that first New York City and now Washington D.C. passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections.  When I tell people in the real world about this, they don't understand what I mean at first because it sounds so outlandish because Americans are supposed to be electing American leaders — not people from the Dominican Republic, or Chinese nationals, and so forth.  We filed a lawsuit.  We've got four clients, and we're suing New York City. [...] Some people are trying to fundamentally transform how our elections are run, who is voting.  The reason they have allowed foreigners to vote in New York City elections, here is the important part, is that they are trying to normalize it.  They are trying to normalize foreigner voting in the United States.

2020: The Year the Ruling Class Took Control.  Is the world really a better place when a major league baseball and football team got rid of their names, a black woman wearing an apron was removed from bottles of maple syrup, and a squaw was removed from butter containers all in the name of social justice?  It's totally laughable, but these are all examples of the top-down cancel culture the country has been experiencing since 2020.  Every day there are numerous articles identifying the rotten woke establishment consolidating its control.

Hollowed Out.  Most military experts agree that the U.S. military is no longer capable of achieving its mission as mandated by national defense doctrines adopted by administrations of both parties.  President Biden is exacerbating the situation by focusing military strategy on progressive politics instead of military preparedness.  Even a Democratic controlled Congress overruled his proposed budget in order to increase spending and partially to fund programs required to reverse the decline.  While the U.S. military remains the world's most powerful military, it also has the broadest mission of any nation, with global security needs and commitments.  Those proud of U.S. capabilities fairly observe that no other nation could have evacuated 124,000 people in two weeks from Kabul.  Nonetheless, insufficient funding, slow modernization, and woke mandates are hollowing out the military's readiness and capacity to achieve its mission.

Democrats: Get your cities under control.  It cannot be said enough that if you are in a Democratic-run major American city right now, you should probably be making plans to get out as soon as possible: [...]

Biden Defends Multi-Trillion Dollar Scam: 'We Did So Much, Nobody Knows the Effects Yet'.  Oh, Joe, bless your clueless heart; you don't even see the irony. [...] Biden, on Tuesday [11/29/2022], defended his ill-fated "American Rescue Plan" for the zillionth time by arguing that the (at least) $1.9 trillion spending spree helped enable local governments to keep paying their employees (which does zero to help productivity).  He also boasted of his additional trillions in spending for government-subsidized health care, manufacturing, infrastructure, and so-called "green energy."  Biden's claim was not only nonsensical; it was a direct contradiction of Economics 101:  Injecting trillions of dollars into a struggling economy to chase a relatively limited supply of goods and services generally leads to an increase in inflation — not a decrease, as Team Biden disingenuously continues to claim.

Netherlands to forcefully shut down 3,000 farms.  The Great Reset is in full gear in the Netherlands as the country's government moves to shut down thousands of farms.  To comply with the European Union's radical climate laws, the Dutch government of World Economic Forum acolyte Mark Rutte will force up to 3,000 farms to shut down for good.  Farmers will be made an offer on their farms, which the government claims is "well over" market value.  According to nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal, the government purchase will be compulsory.  "There is no better offer coming," claimed van der Wal.  Recent EU nature preservation rules require member states to reduce emissions across sectors of the economy.  As one of Europe's most prominent farming nations, half of the Netherlands' emissions come from agricultural activity.  Rutte has warned that those who refuse to comply could face government force.

Joe Biden caused the diesel supply crisis he is complaining about.  During recent public appearances, President Joe Biden has continued to complain about energy prices as well as the potentially catastrophic shortage of diesel that has been forecast to hit the United States soon, particularly in the northeast.  Of course, he never takes the blame for any of this himself.  He instead tries to blame the "greedy" energy companies or, of course, Vladimir Putin.  He has called for bans on oil and gas exports and even suggested a mandate that diesel stocks be maintained at a higher level.  But a new report from the Institute for Energy Research addresses the actual root of these problems.  What we're facing is a significant loss in refinery capacity in the United States and its various territories.  We've lost more than a million barrels per day in production capacity, but rather than working to rebuild that capacity, the White House is issuing new edicts that will result in diminishing it further.

Over 70 Percent of Children Aged 7-12 [are] Now Afraid of Climate Change — Survey.  More than 70 percent of children aged 7-12 are now afraid of climate change according to the results of a survey.  More than seven in ten children aged 7-12 are now worried about climate change, research conducted by a UK-based start-up has reportedly found.  It comes amid reports from various experts that children and teenagers of various demographics are experiencing high rates of mental health difficulties, with one school councillor earlier this year saying that anxiety rates have hit an all-time high post-lockdown.  According to a report by Euronews, the survey — which polled 1,000 children born between 2010 and 2015 on their views regarding the environment — found that a total of 71 percent of respondents were now worried about environmental changes, including the changing climate.

The Editor says...
What other "environmental changes" are going on, other than the constantly (but imperceptibly) changing climate?  Shouldn't the public schools teach kids not to be afraid of trivial things that are beyond their control?  Are they teaching kids to worship the Earth and fear it at the same time?

Biden's Crushing Inflation Spikes Household Credit Card Debt to New Heights.  The Biden administration has worked overtime to gaslight Americans into believing everything is totally fine when, in fact, everything is not fine.  As a matter of fact, it's getting worse by the day.  And by "it's," I mean everything is going south.  The latest indication of yet another looming economic crisis — and no, I'm not talking about the developing housing crisis, the diesel fuel crisis, the home heating oil crisis, the inflation crisis, or the illegal immigration crisis — was revealed in a startling report this week regarding total household credit card debt, which has now increased by the most in 20 years, rising a staggering 15% from last year.

What is behind the rise in girls questioning their gender identity?  Earlier this year, a team of NHS researchers was asked to investigate why there has been such a huge rise in the number of adolescent biological girls seeking referrals to gender clinics.  The figures alone do seem remarkable.  According to a study commissioned by NHS England, 10 years ago there were just under 250 referrals, most of them boys, to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in London.  Last year, there were more than 5,000, which was twice the number in the previous year.  And the largest group, about two-thirds, now consisted of "birth-registered females first presenting in adolescence with gender-related distress", the report said.  The review team is looking into the causes behind "the considerable increase in the number of referrals" and the changing case mix, but is not expected to publish any findings until next year.

Americans Living under Communism.  Did you ever wonder what it would be like to live under communism?  Well, now you know.  The last two years have seen a parade of dumb and dumber policies, the kind you expect in totalitarian dictatorships.  The distinguishing traits are as follows: rulers show contempt for their serfs; policy wonks concoct endless stream of counterproductive ideas; and casual cruelty hurts everyone, day after day.  Here are a dozen examples.  Think back to Biden's decision to shut down the pipeline bringing petroleum from Canada.  Could anything be more irrational than shutting down a functioning pipeline, thus causing higher prices for everyone (and giving Putin the money he needed to invade a neighbor)?  Then we had the president wandering around foreign countries begging for their petroleum.  Millions of Americans knew for the first time what a totalitarian society feels like.  The top guy is nuts, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Are You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago?  Children in the 1950s recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, took part in schoolyard flag-raising, learned the evil of communism, respected their parents, were not exposed to inappropriate material in school or at home, attended church with their (two) parents, worked chores and odd jobs, and idolized their nation's Founders.  In sum, they grew up in an atmosphere of order and respect, and they were happier and healthier for it.  Freedom means the condition of acting and thinking on one's own, without restriction or regimentation, but if the polls are any indication, a large percentage of Americans now have little idea of what freedom entails.  Otherwise, they would not elect governors and representatives intent on expanding the size and power of government.

A Report on What Democrats Are Doing to [the] US Military.  At last a little light is shining on the social engineers who have been using wokeness to debilitate American armed forces.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) have issued a report finding that indoctrinating the US military with Critical Race Theory and LGBT ideology has significantly weakened it:  ["]The report finds that instructors at military academies use 'antiracist' approaches to education that direct soldiers to center their understanding of American society on an acknowledgment of its racist past and present, the report said.["]  "Antiracist" means "racist against America's core population."  ["]Kelisa Wing, the chief diversity equity and inclusivity officer at the Department of Defense, has tweeted she is 'exhausted with these White folx' and suggested Black people are incapable of racism.["]

Colorado Blues, and How to Get the State Back.  As of Nov 8, 2022, the Colorado GOP is effectively dead or at least on life support.  What was once a solid red state became purple, post-Watergate.  Today, Colorado is solid blue after the 2022 mid-terms and is the second consecutive election where Democrats control all state-wide offices. [...] Colorado's lurch left has not improved the lives of the average Coloradoan:  Colorado is ranked first in motor vehicle theft and second in property crimes.  From 2019-2022, robbery is up 15%, murder is up 30%, vandalism up 36%, arson up 56%, and auto theft up 111%.  Drug overdoses have doubled over the same period.  Colorado student proficiency test scores have been in steady decline for math and reading at the 4th and 8th grade since 2010.  Legalization of marijuana in 2012 didn't help either.  Colorado has one of the worst mental health rankings among states.  As Democrats have consolidated power, we are seeing the Californication of Colorado with new laws that allow for unrestricted abortions, expanded illegal immigration and taxpayer funded benefits, weak enforcement of gun laws, no cash bail, and significant restrictions on fracking and energy production.

The Worst Generation of Political Elites Ever.  In other words, in one generation America's finances have been ruined, at every level of government.  From a fiscal point of view, this is undoubtedly America's worst generation ever.  In our brief case study:  city spending went from $36.3 billion to $101.1 billion; the state from $79.7 billion to $222 billion; and the federal government from $2.0 trillion to $6.0 trillion — and the ultimate funding source, U.S. public debt, from $5.7 trillion to $30.6 trillion.  Among economists it was understood, and widely agreed upon, that public debt should never exceed 70% of GDP.  And yet here we are at 121%, higher than at the peak of WWII, rising rapidly, unsustainably, as far as the eye can see.  The Congressional Budget Office forecasts 2052 debt at 185% of GDP.  And make no mistake.  No amount of taxation can fix this problem, even leaving aside the ruinous impact of excess taxation on incentives, growth capital, innovation, personal freedom and prosperity.

The Voting Morons.  We now have two mentally damaged individuals in high office in this country, neither able to function as an independent adult.  How did they get there?  By being elected... with the addition of other means.  But it was the votes that created a situation where those "other means" could work.  In other words, the moron vote played a large role.  Tens of millions of voters who can't recognize a mentally crippled individual when they see one.  Who witness electoral cheating in front of their eyes as clearly as that of a three-card monte dealer but don't see it for what it is.  Who simply can't make the connection between the close of critical pipelines and gas costing six bucks at the pump.

Violent crime comes to previously peaceful and safe Martha's Vineyard.  And guess why.  Last Thursday, November 17, minutes after it opened for the day, a small bank in the island town of Vineyard Haven was invaded by three armed masked men.  They threatened, subdued and duct taped the employees and proceeded to make off in a stolen car with an undetermined amount of cash — after brandishing semiautomatic handguns to intimidate the bank personnel.  Nothing like this crime has ever been seen on Martha's Vineyard.  Previously, the crime rate on the small island off the southern coast of Massachusetts was almost non-existent, confined to things like DUIs and the occasional passing of a bad check.  But now, like many other blue communities that have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, things are changing. [...] This island-wide welcome mat has resulted in the presence of hundreds if not thousands of migrants who now seem to be close to outnumbering the American citizens — most of them working- or middle-class — who reside year-round on the island.  This radical and sudden demographic shift has been largely ignored by the island's news media.

Our dangerous diesel shortage [was] caused by anti-fossil-fuel politicians.  Diesel shortages could get worse in the coming months as European bans on Russian fuel kick in.  Because diesel is a global market this will likely mean even higher prices in the US and Europe, and severe shortages in poorer regions.  Because diesel is a global market there are many contributing causes to diesel shortages.  The fundamental global cause is the global anti-fossil-fuel movement, which has suppressed all the fundamentals of diesel supply:  oil investment, oil production, oil refining, oil transport. [...] Instead of unleashing our diesel potential, clueless anti-fossil-fuel politicians destroyed it by
  [#1]   Preventing us from importing Canadian oil well-suited to our refineries
  [#2]   `Preventing or shutting down diesel-producing capacity in the US
  [#3]   Threatening new diesel investments

As Shortages Persist Under Biden, It's Time To Ask: Is This On Purpose?  Did the United States suddenly become a socialist basket case?  It's hard not to come to that conclusion after reading about the endless shortages plaguing the nation.  Each of which President Joe Biden either seems clueless to resolve or determined to make worse.  Let's start with the biggest one: the shortage of diesel fuel.  While Biden was busy draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down gas prices before the midterm elections, the real worry was that supplies of diesel fuel have been running short.  Two years after the short-lived COVID lockdowns ended, diesel inventories continued to trend downward to their lowest levels since 2008.  The cost for a gallon of diesel fuel is 46% higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA, and now costs more than $5 a gallon.

Germany [is] cutting back meat production to fight global warming.  Germany is still caught up in the demands of the climate change lobby to reduce its carbon footprint drastically in the coming years.  One part of this initiative, similar to calls we've seen from activists in the United States, was a mandate to reduce all livestock on German farms by 50%.  Farmers have been protesting the decision in the same way they recently did in the Netherlands this summer, but the initiative is moving forward beginning this year.  Now, to the great surprise of nobody who has been paying attention, the German Meat Industry Association has reported that the country will be facing a severe meat shortage by the time spring arrives and consumers should expect prices to skyrocket, potentially doubling in some cases.  It would appear that some people in the German government have never heard of something called the law of supply and demand.  But at least they're going to defeat global warming, right?

Maybe denial is the driving factor in the 2022 election outcome.  Democrat voters are not a monolithic bloc.  Yes, some are hard-core ideologues who swooned over Bernie Sanders.  Some are recipients of public assistance and dependent on Democrat party largesse.  Some are students and recent graduates majoring in insurrection.  But they're not all community organizers, and they don't all hate America.  Most are normal, center-left people who habitually vote Democrat. [...] But consider for a moment what the habitual Democrat would have had to acknowledge to vote Republican on November 8th:
  [#1]   That the President of the United States is a doddering mediocrity.
  [#2]   That the person (or persons) responsible for the policies and decisions emanating from the White House is a matter of conjecture.
  [#3]   That the administration's policies are blatantly extremist and being implemented with ruinous effect.
  [#4]   That proper stewardship of the nation's fiscal and energy resources is utterly lacking — to the point of precipitating a foreseeable crisis.
  [#5]   That large numbers of inner-city youth, trapped in broken homes or broken schools, are not being taught respect, self-control, or the difference between right and wrong.
  [#6]   That the freedoms, values, and checks and balances on which this country was founded are being left grossly unprotected.
  [#7]   That despite mounting challenges we are not presently capable of deterring our adversaries or defeating them on the battlefield.
Perhaps it's all too much to contemplate.  The habitual Democrat voter prefers to remain incongruously oblivious.

Today's blacklisted American: Half of today's students support the death penalty for some speech.  This is no longer a land of the free:  According to a new poll, half of today's college students now believe that the death penalty is justified for some people should they dare express an opinion that offends.  Specifically, the students were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement:  ["]Violence in response to offensive speech is not a new phenomenon.  In some cultures, some types of offensive speech even merit the death penalty.  Some speech can be so offensive in certain cases that it merits such harsh punishment.["]  [A]cross the board, 43% to 55% of students from private and public schools, from all types of majors, from all levels of income, and from across the political spectrum, all agreed with this statement.  The results were remarkably consistent.  Tolerance was not their watchword, but oppression and dictatorship.  If you say something that offends, half of today's students feel justified in calling for your death.

The Editor says...
I wonder how many of the same "students" oppose the death penalty for murder or treason.

There Was No Cheating, Peasant!  The educated class said they cared about the workers.  But they let the workers price themselves out of the market with labor unions, and now the midwestern industrial heartland is a Rust Belt.  You did it, liberals.  The educated class said they cared about the Negroes.  But they swaddled them in welfare so that, by 2010, 72 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock vs. whites at 36 percent.  Eeevil Jim Crow segregationists couldn't have cooked up a better way to wreck black Americans.  You did it, liberals. [...] The educated class decided to help students pay for university education with student debt.  So universities hired a bunch of administrators and cranked up the tuition.  Now a whole generation of young people is drowning in debt.  You did it, liberals.

The 2022 Mid-Terms Exposed the Existence of Two Americas and the Overwhelming Importance of the 2024 Election.  The United States is currently plagued with uncontrolled inflation spiraling into a severe recession, crime is rampant in the nation's cities, the borders are open and uncontrolled, the standard of living is rapidly deteriorating, society is sinking into a morass of premeditated cultural decline, and an increasingly bleak future awaits the vast majority of Americans.  Yet fifty percent of 2022 voters chose to continue this state of affairs by opting to elect or re-elect the politicians that have created or abetted this ongoing national devastation.  Far too many, particularly the younger generations who voted overwhelmingly Democrat, dwell in mindless loyalty to a collectivist tribe, its leaders and its attendant ideology.  In their addled thinking this fidelity outweighs the well-being of themselves or the nation and its citizenry.

In 2022, the GOP had the most favorable political environment ever.
  •   80% of Americans say America is on the wrong track.
  •   58% do not support President Joe Biden.
  •   62% do not support Vice President Kamala Harris.
  •   Democrats have caused the highest inflation in 40 years.
  •   Americans said inflation was their number one issue in this election.
  •   Democrat policies have led to sky-high gas and fuel prices.
  •   Democrats persist in doubling down in their war on fossil fuels.
  •   Democrats continue their anti-police rhetoric.
  •   Democrat efforts to defund the police have contributed to rampant crime and murder in many major cities at epidemic levels.
  •   Democrat open border policies have led to 100,000+ fentanyl/illegal drug deaths in 2021, [...]
  •   Since Joe Biden became president, at least 5,000,000 illegal aliens have responded to his open border policy and invaded America.
  •   Democrats no longer try to hide the extremism of abortion on demand for any reason and up to the moment of birth.
  •   Democrats now require taxpayers to pay for these abortions.
  •   President Biden's abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan led to the worst foreign policy defeat in American history.
  •   Our enemies in Russia, Iraq, and China see that we have a weak, ineffective, and mentally challenged president.

Three Primary Factors Stopped That Red Wave.  The American public, having been fed a steady diet of leftism and dumbed-down curricula from nursery school through graduate school, no longer understands civics or economics, and sees our form of government as somehow inferior to European socialism.  European socialism is only made possible by the U.S. Defense umbrella in the form of NATO, but few understand that distinction.  As a result, Americans don't see the threat to our freedoms that vaccine and mask mandates and lockdowns were and are.  They also don't understand that someone must pay the bill for government handouts, either directly as confiscatory taxes or indirectly as rampant inflation or hyperinflation.  As a result, they tend to vote for the person who promises them something for nothing.

America's Death Wish.  Let's get real: The American people are electing the pols they deserve, demagogues who mirror the woke prejudices of an increasingly propagandized people.  According to the media, "threats to democracy" constituted one of the top concerns of the people.  How lame.  Large segments of the American public clearly swallowed Joe Biden's self-serving malarkey on that subject whole.  Never mind that Biden was clearly referring not to authentic threats to democracy but challenges to regnant liberalism.  Biden is not afraid for democracy but afraid of it.  He desires a one-party state.  The relative success of the Democrats on Tuesday is a measure not of the public's rationality but of its submission to wokeness.  Those in the 18 [to] 29 demographic voted for the Democrats overwhelmingly — a tribute not to their wisdom but to their lack of it.  These voters entered the booth after receiving a warped education at colleges and universities swimming in wokeness.  It is nearly impossible to impress upon this generation the dangers of liberalism.  They simply shrug at any description of them.

The Inflation Reduction Election.  Inflation is hands down the most important issue on the minds of Americans on the eve of the midterm elections.  An Economist/YouGov poll taken of 1,500 American adults in the first week of November found that 68 percent say that they will be thinking about inflation "a lot" when casting a vote in this year's election. [...] The Biden administration has struggled to present a palatable program for fighting inflation.  There was the infamous Inflation Reduction Act, which every reputable economist agreed would do little or nothing to reduce inflation.  According to the Economist/YouGov poll, just 32 percent of Americans say they approve of President Biden's handling of inflation.  Fifty-four percent say they disapprove of Biden on inflation, with 40 percent saying they strongly disapprove.

Biden yells 'There is no more drilling!' just months after claiming he never shut down energy production.  Is there any lie that's just too brazen for old Joe Biden?  Seems not. [...] Biden has blamed Vladimir Putin, OPEC's barons, Big Oil, global warming, Republicans, and all other things he could think of for high prices at the pump.  The one thing he won't do is consider what Americans can see with their own eyes: that before President Trump left office, gas prices were about $2 a gallon.  Now they are $5 and $6 a gallon in California, and well above $3 a gallon in the rest of America.  That's "lived experience."  The clearest reason for that is Biden's policies to halt drilling.  Back in January 2021, Biden signed off on an executive order dictating a ban of oil and gas drilling on federal lands.  Fox News has a string of other bans and hamperings he's done to stop energy production and drive pump prices sky-high.

Seriously, can anyone name a well-run Democratic city?  Can anybody in any Democratic-run city honestly say that their lives — and city — have improved over the last couple of years?  That's a slightly easier question.  As New Yorkers go to the polls it is also a slightly devastating one to ask.  Because it has a devastating answer.  I dare even the most die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat to say, "Oh, New York has never been better.  In fact, it's just getting better and better."  Does anyone really believe that?  Is there a single person out there who can really say that with a straight face?  As they survey the crime in our city, the homelessness, the waste and rats.  And I'm not even talking about the incumbents of City Hall.  Does anyone think that this great city has become greater in the last two years?  The stats in New York speak for themselves.  Ignore the nightmare year of 2020, and just look at the increase in crime during the last year.  Between July 2021 and July 2022 shooting incidents in New York increased by almost 14%.  The number of murders increased by almost 35%.

It isn't a "failed presidency" if all this destruction is intentional.
Biden is gaslighting Americans about his failed presidency.  The Biden Administration will be known to history for many things:  an open border and its deadly consequences, the abandonment of Afghanistan, weakness that led to catastrophe in Europe, skyrocketing inflation, and the use of federal law enforcement to target political opponents.  The catalog of infamy goes on.  Above all, though, this administration may be remembered for its duplicity — its continual, shameless "gaslighting" of the American people.  Biden, his team, and his sycophantic media supporters repeatedly tell us that "all is well" where it manifestly is not.  No matter how bad things become in the nation, no matter how many people suffer, reality has no purchase on the ideological bubble of this White House.  That is why, in these midterm elections, the American people must deliver to Joe Biden an unequivocal message:  that they refuse to be gaslit, that they are not buying what he is selling.

Gov. Hochul's funding, progressive drug policies transform East Harlem into Zombieland.  Progressive policies funded and foisted on the Big Apple by Gov. Hochul and her left-wing allies have caused a legion of drug-addicted zombies to descend on East Harlem and transform parts of the neighborhood into lawless, open-air shooting galleries, neighbors and critics told The [New York] Post.  The real-life horror show plays out daily in the neighborhood's gritty streets where The Post witnessed dozens of raving, hunched-over junkies commandeering East 126th Street — now the home of a controversial public-injection site — as drug dealers hovered nearby like vultures.  Others along Park Avenue down to East 114th Street have been spotted nodding out, splayed on the sidewalk, and injecting themselves in the neck or through jeans in broad daylight.

The Floyd Effect.  Democratic politicians have been flailing about looking for a way to get off the hook for the historic increase in murder and car crash mayhem ever since our respectable class' leaders declared "the racial reckoning" was at hand following the unfortunate expiration of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.  For example, New York's Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, suddenly finding herself in a tight race with Lee Zeldin largely over the crime surge, kvetched to Zeldin in a debate about crime, "I don't know why that's so important to you." [...] Before getting to the red state vs. blue state issue that everybody wants to talk about, let's look at the national murder trend, which has been jaw-dropping. [...] The argument I find most persuasive for why black-on-black shootings erupted during the anti-cop mania of 2020 is that when our society's leadership told police to not pull over blacks so often, they obeyed.  With reduced fear of being stopped and searched, blacks then started carrying illegal handguns more and driving worse.  Thus, the black car crash death rate also exploded in June 2020:  [Chart]

Why suburban women are flocking to the GOP: As simple as A,B,C.  To hear Democratic candidates, and the party's media cheerleaders, talk now, nobody ever supported defunding the police.  But, of course, Democrats across the board did just that, and GOP candidates, and honest media, have been replaying the video.  In a spasm of post-George Floyd mass hysteria, the political system, and in particular the governments of Democratic-run cities, made drastic cutbacks in police protection, installed revolving-door, no-bail arraignment systems and encouraged the proliferation of homeless encampments and open-air drug markets in many areas.  Unsurprisingly, the result was surging crime.  Around America, downtown businesses have closed, and people — especially women — have felt unsafe in their own neighborhoods.  Crime is now a major issue with the electorate, and even among black voters, the alleged beneficiaries of police defunding, only 17% support defunding the police, per a recent Grio/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

Even Biden Thinks The Economy Is Going To Crash Next Year.  David Strom at Hot Air noticed something in the Democrats' campaign messaging as the midterm elections draw near.  Namely, the emergence of a talking point about how if Republicans win control of Congress they will "crash the economy."  There's only one reason to say this.  Democrats know they've set the economy on course to crash and they're hoping to blame Republicans when it does.

Democrats Declared War on Democracy Through COVID Tyranny.  Some of us were sounding the alarms on COVID tyranny when it was first starting.  Lockdown policies were never about saving lives but a test to see how many liberties and rights the government could take away without much pushback by the population.  Fear is the main path tyrants take in trying to strip freedom from their citizens.  Scare citizens enough and they will enslave themselves to whatever dictates the dear savior will come up with.  This is replaying itself as we approach the November 8 election.  Democrats destroyed entire families through their COVID lockdown policies which eliminated businesses, put stress on homes, and harmed the intellectual development of children.  Those are years that will be hard to recover, if at all.  COVID tyrants are hoping Americans forget their debacle in handling the pandemic and the tyranny that so many experienced because of it.  Families were unable to visit loved ones.  Churches were shut down, some never to reopen.  Businesses, once staples and pillars of the community, suddenly vanished and are now vacant and rotting with overgrown weeds and mold.

The Blue City Murder Problem.  Those on the Left know that their soft-on-crime policies have wreaked havoc in the cities where they have implemented those policies.  It is not hard to understand why "reforms" such as ending cash bail, defunding the police, refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, letting thousands of convicted felons out of prison early, significantly cutting the prison population, and other "progressive" ideas have led to massive spikes in crime — particularly violent crime, including murder — in the communities where those on the Left have implemented them.  Left-wing politicians and their backers recognize that rising crime rates and the lack of a general sense of safety that follows are a problem for them and their chances for reelection.  In fact, recent polls show that voters care a lot about rising crime — an issue that is second only to rising, rampant inflation and the lackluster economy.  So the Left is engaging in political traditions as old as time: obfuscation, finger pointing, and blame shifting.

Will Lucy Move the Football Again?  While the meme of "most important election in our lifetimes" is overused, just a brief review of the past 22 months since the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and the White House would lead one to think that it might just be true of these mid-term elections:
  •   From energy independence (no longer relying on the Arabs who hate us) and even an exporter of energy, we're now experiencing gas prices two and three times the per gallon price at the end of 2020, plus the prospect of rolling electrical blackouts this winter and beyond, not to mention the higher costs of food and everything else due to higher gas prices.
  •   From the most booming economy in over 50 years, with inflation barely over 1%, we're now facing near-record high inflation of over 8%, while the Democrats (and many treacherous Republicans) voting to spend trillions we don't have, exacerbating the problem.
  •   From a relatively peaceful, safe society, in under two years we have devolved into a crime-ridden hellscape comparable to the horrors we've witnessed in Third World countries.  Democrat district attorneys who will not enforce the law, releasing violent felons without bail to again prey on innocent citizens, have given criminals free rein, knowing they won't be held accountable for their crimes.
  •   While the public schools in the U.S. have long been grievously underperforming, at least they weren't teaching our kids to hate us, to celebrate "gender diversity" and to believe that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.  Nor were they taught to distrust anyone who doesn't look like them, as Critical Race Theory is now doing. [...]
  •   Over five million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border since Biden took office.  Most are receiving health care, housing, food allotments, etc., paid for by us, the taxpayers, because the Democrats want more voters to ensure they keep political power.
But all these things, and others, are well-documented and reported upon.  The question is, "What are the Republicans going to actually do about it if they regain control of the Congress?"

Don't Cry For Me, America.  We've seen this movie before.  The Democrats' populist giveaway plans can't possibly work, because government bankrupts everything it touches.  History teaches us that ObamaCare and the myriad of government's unfunded entitlement programs will be utter, complete disasters.  Today's Democrats are guilty of more than stupidity; they are enslaving future generations to poverty and misery.  And they will be long gone when it all implodes.  They will be as cold and dead as Juan Perón when the piper must ultimately be paid.  Throughout history, Democrats' Marxist templates for wealth redistribution have proven fatal for civilized societies.

America Is On The Cusp Of A Fundamental Transformation.  No matter how bad Obama's actions while in office, nothing he did compares to Joe Biden.  Since being installed as president, Biden has done an insane number of things that simply make no sense from a rational perspective.  Literally the first thing Biden did was reduce the amount of energy available to Americans. [...] Then, of course, there is the economy.  With the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, Biden poured trillions of dollars into the economy and drove inflation to levels not seen in 40 years.  Everything, from energy to housing to food to clothing... virtually every single thing Americans use has gone up in price since Biden became president, often by giant leaps.  As a consequence, Americans are fighting to stay afloat financially, with 60% worse off than they were a year ago and a staggering 40% of businesses missing their rent payments in October.

Back to the Carter economy.  The latest edition of "Joe Biden: Bad Ideas" came yesterday when Biden stepped up his attacks on Big Oil and suggested that unless they lower prices he would push to implement a Windfall Profits Tax on the companies, essentially seizing their profits as a punishment for making money.  Such taxes are notoriously idiotic, and even the dimwits in the White House must know that.  It seems like Biden is trying to ruin the economy, and we have hit the point where we have to actually consider that to be a possibility.  Everything he has done to the economy has made things worse, and after a while you have to consider whether it is intentional.

The Cart Before the Horse.  We knew from the get go that freedom was the ticket, that government was the enemy, that God was the foundation on which this nation must be built.  A large portion of our citizenry, unfortunately, has forgotten these things, and the latest generations never learned them in the first place.  We've lost track of the paradoxical fact that you can't have freedom without law.  Not only that, but you can't have law without punishment.  We're seeing that right now as defunded police departments and lax district attorneys are allowing criminals to roam our streets with no fear of retribution.  Inner city dwellers are no longer free to leave their homes and run their businesses.

Every Day is Halloween Now.  Nobody wanted to live in a world in which there's no way to know what is real and what isn't.  But that's the world we live in now.  Costumes have become the norm and normalcy is the aberration.  Men dress up as women.  An NAACP president turned out to be a white woman who identifies as black.  New York State Senator Julia Salazar is an antisemite who identifies as Jewish.  And it's revealed that prominent Indian activist figures, Marlon Brando's Oscar night princess, a prominent academic, a poet, were just white people even though they took to dressing up as Indians all year round.  Identity politics values what people identify as more than who they are.  Magical thinking leads people to believe that life is just a costume that you can change when you want to.  In a world that is becoming increasingly unreal, it's easy to think of reality as endlessly malleable.

Have Democrats Lost Interest in the Working Man?  The Biden-Harris regime began — Day One — with a flurry of executive orders, cancelling the contracts in place for ongoing work on the Keystone XL pipeline.  Most were union construction jobs.  Thousands of workers were thrown out of work on the spot — no notice, no severance — just because the incoming regime's green agenda didn't square with the idea of a pipeline moving Canadian fuel southward.  In state after state along the route, materials were left sitting where they were, work unfinished, people fired and forced to move elsewhere to find new jobs. [...] Drilling, exploration, R&D, everything in the critical oil and gas sector that requires any federal permit, from drilling on federal lands, to drilling on private lands that require government access or government authorization of any kind, slowed to a crawl instantly.  For all intents and purposes, this development just isn't happening anymore.  And that's why gasoline has more than doubled in price.

America's energy crisis is mostly US Democrats' fault.  [Thread reader]  America is experiencing our worst energy crisis since the 1970s.  High oil prices are making driving expensive, while high natural gas prices are making heating and electricity far more expensive — above all in the Northeast, where some ratepayers might see prices >2X last winter's.  Here's a chart of residential natural gas prices over the last several winters from the US Energy Information Administration.  Notice the massive spike projected for this winter — meaning record heating bills for many.  [Chart]  Democrats are claiming there's nothing they could have done about today's oil and natural gas prices.  These prices, they say, are outside America's control because they are largely set by global markets.  In fact, had Ds been pro-oil/gas our prices would be much lower.

The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.  The sick and well alike were quarantined through the use of stay-at-home orders, domestic capacity limits, and business, school, and church shutdowns.  This occurred not only in the U.S., but worldwide — with the notable exception of perhaps five nations and the state of South Dakota.  Needless to say, the consequences were profound.  Coercion can be used to turn off an economy.  But given the resulting trauma, turning an economy back on is not so easy.  That is why, 30 months later, we are experiencing the longest period of declining real income since the end of World War II, a health crisis, an education crisis, an exploding national debt, 40-year high inflation, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets, a breakdown of international trade, a dramatic collapse in consumer confidence, and a dangerous level of political division.

New York, New England Begin Rationing Heating Oil — Before Peak Winter Has Even Hit.  Biden's war on oil has consequences, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.  We've already gotten a taste of it nationwide with persistent, sky-high gas prices.  In California, we felt it this summer as our power grid was stretched to capacity by heat waves and we were subject to rolling brown-outs along with warnings not to use appliances or charge electric cars.  How very First World. [...] Bloomberg is reporting that the rationing of heating oil is already underway, despite it not even yet being November.  The reason:  stockpiles are at 30 percent of their normal levels. [...] The bottom line?  Americans will pay almost 30 percent more to heat their homes than last year — the most in 25 years.  Biden will continue to blame Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine for our oil woes, and scold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for refusing to bend the knee and pump more oil, but it's Joe's own fault we're in this mess.

The Economy Will Never Prosper Under Biden: Here's Why.  The White House has also promised to use "every lever at its disposal — including regulatory action — to deliver on the president's priorities, including containing the pandemic, driving a durable economic recovery, advancing equity, and combating climate change."  We are already seeing the fruits of Biden's approach.  A recession in the first half of the year.  Sky-high inflation.  Widespread despair.  What the left can't seem to understand is that when government gets active, businesses get passive.  They become more risk averse.  Compliance costs weigh them down.  Long-term investments become problematic if you don't know what the rules will be down the road.  This is one big reason why energy production has never recovered after the pandemic — the oil and gas industry has no idea what lies ahead.  So, as Biden's regulators descend upon the land, the economy will — as it was throughout Barack Obama's eight years — be on a long and dreary slog.  Indeed, Biden's regulatory zeal will probably ramp up if Republicans win big in November, since his legislative agenda will be caput.

Misplaced Compassion Puts Lives in Jeopardy.  The shooter, Nestor Hernandez, was there to visit his girlfriend, who had just given birth to his child.  Hernandez is a 30-year-old lifelong criminal with a rap sheet going back to his teens.  He had been in and out of the Dallas criminal justice system for such charges as robbery and felony assault before he was twenty, and he earned his first serious jail time — an eight-year sentence — after a violent burglary in which he and his accomplice repeatedly beat up a woman to gain access to her apartment and car.  For that one, Nestor Hernandez pled guilty in September 2015 to "aggravated robbery," which could have won him anywhere from five to 99 years in jail.  They gave him eight.  Only they didn't.  If he'd served the full eight years, he'd still have been in jail.  He wouldn't have been free to acquire a girlfriend, get her pregnant, visit her at the hospital, beat her up, and kill two hospital employees.  So what happened?  The system decided to show "compassion" to this model prisoner with a violent history, a rap sheet going back to his childhood, and gang tattoos on his face and neck.  They didn't even make him stay the full eight years but let him out of jail on October 20, 2021, after just six years.  They installed an ankle bracelet and called it "parole."  It was this choice that enabled him to put this girlfriend in a position where he could visit her hospital room and start killing innocent bystanders on October 22, just a year after he was freed.

Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami Metros See Fastest Inflation.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the consumer price index rose 8.2% in September compared with the year before, but that national average hides the fact that prices are rising faster and higher in certain parts of the nation.  Breaking the country into the same subregions used by the Census Bureau, the rate of price increases that consumers pay for goods ranges from 7.2% in the Northeast to 9.6% in the Mountain States.  More local measures show an even greater range in price increases, from 5.7% in metropolitan San Francisco to 13% in metropolitan Phoenix.

Now Mired In Crime, The City That Kicked Off The 'Defund The Police' Movement Is Struggling To Recruit New Officers.  Minneapolis is having a tough time restaffing its police force amid a crime wave after officers left en masse following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, according to The Associated Press.  Then-Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said the department lost almost 300 officers by October 2021 to causes including retirement, resignation and disability leave for claimed post-traumatic stress disorder following Floyd's death and large-scale protests, according to Newsweek.  The department has reportedly seen applicant numbers drop from 292 in 2019 to 57 this year, with its September graduating recruiting class only featuring six people, according to the AP.  "In Minneapolis, with what we've been through for the last couple years, for you to be here and have an interest in law enforcement ... I'm impressed with every one of you that's here," training officer Matthew Hobbs told attendees at a March recruitment information session, the outlet reported.

America's crime epidemic keeps growing thanks to radical leftist prosecutors and their social experiments.  The United States has a crime epidemic, and it is being further fueled by certain prosecutors who are more interested in radical leftist ideologies than in enforcing the law.  These prosecutors are becoming disturbingly more common in many states and communities, and they have no reservations about sacrificing the safety and security of their residents to perform their deeply misguided and ridiculously dangerous social experiments.  In many jurisdictions around the United States, an increasing number of violent criminals are being released from custody as they await their trials — or given mere slaps on the wrists in plea deals that do nothing to rehabilitate them or to protect the community.  This is a recipe for disaster and anarchy, and cities across the country are paying a catastrophic price as a result.

Biden's Destroying the Economy.  Is It Intentional?  Here are seven Biden administration steps to undermine an economy and a society from within. [...]
  [#1]   Dismantle the nation's energy supply
  [#2]   Don't enforce the border
  [#3]   Devalue the nation's currency through inflation
  [#4]   Destroy the nation's finances by running up the debt by multiple trillions of dollars
  [#5]   Divide rather than unite the nation
  [#6]   Dumb down and indoctrinate our children with anti-American propaganda in the schools and media
  [#7]   Decriminalize a lot

Biden Is 'Buying Votes' Ahead of Midterm Elections With Policy Decisions: Rep. Lauren Boebert.  [Scroll down] In 2021, when green energy policies caused gasoline prices to soar, Biden directed the Department of Energy to release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which amounts to about two and a half days' worth of the nation's consumption.  When gas prices continued to climb, Biden dipped into the reserves several more times.  By July 29, the SPR had reached its lowest level since 1985.  As of Oct. 14, the SPR had about 405 million barrels, down from 638 million barrels in January 2021 when Biden took office.  Congress created the SPR in 1975 to protect the United States from volatility in oil markets and to ensure an inventory of energy supplies in emergencies, such as war or natural disasters.  The United States just reached the end of peak hurricane season, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently threatened NATO forces with nuclear weapons.  Boebert said Biden and Democrat lawmakers are skirting legislative procedure to buy the votes they haven't earned over the past two years.

Biden's Next Crisis: Home Heating Oil Rationing Begins in Northeast, and It's Not Even Winter Yet.  It looks like President Joe Biden might get his winter of death after all, and it's not because of the unvaccinated.  If you live in the Northeast, you know that even in normal times, heating oil bills constitute a significant expense because winters are usually brutal.  Unfortunately, this year could be the worst year ever for residents of the region hoping to adequately heat their homes.  Not only are heating oil prices through the roof on anti-fossil fuel President Joe Biden's watch, but even for those who have the funds to stock up, it doesn't really matter:  heating oil rationing is already taking place.  Rationing.  Like toilet paper and baby formula rationing.  Why is all this rationing happening on Biden's watch?  For the record, we never once worried about rationing under former President Donald Trump.

The Democrats' Bizarro World.  [Scroll down] Is that not what the Democrat Party has created right here in America, transforming a once prosperous, strong, united, and safe nation into a debt-laden, militarily weak, socially divided, and increasingly dangerous society?  Here are some of the Bizarro policies and beliefs inflicted on us by the neo-socialist, globalist, anti-American Democrat Party over the past few decades:  Although leftists and atheists may deny it, the writings of the Founders make clear that the Classical Liberalism upon which this nation was founded stemmed from Judeo-Christian principles.  The self-discipline, respect for law and order, and Protestant work ethic that helped build the U.S. created the most prosperous and militarily mighty nation in history.  But the leftist Democrats can't have that, for Christian principles block their irresponsible and increasingly perverse demands, so God had to go, leading to the continual erosion of Judeo-Christian principles, plunging our nation into the current chaos.

Our Enemies Walk Among Us.  All the poverty you see around you, all the lack, the financial pain in the faces you pass, the lost businesses of the last three years, the titanic risk in the markets, the actual recession, all of it has been engineered.  We all, all of us, every single one of us, should be three times as wealthy, and three times as creative.  The most visible result of their malfeasance is homelessness.  Which has been engineered to shame you.  Entirely.  100%.  Every time you drive by some poor soul dying on the sidewalk, you are meant to feel
  1. Guilt
  2. Anger at the system (capitalism) and
  3. an urge to vote for the compassionate left who promise to work only for the dispossessed.
It's a psy-op.  It is why the homeless population is front and center in the richest, most beautiful city in the world:  San Francisco.  This fact is meant to shout that no matter how much money private enterprise generates, capitalism means losers, addicts, madmen and women, because our system is brutal and must be changed.  San Francisco's beauty and reputation mean that its homeless catastrophe is publicized all over the world.

In Ukraine, The Democrats Have Locked Us Into A Pointless, Dangerous War.  Our southern border is being overrun by cartels, drugs, and illegal aliens.  It is, from almost any perspective, an invasion.  Rampant crime is wreaking havoc on our cities.  Inflation is out of control, and the price of gasoline continues to rise.  Is it possible that there are bigger fish to fry than spending untold billions that we don't have to protect borders that are not ours?  How well have our past efforts at policing the world worked out for us?  Well, there was Vietnam.  We know how well that worked out.  Then there's Afghanistan.  That's still an open wound that will not heal anytime soon.  And who could forget Iraq and its WMDs?  It's not exactly a stellar list of accomplishments.  It is, however, the very definition of insanity that we would want to try this again with a country that controls the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. [...] Joe Biden says we will support Ukraine for "as long as it takes."  As long as it takes to do what?  What is the objective?

Why Everything Is a Mess and You're Paying For It.  There's a reason inflation and the economy are the most prominent issues in voters' minds:  For almost two years, the cost of every last thing you buy has been going up at a pace that considerably outstrips the (nominal) growth in wages.  What that means is simple: Your standard of living is going down.  And the electorate correctly senses that our real problems have only just begun.  The consensus is that because inflation is continuing at a high if not ruinous rate, the Fed will continue to have to raise interest rates to suppress business activity and consumer demand.  That means we're in for a recession.  The only realistic questions among those willing to face reality are how deep and for how long.  Among the MSM, of course, it's impolite to say "recession," so you don't hear it that much (and won't until after November 8).  The only things it's polite to say are "abortion" and "January 6."

Biden's Diesel Fuel Supply Crisis Could Soon Cripple America in Ways Never Before Seen.  Oil prices and President Joe Biden's continued draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) have dominated the headlines over the past few weeks, but analysts say a more impactful and serious crisis on the energy front looms:  a diesel fuel shortage.  Diesel doesn't get as much of the limelight as oil and gas, but it should because diesel fuel is the industrial lifeblood of the United States, and the price of diesel alone probably has a more significant impact on inflation and the prices you're paying at the grocery store over any other factor.  Without ample amounts of diesel, semi-trucks don't move, farms are shut down, and critical manufacturing sectors are crippled.

Top Democrat Admits 'All of Us Knew' Their Party's Policies Would Cause Inflation.  For many, many months, Joe Biden has blamed everyone else for inflation.  He once falsely claimed that "inflation started under Trump" and that inflation was was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  More recently, he's tried to blame the Russia war in Ukraine for inflation, which Biden dubbed "Putin's price hike."  Back in June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she and Biden were wrong about the impact inflation would have.  "Well, look, I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take.  As I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that I didn't — at the time didn't fully understand," Yellen told CNN.  "But we recognize that now."

The Editor says...
If you don't "fully understand" what could happen before it does happen, you shouldn't be the Treasury Secretary.

Democrat Senate Incumbents Refuse Responsibility for Fueling Inflation, Gas Prices.  Four embattled Senate Democrat incumbents have set a pattern of refusing to take responsibility for soaring inflation and gas prices that have occurred in record-setting fashion under their leadership. [...] On Thursday, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who is losing in the polls to Republican Adam Laxalt, claimed gas prices are spiking because oil companies are not producing enough oil.  "Instead of increasing supply, they're taking in profits," she tweeted.  Masto did not mention that gas prices have spiked since Democrats regained control of the executive branch, legislative branch, and administration state in 2021.  Nor did she mention President Joe Biden's campaign promise to reduce oil drilling.  In the last two years, the Biden administration has succeeded in driving up private and public financing costs of oil drilling, halting drilling on public lands, and canceling the Keystone pipeline.

Fists of furry.  A vigilant group of parents and kids in Jefferson County have been hounding school officials about the bizarre presence of "furries" in Colorado middle schools and high schools since February 2022.  This is not a "GOP talking point" or an election-season ploy.  This is not a joke or satire.  It's real, it's disruptive, and it's sick. [...] Back in February, a parent had informed JeffCo's "chief student success officer" Matt Palaoro about rabid furries at Wayne Carle Middle School who wore "cat/dog ears, tails, fur gloves, collars, and leashes" while threatening peers who objected.  The parent's son reported that the costumed students would "hiss, bark, scratch, and meow" at students who objected to the behavior.  Another child reported that the herd of furries would "walk on all 4s in the hallway" and "also eat with their face in their food."  Back in March, parents at Drake Middle School in Jeffco met with principal Melinda Feir to alert her of the classroom disruptions caused by the human pet parade.

CEO blasts San Francisco as 'city of chaos,' closes store over rampant crime.  The CEO of a popular clothing brand Cotopaxi is closing the company's only San Francisco store due to "organized theft rings" and a lack of safety in the city, he announced this week.  CEO Davis Smith announced the closure in a lengthy post on social media, saying the location faces regular attacks by thieves with virtually no response from law enforcement.  "We are closing the store due to rampant organized theft and lack of safety for our team.  Our store is hit by organized theft rings several times per week.  They brazenly enter the store and grab thousands of dollars of product and walk out," Smith wrote.  "We started keeping the door locked and opening it only for customers, but even then, they'll have a woman go to the door, and then hiding individuals rush into the store as soon as the door opens.  Our team is terrified.  They feel unsafe.  Security guards don't help because these theft rings know that security guards won't/can't stop them," he added.

Eight things that killed the Democrat Party.  [#8] Crime:  Because of the Democrat rule in blue cities, crime is not being prosecuted in the name of some weird kind of reparations.  What the Democrats don't get is that they hurt their own innocent population by allowing criminals a get-out-jail-free card, and by not prosecuting at all.  Their racist policies hurt the very people they claim to want to help.  Why are they doing this?  To deliberately create chaos in the execution of anti-white racism.  The one solution to the rising crime rate, the prosecution and incarceration of criminals, is the one thing blue cities under Democrat rule will not do.  Mayor Lightfoot makes weird and demonic home videos of herself dancing around in what appears to be a drugged stupor.  Rather than be a responsible mayor, she has totally ignored the death-by-violence rate in Chicago.  This is another very clear example of Democrats doing what they do best; destroying things.

New England facing natural gas shortages, rolling blackouts this winter.  Winter is on the way here in the northeast, as I was reminded when the local weatherman told me that it might snow here this week.  In the middle of October.  But the annoyance of potentially having to break out the snow shovels before Halloween has arrived is small potatoes compared to what may be coming in a couple of months.  Power grid operator ISO New England issued a warning to consumers this week about the effects that a particularly cold winter (as is being projected) could have on heating and electrical power consumption limits.  The northeast relies heavily on natural gas for home and business heating needs.  But many of the power plants in the region also run on natural gas.

The Editor says...
Which political party opposes drilling, fracking, pipelines, and methane emissions?  Which political party has been claiming for the last 30 years that the world is heating up at a dangerous rate?  Which political party opposes the use of petroleum and coal because of an irrational fear of carbon dioxide?  When you're freezing this winter, that's the political party you should blame.

Americans Make Huge Sacrifices As Bidenflation Rises To 12.8%.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the government last Thursday showed an 8.2% year-over-year price increase from September 2021 to September 2022.  The CPI has edged down steadily from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June to 8.2% in September.  The official CPI does not tell the whole story of price increases under President Biden.  Bidenflation, measured by the TIPP CPI using the same underlying data, stood at 12.8% in September.  It was 12.6% in August and July and 12.7% in June.  We developed the TIPP CPI, a metric that uses February 2021, the month after President Biden's inauguration, as its base.

How 'woke' policies turned Downtown San Francisco into an urban drug-den.  Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco.  The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline: "S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she'll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers."  The article was taped to walls on neighborhood corners regularly frequented by drug dealers.  At least one of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the better for the dealers in question, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.  The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that includes the Mid-Market area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is both a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities).  Dorsey's office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to promote.  Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department.  Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his number one priority — a goal he shares with new District Attorney Jenkins.

The Democrats are responsible for the hardships faced by citizens.  Inflation is at a 40-year high making essential commodities expensive.  Even the price of candy reached its highest recorded mark which will impact Halloween celebrations.  The price of gasoline continues to rise.  The border is open causing over 4.9 million migrant to enter the US since Biden took over, and the smuggling of illicit narcotics is resulting in numerous drug overdose deaths.  The rate of violent crimes in the U.S. is rising while the murder rate spiked by 30%, the highest increase since record-keeping began in 1960.  Democrats are placing restrictions on firearms, which are the only affordable means of defense for citizens.  The Democrats were responsible for the lockdowns that infringe upon the right of movement and the right to earn a living.  The Democrats impose vaccine mandates that eliminate the right of choice.  The Democrats desperately want to change the topic.  Hence the focus on the 'insurrection'.  The goal of the January 6th committee was never to find facts, it was instead to persecute their main political opponent, Donald Trump.

Mother Horrified to Learn Son's Death Is Scheduled in Two Weeks After Skimming Through His Email.  A mother in Canada was horrified when she discovered that her son had made an appointment to kill himself with the help of a doctor.  The incident shines a light on how Canada's assisted suicide program has spun entirely out of control.  On Sept. 7, Toronto resident Margaret Marsilla logged in to her 23-year-old son's email account and discovered that he had applied for permission from the Canadian government to be killed.  A doctor had approved the request and scheduled the murder for Sept. 22, Common Sense reported.

Biden To Gig Workers: Drop Dead.  In essence, the White House wants to outlaw gig work in America.  No, it's not saying so outright.  The Biden Labor Department obscures that harsh reality with words meant to deceive.  Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the department's proposal is needed to safeguard "our nation's most vulnerable workers," and ensure they are not deprived "of their federal labor protections."  Left out is the part that, should the proposal become policy, millions of Americans will be stripped of their jobs and income.  Under its rule, the Labor Department would be free to "determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act."  And it will determine in every case that the worker in question must be a hired employee, no longer free to continue his or her job as an independent contractor.

America today vs. 1950 — what we are missing.  There was a time — and it wasn't that long ago — when kids would leave home on a summer morning and roam free," reports npr.org. [...] Today's children are not being taught any kind of survival skills," writes Traci Baker at grit.com.  "I know adults who can't count change, who can't write checks, some who can't even pump their own gas or find their way home without help.  We are setting ourselves up for disaster.  And no, using computers and cell phones are not considered survival or even basic skills!"  "There are many benefits to unsupervised outdoor play and experiences in nature, including a reduction in obesity and the symptoms of anxiety, depression and ADHD," reports theconversation.com.  "Research has shown that children learn self-control over their own actions and decisions in this time alone without their parents.  Without time unsupervised, children may not develop a sense of self-control or an ability to judge and manage risk on their own."

Wasn't Legalizing Pot Supposed To Reduce Crime?  [A]nyone pushing for legalized marijuana should look at what's going on in California before cheering this on.  That state, as have several others, legalized marijuana on the promise that it would reduce crime, improve public health, increase traffic safety, and stimulate the economy.  Instead of wasting time prosecuting people for possession or for selling pot, states could capture a new revenue source by taxing it.  Legalization would also mean that states could regulate it, presumably making the marijuana safer and free of adulterants.  So far, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for nonmedical use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

[The] Army [is] Scrambling to Explain [its] Massive Recruitment Failure.  The U.S. Army is scrambling after missing recruitment numbers in 2022 by wide margins.  "The Army plans to increase its investment in marketing and is expected to expand a new program for struggling recruits, but leaders on Monday offered few new details on how they'll fill the ranks after falling far short of recruiting goals this year," the Associated Press reports.  "Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters that a new recruiting task force is coming up with ideas.  But any new plans would have to gel quickly in order to reverse the dramatically low enlistment numbers over the past year.  For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Army enlisted just 75% of its goal — falling 15,000 soldiers short of the 60,000 target.  It was the only service to miss its recruiting goal, but all of the others had to dig deep into their pools of delayed entry applicants, which will put them behind as they begin the next recruiting year on Saturday."

Ex-NYPD Chief Says Left-Wing DAs are Causing the Spike in Crime.  Left-wing district attorneys implementing policies such as bail reform bear significant responsibility for the nationwide spike in crime, former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton argued Monday.  Many cities' district attorneys sympathetic to "criminal justice reform" are releasing criminals who should be in jail, Bratton told NewsNation's Chris Cuomo in an interview aired Monday.  Such cities have borne the brunt of the crime wave thanks to bail reforms and other criminal justice reforms, he said.  [Video clip]

How Different Would America Be Today if Trump was Still President?  Let's start with the obvious.  How did this happen?  The 2020 election was stolen.  That's how they removed Trump from office and installed a man who doesn't know who he is, where he is, or what he's doing.  A man who can't put 2 sentences together, and who can't attract more than 20 people in concentric circles to his speeches, yet they want us to suspend reality and believe he got 81 million votes — the most in history.  Bizarre.  And look what they did to us after rigging and stealing the election.  They quickly put a plan in place to disassemble America; overwhelm the economy, make America poor, destroy the middle class, make America unsafe, and to open the borders and make America foreign to Americans.  And as a bonus, they put in place a disastrous foreign policy of liberal weakness, wokeness and appeasement that has set the entire world on fire.

Yes, New York's Bail Reform Has Increased Crime.  Pre-trial detention in New York State is not supposed to be conditioned on whether a person is likely to reoffend.  Both before and after bail reform, judges must release offenders on "the least restrictive alternative and condition or conditions that will reasonably assure the principal's return to court" — that is, minimize his risk of failure to appear.  Manhattan Institute scholars have emphasized time and again that New York State is unique in prohibiting judges from giving any consideration to public safety risk in remand decisions.  But even given that reality, a shift toward less-restrictive pretrial detention conditions on average seems to have driven up the risk of rearrest following release.  Perhaps the increase in crime identified above will be offset by a reduction in future offending, given the long-run criminogenic effects of jail.  On the other hand, the most relevant study to New York finds that the incapacitating effect of jail pretrial slightly outweighs its criminogenic effect post-release, at least within the study period.  In any case, those effects are heterogenous.  Some detainees are career criminals, for whom the benefits of keeping them behind bars almost certainly outweigh criminogenic costs; others are not.

Biggest Food Stamp Hike Ever, Thanks to Bidenflation.  Food stamp benefits are increasing by 12.5 percent as families grapple with grocery prices that have skyrocketed under President Joe Biden.  Under the maximum benefit, a family of four on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will see their payments increase from $835 to $939 per month.

The Democrats Wrecked My Retirement.  Biden printed billions of dollars to spread around and bribe voters, calling it "COVID relief," and paid people to stay home and not work.  Now, under Biden, we have 8 [to] 9% inflation and a labor participation rate that is the lowest it's been since the 1970s.  Prices are out of sight.  The supply chain has collapsed, and shortages of household staples have become so commonplace that it's just an accepted way of life in 2022.  The administration puts forth an abomination deceitfully labeled the "Inflation Reduction Act," knowing there is not one single thing in that bill that is intended to reduce inflation.  Now the Fed is raising interest rates to try to calm inflation.  In order for that to work, it has to crush consumer demand so suppliers will reduce their pricing in order to entice a weak and shrinking pool of customers to buy something.  Nice going, Joe. [...] Retirement accounts are in a shambles.  Two short years ago, things looked great.  Now there's a financial/investment canyon that will likely take ten years to recover from.

Under Bidenomics, A 'Soft Landing' For Economy Is No Longer Possible.  The Democratic Party's faithful are whistling past the graveyard, hoping with all their might we'll avoid an economic slide.  As a matter of general economics, we're already in a recession.  And it looks like things will soon get worse, not better.  "We hope we can have what they say, 'a soft landing,' a transition to a place where we don't lose the gains that I ran to make in the first place for middle-class folks, being able to generate good-paying jobs and — expansion," President Joe Biden told CBS' 60 Minutes last month.  Good luck with that, Mr. President.  Even members of your own party think it's hogwash.  As economist Larry Summers, who advised both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said last week, a soft landing is "really quite unlikely."  We agree, as do most economists of our acquaintance.

Dems in Disarray as 'Comeback' Narrative Completely Falls Apart.  [Scroll down] The problem for Democrats, however, is that most elections usually boil down to one thing:  the economy.  If people generally feel like they're doing well, the party of the person who occupies the Oval Office tends to do well at the ballot box.  If those same voters are feeling the pinch come election time, though, the outcome for the president's party typically is not good.  The latter has consistently been the case for President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer going back for at least a year or so as inflation and a volatile job market along with the supply chain crisis, rising interest rates and rising food and gas prices hit middle-class Americans hard.

Coal power plant closure leaves schools underfunded, hundreds unemployed in NM.  The clamor of second graders breaking away from lessons to form lunch lines has gotten quieter in a rural New Mexico community, where families losing coal jobs have been forced to pack up and leave in search of work.  At Judy Nelson Elementary, 1 in 4 students have left in an exodus spurred by decisions made five years ago to shutter a coal-fired power plant and mine that sit just up the road from the school in a largely Navajo community.  The plant and mine had provided electricity to millions of people across the southwestern U.S. for nearly a half-century.  The San Juan Generating Station burned its last bit of coal Thursday.  The remaining workers will spend the coming weeks draining water from the plant, removing chemicals and preparing to tear down what has long been fixture on the high-desert horizon.

Why We Will Never Control Medical Costs.  The purposes of medicine are expanding rapidly beyond treating actual illnesses/injuries and promoting wellness, to also facilitating life fulfillment and making personal dreams come true.  Latest case in point:  A gay couple has filed a class-action complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the City of New York, suing for unlawful workplace discrimination because they were denied coverage for fertility services.  If successful, health insurance nationally may eventually be required to pay for IVF/surrogacy services for male gay couples.

Stock Market Tanked 14 Percent Since Biden's Inflationary Boondoggle Passed.  The stock market continued its downward spiral on Thursday as the economy struggles to cope with Democrats' reckless spending adding fuel to runaway inflation.  All three benchmark indexes closed under their opening value with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 450 points.  The NASDAQ dropped nearly 3 percent Thursday and the S&P 500 fell by nearly 80 points.  The Dow's decline marks a continued trend since the signature passage of President Joe Biden's dubiously named "Inflation Reduction Act" on Aug. 16.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average has now fallen nearly 5,000 points, or more than 14 percent, in the aftermath of Biden's bill becoming law.

There's a major reason why the world in 2022 is like the world in 1939.  [Scroll down] At the very moment when a fragile peace could have been worked out and negotiators begun to solve the differences between Russia and Ukraine, Joe Biden steps in and does what he does best, mess things up.  The timeline here is interesting.  Even though, on March 10, the US promised Ukraine $13 billion and, on March 26, Biden told the world that Putin "cannot remain in power," the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were still able to come to an agreement on a peace deal.  And staggeringly, Joe Biden scuttled it.  Here we are in September, and much of the world is in recession, prices for everything are up dramatically, the US has provided Ukraine with upwards of $60 billion in aid, and Europe is facing energy shortages and skyrocketing prices just as winter approaches.  And now nuclear war is in the air.  All of this because Joe Biden wants revenge on Russia for something it didn't even do.

Why some polls show a dead heat for a generic ballot.  The Afghanistan withdrawal was perhaps the most serious foreign policy mistake in U.S. history.  It left the Taliban billions of dollars of state-of-the-art military equipment and the Bagram air base which is in spitting distance from China.  Joe Biden's ill-conceived spending kicked off the inflation that is currently sullying the lives of millions of Americans.  Drunk with power, Biden gleefully imposed mask and vaccine mandates on millions of Americans — law enforcement, military, federal employees, etc.  Those who were wisely skeptical and refused the experimental jab lost their jobs.  As it turns out, they were the smart ones; the vaccines were ineffective and have caused countless deaths and vaccine injuries far more devastating than COVID.  The mortality rate among young people is up by forty percent.  Biden gleefully put an end to our energy independence that President Trump had won.  He cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and ended drilling on most federal lands.  He has drained our strategic oil reserves at a most inopportune time.  This can only be a purposeful plan to destroy America as founded.

America is being attacked from within.  The United States' biggest threat isn't foreign nations, it is the systematic dismantling of the foundations of democracy, it's the woke philosophy of the left and methodical uncoupling of a nation that poses the biggest risks, according to Number 45.  "Where did my America go, seriously?  I mean this wholeheartedly folks," asked One America News Network host Dan Ball at the beginning of the September 26 segment featuring former President Donald Trump.  "Where did the America that I grew up in, the America that millions of people across this globe are trying to reach and become citizens each and every year?  That America.  The America that for decades the entire world looked to for freedom, for liberty, for security?  The America that used to value a hard day's work.  That protected our future, our children?"  Trump had a solid answer:  the Democrat Party broke that America and we are dangerously close to a point of no return.

Bidenomics: $9 trillion in private wealth [was] wiped out in stock plunge.  [Scroll down] Where does this stock downturn and its accompanying wealth loss come from?  It's brought on by Joe Biden's complete inability to resolve the energy crisis of his own making by removing his roadblocks to fossil fuel production, and his even worse ability to rein in government spending.  During his short, vacation-laden presidency, he's signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act, and the Emergency Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, both of which could be worth more than a trillion dollars, plus a bill to raise the national debt limit by an extra $2.5 trillion so he could have lots of extra room for cash to spend.  This year, he signed the badly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" of 2022, which tacked on another $732 billion.  As if that were not enough, his 530-and-counting executive orders have cost American taxpayers another $532 billion, with that number set to rise to about $800 billion if his student loan forgiveness scheme goes through.

Stocks Have Lost $7.6 Trillion in Value Since Biden Took Office.  Joe Biden destroys everything he touches. [...] The stock market has also taken a brutal beating since Joe Biden was installed.  Fox News is now reporting that the stock market is down $7.6 trillion since Joe Biden took office.  [Video clip]

When do we see President Biden wearing a sweater?  You think the price of everything is up?  Wait until the seasons change up north and your electricity bill shows up in the mailbox.  Talk about sticker shock.  Talk about people rediscovering their fireplaces to keep their homes warm, not just to share a glass of wine with their favorite person. [...] The Democrats may get lucky because most of these big bills will get mailed out after Thanksgiving.  Nevertheless, this is a great opportunity to remind the voters that our energy cost crisis was largely self-inflicted.  We have all the energy we need to keep our costs down.  We are not Europe, having to depend on Putin for energy.  We have our own and could flood the market with oil and natural gas to keep prices down.  We did it under President Trump.  Are you ready for a presidential speech about wearing a sweater and controlling your thermostat?

SPR Oil Level Hits 40-Year Low as Hurricane Season Fires Up.  Thanks, Brandon.  [A]lmost anytime even a moderate strength hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, oil production on the rigs at sea to the refineries that dot the southern U.S. Gulf Coast tends to shut down or is heavily restricted until the storm passes.  For especially ferocious storms that hit vulnerable areas in the Gulf and trigger longer work stoppages at the refineries or rigs, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) usually makes the news headlines, as the U.S. government relies on the emergency supply of crude oil to keep the country running and to stave off high prices and panic.  That's what it's there for — emergencies.  The U.S. government has tapped the SPR after several hurricanes in the past, including Ida, Gustaf, and, of course, Katrina.  But under the current administration, the SPR is also routinely used as a political expediency tool.  President Joe Biden, in a desperate effort to bring gas prices down after they skyrocketed thanks mainly to his anti-American energy independence policies, has released and sold off hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from the SPR.

Trump's 2020 Warning About Biden Comes True.  A clip of former President Donald Trump arguing that the election of President Joe Biden would lead to a plummeting stock market circulated online on Friday after Wall Street saw a bloodbath.  The Federal Reserve increased targets for the federal funds rate by 0.75% on Wednesday afternoon, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks 30 of the most prominent companies on American exchanges, tumbling more than 500 points.  After stagnating on Thursday, the index fell another 500 points by early Friday afternoon to 29,400.  On January 20, 2021, the day of Biden's inauguration, the Dow had closed slightly above 30,900.  "They said the stock market will boom if I am elected," Trump said during a 2020 presidential debate.  "If he's elected, the stock market will crash."

[New York] City kids seeking therapy after unending exposure to vagrants and addicts.  New York City school kids are losing their minds over the zonked-out drug addicts and raving vagrants they encounter every day — and are flocking to therapists to find ways to cope with the stress, The [New York] Post has learned.  In neighborhoods such as Hell's Kitchen "a lot" of kids are now in therapy, according to mom Katie Hamill, 43, whose 7-year-old daughter is being treated for anxiety.  "My daughter has seen [bad things], you name it, she has seen it. ... consistently and constantly.  She is in this constant state of panic," said Hamill, who works in real estate.  The little girl gets upset when she sees "the dying people" — the junkies who look dead whom she thinks no one is helping, the mom said.  And she sees far too much vile behavior from adults, including one addict trying to rip out his hair after getting high at a West 42nd Street playground.

Real estate sales drop 34% in Seattle as crime ravaged West Coast sees prices tumble.  Seattle's housing market is slowing faster than any in the country, a new study has revealed — as cash-strapped buyers increasingly shy away from home purchases.  The study, from real estate firm Redfin, ranked the nation's most populous hubs using metrics such as prices, price drops, and supply — and found that the real estate market is cooling fastest primarily along the West Coast.  Property prices along West Coast metropolitan areas are understood to be dipping because of a glut of properties on the market, amid a mass exodus of citizens deterred by rising mortgage rates, crime, and warnings of a looming recession.

Running the World into the Ground.  Who can claim to be better off under Biden?  The economy has tanked, inflation is at a 40-year high, people can't afford to heat their homes or fill up their cars with gas, crime statistics are off the charts, and confidence in America is at an all-time low.  Biden's open-border policy, which is opposed by a majority of American citizens, is leading to social unrest and economic chaos.  A country without a functioning border is not a country, yet that is where Biden has taken us.  America is marching toward totalitarianism as Biden empowers the DoJ and FBI to go after his political opponents, i.e., at least half of the population.  His worst offense, however, is following the climate dictates of the World Economic Forum.  Biden is torpedoing the robust U.S. economy in service of a totally false assumption — that human beings are able to change the planet's climate.  He is raising taxes so that billions of your dollars can be wasted on ridiculous anti-fossil fuel projects.  Biden has declared war on the energy industry in the name of global warming.  He wants us to believe that oil, gas, and coal are killing the planet.

The economic facts demand a Democratic midterm defeat.  President Joe Biden last week talked about record-low unemployment.  He explained that the headline inflation number rose only 0.1% month on month.  Biden conveniently ignored comments by Democratic-leaning Harvard University professor Jason Furman that the August consumer price index report actually suggested an acceleration in inflation.  Furman explained that the Cleveland Fed's median CPI, which excludes all the large changes in either direction and is better predicted by labor market slack, showed an annual rate of inflation of 9.2% in August, the single highest monthly print in their dataset (which starts in 1983).  Furman also suggested that there is a real possibility of stagflation, with an unemployment rate at or above 6% and sustained inflation of 4%-plus.

MAGA's Real Crime?  Spotlighting Government Failure.  The midterm elections are only weeks away.  The Democrats are in complete control of the House, Senate, and presidency.  Donald Trump's name appears nowhere near a November ballot.  Yet the only things Democrats talk about are the former president and his "Make America Great Again" voters.  It is as if Joe Biden's and Nancy Pelosi's political troops have no interest in touting their successes in opening the Southern border to endless illegal immigration, promoting divisive lockdowns and "vaccine" mandates, passing a Green New Deal spending extravaganza, encouraging transgender drag queen shows for elementary-schoolers, emptying prisons of criminals, eliminating cash bail for felony arrests, leveraging Americans' pain at the gas pump to push them into expensive electric vehicles, or presiding over the highest rates of inflation in over forty years.

Sorry Democrats, Abortion Won't Save You.  Contrary to Democratic hopes, November won't be about abortion vs. inflation.  The midterms will be a referendum on Biden's performance, particularly as it affects inflation.  This is almost always true for the first midterm of a president's tenure, but the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling gave Democrats false hope that they could defy history.  This may have been possible if the Biden administration hadn't committed so many fiscal blunders.  As it is, polls conducted in September clearly indicate that Americans are deeply unhappy about the sorry state of the economy and that they know who to blame.  According to a PBS/NPR/Marist poll, for example, "Six in ten Americans think the nation's economy is in a recession ... and more than half think President Joe Biden has weakened the economy."  This would not be as lethal for the Democrats if it involved a less visible issue, but voters are being mugged daily by the grim reality of inflation.

Policing in Democrat cities: Don't say we didn't warn you.  America's big cities are almost exclusively run by Democrats and have been for decades.  America's big cities contain most of America's minority race population.  And America's big cities are suffering from soaring crime caused by failed Democrat social and economic policies.  It is a given that police in these cities will have to use force against a criminal who will be a member of a minority race.  When that happens, it is inevitable that riots, arson, looting, and such will occur.  Democrat leaders of these cities find it easier to throw police under the bus than to admit that the crisis was caused by their policies. [...] Why would anyone genuinely interested in the true mission of law enforcement go to work as a police officer in a Democrat-controlled city?

Food Prices Hit 40-Year High, Keep Breaking Records Every Month.  Food prices have increased every month of 2022, with each month since February breaking 40-year records, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  The price of food at home increased 13.5% year-over-year in August, the highest it's been since May 1979, according to the BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI) report.  Since February, when the year-over-year cost of food at home increased by 8.6% — at the time the highest level since 1981 — grocery prices have increased every month, first breaking a 10% year-on-year increase in March, according to archived CPI reports by the BLS.  The rate of increase blows away the increases over the past two years, with food at home prices increasing 3.5% in 2020 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The increases are also well above the USDA's Aug. 25 estimate of a year-on-year food at home price increase between 10% and 11% in 2022.

'Defund the police' aftermath means fewer officers on job across US.  Police officers across the nation are leaving their jobs because of the "defund the police" policies in cities, leaving personnel shortages and longer response times.  A survey of several large cities shows a downsizing with fewer applications to fill the vacancies as crime is on the rise.  Los Angeles has even taken the step of offering a rental subsidy in exchange for taking a job at the Los Angeles Police Department.  Dennis Zine has spent 54 years working for the LAPD, currently as a reservist after retiring as a sergeant.  He is a former city councilman and an organizer for a campaign to recall District Attorney George Gascon.  "All these cities with a woke generation mentality like 'defund the police,' 'neuter the police,' 'we don't need the police' is affecting what we are seeing," Zine told the Washington Examiner.  "Black Lives Matter was instrumental in getting a lot of people out."  Law enforcement certainly don't do their jobs for the pay, so when police feel unappreciated, they leave, he said.

Mortgage Rates Jump Above Six Percent for First Time Since 2008.  Mortgage rates when President Joe Biden took office?  2.65 percent.  Today?  6.28 percent.  On Tuesday, Biden held a weird celebration of his "Inflation Reduction Act" on the lawn of the White House.  Why was it weird?  Because at the very same time as Democrats were applauding themselves, the U.S. Labor Department was releasing figures that showed an "unexpected" rise in inflation, with the cost of rent, food, and other basic necessities continuing to skyrocket.  Now we learn that mortgage rates have climbed above six percent for the first time since 2008.

The Bidenomics Sham Is Collapsing.  With red lights flashing nearly everywhere, the economy's prospects look grim.  Soaring inflation, crashing home sales, plunging GDP, falling real incomes.  No question, the economy is a mess.  So why is the Biden administration saying things are going better?  It's not just this week's "unexpected" 8.3% inflation jump.  Or the scary plunge in stock prices, destroying trillions of dollars in household wealth in just days.  It's that the ruling party, the Democratic Party, seems utterly oblivious to the damage it's done.  This week, President Joe Biden touted the "progress" made by his administration against inflation, just a day after the report that prices had risen 8.3% overall, and food prices by 11.4%, the fastest since 1979.

Progressives are the Cause for American Decline.  In the maelstrom of the chaos of 24/7 news, societal decay and violence, and media and political platitudes, it must be recognized that conservatives are not guilty of American decline.  Conservatives are the ones defending, and conserving, the symbols and story of American unity.  Progressives, on the other hand, have been demolishing these symbols and assaulting the traditional story and opting for a new one — one that is meant to destroy those symbols which had previously unified American life.  At least since the 1960s, American progressives have been taking a battering ram to the symbols of justice that served as the unifying force for American society.  The Declaration is considered a fraud and the revolution it inspired equally fraudulent.  The Constitution is belittled as "a piece of crap."  The American flag is said to be a force for evil and division.  American churches are now assailed as pillars of white supremacy and racism.

Numbers Really Do Matter.  I have always loved math and numbers.  I love them because of their certainty, their preciseness, and my confidence that 'truth is in the numbers.' [...] Here are a few to consider:  the day Donald Trump became president, the Dow Jones Average was at 19,827.  The day he left office, it was at 34,005, an increase of 71.5%.  Now two years into the Biden-Harris regime terrible, the market is at 31,216, a nearly 8% decline.  The price of gas on that wonderful January 20, 2017, was $1.97.  Today it sits at $3.75, a 90% increase which is actually down from a high of $5.01.  The national rate of inflation the day Donald Trump left office was 1.36%.  Today that rate sits at 8.3%.  Read those numbers again if you still don't see the obvious.  While shrinking daily, our ever-dwindling stock portfolios and savings are needed to help supplement our wages to provide necessities at an ever-higher cost.

A Time of Evil.  What we have seen the last two years, and especially the last few months can only be explained in one word.  Evil.  For this is a time of evil. [...] Why would Biden refuse to protect our southern border?  Why would Biden knowingly allow in fentanyl, human trafficking, cartels, and terrorists?  Why would Biden allow child predators and unaccompanied minors to cross our borders?  Why would Biden make it very clear to our enemies in China, Iran, and Russia that we will not fight for our borders and we are not a sovereign country?  Why would the occupier of the White House display our weaknesses to friend and foe?  Why would the placeholder of the White House purposely make America weaker militarily and economically?  Why would Biden's FBI and Department of Justice cover up obvious felony crimes on Hunter Biden's laptop, yet search the bedroom of President Trump's teenage son?  Why would the FBI and DoJ ignore the 4th and 5th Amendments in their illegal raid on President Trump's private home?  Why would the FBI/CIA/NSA disregard all precedents, all laws, all tradition, the Constitution, and all common sense in their illegal attacks on President Trump since he came down the golden escalators?  Why has the FBI/CIA/NSA abused and misused the Patriot Act in their attack on Biden's political enemies?  And why has the ACLU remained totally silent and mute as these Third Reich tactics have been used on the American people?  Why has Biden/FBI/Justice Department carried out Stasi police state raids on many of President Trump's closest supporters?

The highest inflation in 40 years is deeply embedded in the economy and spreading.  Today's CPI inflation report shocked Wall Street and the nation with a significantly higher than expected print.  Pollyannas everywhere are painfully learning that there's no magic cure.  There's no easy way out.  After several years of excessive federal spending, regulating, taxing and money-printing, the highest inflation in 40 years is deeply embedded in the economy and it is spreading.  The only significant decline came with gasoline prices.  Overall, the topline CPI came in at 8.3% for the year — food up 11.4%, even energy is still up 24%.  Electricity is up 16%; natural gas 33%; new cars 10%.  Even with the recent drop, gasoline is still 26% above a year ago.  Rent is up 6.5%.  Overall, services are up nearly 7%.  Core goods prices are up 7%.  Used cars are up nearly 8%.  The so-called core inflation rate, omitting food and energy, has risen 6.5% annually over just the past three months.

Tucker Carlson: Voters Must Make Democrats Pay For Out Of Control Crime.  FNC's Tucker Carlson reviews the record crime levels in Chicago and other inner cities, saying Democrats need to be held responsible for the collapse of law and order on city streets.  "You think [Chicago district attorney] Kim Foxx cares?" Tucker Carlson asked.  "But she is not the only person who did this, the federal government also played a role."  "Over the eight years of Barack Obama administration, the department of justice forced more than a dozen police departments across the country to enter into what is called a consent decree.  The Obama administration began an investigation into the Chicago police department and they got a consent decree.  They pronounced police departments guilty of racism if they disproportionately interact with African-Americans, regardless of whether those interactions were legally justified.  In other words, the law is entirely irrelevant to the consent decree."

El Paso looks like a 'third-world country' after Texas border city is overrun by migrants.  Shocking photos show President Biden's border crisis has hit a new peak in El Paso, Texas — where a historic flood of migrants has turned the city into what a local pol says resembles "a third-world country."  Regional Border Patrol Chief Gloria Chavez posted snapshots Monday night on Instagram that showed hordes of migrants dumped under an El Paso bridge over the weekend because the city has no more room to even process them.  "We've never seen anything like this," said outraged US Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), whose district covers part of the city, as El Paso began grappling with its highest daily influx ever last month.  "It's a scene that you would see in a third-world country, not in the streets of El Paso."  Gonzalez warned, "Everything that I've been told and every indication tells me that we haven't seen the worst yet.

Blame Democrats' massive spending spree for our economic crisis.  For two years, families have experienced the dire consequences of massive government spending at the gas pump , the grocery store, and elsewhere. [...] Democrats began spending as soon as they took the majority, and they have made it clear they don't intend to stop.  Their first major act was passing $1.9 trillion in COVID aid, which was much larger than most economists were saying was necessary and ultimately was the catalyst to the inflation crisis.  Even after months and months of record high inflation, Democrats refused to change course and continued to spend trillions of more dollars.  In fact, Democrats have added an astounding $2.7 trillion in federal spending over the past two years.  President Joe Biden hopes to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to that number with his student loan debt heist.

Would You Please Stop Being Stupid?  The country is on the verge of being completely taken over by the Communists.  Censorship is rampant.  Political indoctrination is taking place throughout every institution, state or private.  The major news outlets are propaganda outlets.  Formerly neutral government agencies are being oriented against dissenters.  The economy is being destroyed.  There is an invasion on the southern border.  And, of course, you have the (traditional) Democrat election fraud now and then.

If You're Going to San Francisco...  No, stop!  Don't even think about going to San Francisco.  The place is a disaster area, possibly as bad as Portland.  If you think that is impossible, check out this photo essay in the Daily Mail.  The story is about the city's new "soft touch" approach to drug addiction and homelessness.  "Nobody's going to jail," city officials say.  No, they're going straight to the morgue.  San Francisco has seen nearly 1,700 fatal fentanyl overdoses so far in 2022.  The text is depressing, but the message is really in the dozens of photographs that accompany it.  Addicts openly shooting up; homeless encampments on the streets; filth everywhere.

America Delira.  Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. [...] They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States:  that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women's sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history — and the other 50 percent of the population — as much as do its enemies.  Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression.  Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced — or else.

Obama [gets] smacked down for gaslighting about Americans being 'better off' under Joe Biden.  In comparison to Joe Biden, Barack Obama appears to be a picture of probity, wisdom, and dignity.  But in reality, he's just a more unflappable liar, and now that Democrats are on the rocks in the polls, he's cribbed a page from Ronald Reagan, a man he's always had a curious fascination for, claiming that "the country is better off than when you took office.  We should all be deeply grateful for that."  If Obama were ask that as a question, the way Reagan once did, the open-ended answer would not have been to his liking, so Obama supplied the answer, too.  He was all gaslighting.

We're 'Better Off' Under Biden?  Who Is Obama Kidding?  Let's review just how much "better off" we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.
COVID deaths:  When Biden took office on the promise that he had a plan that would end COVID, the official death count was 424,318.  Today it is over 1.044 million.  In other words, there have been nearly 620,000 COVID deaths on Biden's watch.  And that's despite all the interventions Biden claimed would end the pandemic.  Are the families of those 620,000 people better off?
Inflation:  Despite the recent decline in pump prices, gasoline costs 91% more than it did on January 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index.  Food prices are up 14%.  Overall prices have climbed 13% in the time Biden has been president.  To put that last number in perspective, the overall increase in the CPI during President Donald Trump's entire four years in office was just 7%.
Real earnings:  How about workers, are they better off?  While wages have climbed, they haven't nearly kept pace with Bidenflation.  As a result, workers have seen their real wages decline by 5%, which works out to an effective average pay cut of $2,726 a year.  Does that, in Obama's mind, make them better off?

A World on Fire.  [Scroll down] Let's talk about life in a one-bedroom apartment in London.  The price of energy for heat has nearly doubled, seemingly overnight.  Truly, it took months but it has felt like one day to the next. [...] This is all running wildly ahead of consumer prices generally.  This is only through June.  We are already approaching 100% inflation in energy. [...] My friends in the UK are truly panicked.  They want to come to the U.S. just to get away.  But many of my friends are rebels and did not accept the vaccine because they are healthy and under the age of 80.  They rejected the jab.  Now they cannot come to the U.S. because the U.S. is still imposing rules that forbid travelers from foreign countries who are not vaccinated from getting across the borders.

Jackson Mississippi: This Is What The Water Looks Like When A Radical Communist Is In Power.  Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Democratic mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, promised to make the capital "the most radical city on the planet" during his 2017 campaign, but so far he's been unable to even solve even the city's basic infrastructure problems and the city's running water is now unsafe to drink.  He campaigned on plans to introduce universal basic income and alternatives to policing, to replace vacant lots with urban farms, and resolve chronic issues with the city's water and roads in order to break the "cycles of humiliation" he said black residents experienced in Jackson, the most heavily black large city in the U.S.  Instead, the city's water problems have worsened, and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency Tuesday because running water is not reliably available nor safe for consumption.

Great Reset: Switzerland Threatens to Jail People Who Heat Their Homes Too Much in the Winter.  People who heat their homes above a certain temperature in Switzerland during the Winter face fines and potentially up to three years in prison if energy rationing measures are put in place.  Under proposed legislation in the home of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Swiss lawmakers are preparing to set legal limits on the use of heating during the winter should the country face energy shortages.  Under the plans, gas-heated buildings would be capped at 19C (66.2F) and water heating up to 60C (140F).  Saunas and swimming pools would also be forced by government diktat to remain cold.

Biden took a booming economy without inflation and turned it into a high-inflation bust.  There's a growing view inside the mainstream media that Joe Biden's recent legislative victories and his recent speeches that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy and are "semi-fascists" are going to give the Democrats some midterm momentum and they're going to overtake the GOP by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.  I'm not buying it and here's why you shouldn't either.  First of all, the new legislation is not popular.  By 36% to 12%, an Economist-YouGov poll shows that voters believe the IRA legislation will actually increase inflation.  As for the student loan cancellation, a poll from another network shows by 59% to 38% that voters believe that too will increase inflation.  By the way, the latest inflation report for July was 8.5% year-on-year and the inflation tracker from the Cleveland Fed predicts an 8.2% CPI for both August and September.

German Minister of Economics Under Fire as Energy Driven Reality of Economic Collapse Starts Sinking In.  German Minister of Economics Robert Habeck is under fire after his comments during an interview with an ARD broadcaster on Tuesday evening. [...] Mr. Habeck responded that businesses can stop operating, but that doesn't mean they will go insolvent.  Just because the business loses most or all of their revenue, doesn't mean they will go bankrupt.  That doesn't make sense, Minister Habeck was pressed to apply commonsense.  If businesses close to save money, workers are not employed.  If workers are not employed people do not earn income.  If people do not earn income, the economy worsens.  Habeck had no response other than an economically detached "Green Party" perspective that businesses will not go bankrupt just because they are not operating.  However, his facial expressions reflect that he knows what comes next, total economic collapse.  [Video clip]

Return of the Ice Age.  To Europe, anyway.  Years of horrible decisions by European leaders have come home to roost, as Europeans now worry about how to heat their homes this winter.  Reliance on a geopolitical enemy for much of their energy turned out to be a mistake, as Russia has now shut off gas supplies.  Who could have predicted it?  Other than anyone with a modicum of common sense?  Which Europe's governing class has lacked for many years.  The continent's leaders are panicking and preparing to ration energy: [...] European countries are voluntarily turning themselves into third-world nations.  Will any politicians pay the price for this disaster?  Don't bet on it.

When Must a Good Citizen Become a Dissident?  Is it when the FBI and other Deep State truth-twisters manufacture crises and manipulate elections?  Is it when free speech comes under attack under the guise of State-labeled "misinformation"?  Perhaps it is when the president-in-name-only reads carefully scripted messages (written by those who control his office from the shadows) attacking half the country's citizens as "fascists."  Or when government and media "elites" falsely frame political protest as "insurrection" in order to justify criminal persecution and imprisonment of opponents of the ruling regime.  Or maybe when the endless declaration of fake "emergencies" is used to justify the steady imposition of extraordinary State power over each citizen's livelihood.  Maybe it's when the Intelligence Community operates a massive domestic surveillance network targeting Americans who have committed no crimes.  Maybe it's when secretly collected information mined from supposedly independent social media conglomerates and too-big-to-fail private banks is used to track and trace unsuspecting citizens.  Maybe it's when the value of the U.S. dollar is intentionally chipped away by central bank authorities enabling tax-and-spend legislators to expand institutional power at current and future Americans' expense.  Perhaps it is when the same federal government that insists on fighting wars all over the world in defense of other nations' borders staunchly refuses to protect America's own borders from invasion.

I Feel the Earth Move Under my Feet.  We have a nation filled with at least two generations of people who have not been properly educated, who have no respect for the church, no respect for teachers, no respect for parents.  We have a nation saturated with drugs, many people addicted because of painkillers, many too young to make sensible decisions about substances they can procure with ease.  Things like the flailing economy can be corrected with the right policy decisions.  The border can be fixed with a wall.  The crime problem will settle down when we go back to punishing criminals.  Most of this isn't rocket science.  It just takes an honest look at human nature (Newsflash: we're not basically good.) and the application of common sense — and all that takes time.

Seven Practical Ways to Make America Great Again.  I am guilty, like many of my fellow conservatives, of complaining about everything that has gone wrong since COVID.  That includes massive inflation, the loss of small businesses because of a messed up COVID response; supply chain problems; gas prices; the border sieve; the swallowing up of the mainstream media by Great Resetters and [Democrats]; the Afghanistan defeat and weaponry giveaway; the billions and trillions spent on Ukraine; the paying of people not to work; the Luciferian malignancy of CRT, DEI, and ESG infecting our institutions, schools, and businesses; and the litany of other complaints MAGA Americans get so justifiably indignant about.  But what can the average American do to actually take down this behemoth of leftism that is strangling liberty, free speech, and prosperity?  It may take a while, but it is doable with small things to start with.

The West's Energy Disaster Worsens.  There is no excuse for advanced economies to experience a shortage of electricity, or of energy generally.  The world has more than ample supplies of fossil fuels.  And, if you buy the global warming hype, nuclear energy is the obvious alternative, although that implies universal use of electric vehicles that are devastating to the environment.  Nevertheless, an electricity crisis is upon us. [...] The current crisis in Western Europe is due in part to the threatened cutoff of Russian natural gas.  But countries like Britain and Germany are vulnerable to such a cutoff because they fecklessly failed to provide for their own energy self-sufficiency.

It's Too Late For Corrupt Media To Decide Political Violence Is Bad.  The 2020 election was nothing less than a hostage situation, and everyone who lives in a major city (all of them run by Democrats) knew it when they saw their shops, offices, and storefronts boarded up.  That wasn't in anticipation of a Biden victory.  It was in fear of a Trump victory.  The Left had shown all summer that year what it's capable of when things don't go their way.  They will fabricate a conspiracy to derail a president who was never given a chance.  They will hype up an airborne virus, laying every single death it causes at the feet of their political opponents.  They will perpetuate a lie about race and police to shut down highways, businesses, and government services.  The cost:  At least 25 deaths and up to $2 billion in property damage.  And that's just from the George Floyd riots of summer 2020.  There's also the retarded development of an entire generation kept out of school, countless livelihoods ended via shutdown orders, and the ever-lasting trauma that will be endured by those who were told they could not tell loved ones goodbye.

New Jersey banned plastic bags.  So, people are stealing grocery store shopping baskets.  Grocery store customers are walking off with those plastic hand baskets you find in the supermarket, an apparent consequence of New Jersey's plastic bag ban that went into effect this spring.  "They are just disappearing," said Louis Scaduto Jr., chief executive officer of Middletown-based Food Circus Super Markets, which owns four Super Foodtown stores in Monmouth County.  "I may actually have to just do away with them soon, can't afford to keep replacing them," Scaduto wrote in a text message.  It's not just happening at Super Foodtown.  Stop & Shop in Long Branch didn't have any hand baskets during a recent visit.  ShopRite in Freehold Township didn't have any either.

The True Cost of Student Loans.  The cancellation of student debt has echoes of two other unwise political decisions, one made by a Republican President, the other by a Democrat President. [...] The second one was the decision of the Clinton administration to allow people to have access to mortgages they had little chance of actually repaying.  Under Clinton's Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in "credit-deprived" areas.  In short people with low and poor credit were still given massive loans for homes, despite the obvious risk to both borrowers and lenders.  The government made clear that it would take the hit for any mortgage default.  As a result, banks realized that the smart money was not in being careful with mortgages, but instead lay in getting as many people signed up as possible.  After all, Uncle Sam would bail you out.  This caused the 2008 economic collapse.

Total chaos as millions of student loan borrowers rush to get Joe Biden's $10,000 debt amnesty.  They blew out their own website based on the high volume of traffic from those seeking the $10,000 debt freebie.  Seems that Joe took the Obamacare rollout fiasco as a model, not a warning.  They never set up a special website for this matter at all before the debt forgiveness plan was announced, which might have saved the rest of their website, and still don't have any plans to do it.  Plan?  What plan?  They have no idea how many people will apply for the $10,000 freebie.  They have no idea what it will cost.

Germany to Implement Energy Rationing Amid Fears of Gas Riots.  As officials in the country express their fears about future gas riots this winter, the German government has announced a host of new energy rationing rules that will come into effect [...] next Thursday.  In what appears to be the latest attempt to avoid energy shortages this winter, the German government is to implement restrictions limiting the use of energy in the country.  Ministers appear to be hoping that the rationing efforts will help reduce the risk of energy shortages this coming winter, with a number of bigwigs now openly fearful of a future of public unrest and gas riots should people be left unable to adequately heat their homes.

President Macron Warns of Public Unrest in France as Energy Crisis Bites.  President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the French public may react poorly to what he calls the "end of abundance" in France and Europe, as multiple crises brought about largely by political management wreak havoc on the continent.  With a long line of political mismanagement finally coming to a head across the European continent, France's President Emmanuel Macron has now said that his country faces what he calls the "end of abundance", something he fears could disrupt the stability of his nation.  Macron's warning comes amid growing political panic in neighbouring Germany, where many political bigwigs are now fearing that the country faces a future of riots and public upheavals as people lose the ability to adequately heat their homes over the winter.

What's Going On in America.  When we see adults in leadership who have made it legal for minors, very young minors, to have permanent, life-altering sex changes, while it would be a crime to give these very same minors cigarettes, alcohol, or the car keys, we can't believe what's going on.  When China, Russia, and Iran no longer fear us, and Israel, Japan, and South Korea no longer trust us, we know that leadership is making purposeful mistakes.  When kindergarten students are still being forced to wear masks that do not work, and everyone knows they don't work, we wonder aloud why.  When J-6 political prisoners are still being held in D.C. gulags without charges being filed against them or bail being afforded to them, we know that this is just not American.  When there is practically no border at all on our southern flank, and we know that all sovereign nations do in fact have borders, we know that history shows us clearly that this is suicidal for a people.

Here's How Unlivable Blue Cities Have Gotten.  How bad have things gotten in Democrat-controlled cities like New Orleans, New York City, Detroit, San Francisco, and Chicago?  So bad that when you think of those cities, it's not the good things about them, from culture to industry, beautiful shopping districts to stunning city parks, that come to mind.  Rather, what almost every American thinks of when such blue cities as those are brought up is of the bloodshed, crime, and heartbreak within them, the streams of blood flowing down their streets thanks to crime that would rival the French Revolution in terms of both volume of blood shed and the pointlessness of it all.  While many might avert their eyes and avoid criticizing such places and the little being done to combat crime within them out of fear of being called "racist," or something, Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson went full steam ahead in criticizing the bloodshed of inner-cities and the violence present in Democrat-controlled areas.  In fact, Tucker even went so far as to say that the horror of those cities shows that our "civilization is falling apart."

Democrats Evade Accountability to Avoid Political Fallout.  Gasoline now costs on average more than $4 per gallon.  Two years ago, it was less than $2.  Americans are suffering the worst inflation in more than 40 years:  9.1 percent in July 2022.  Inflation is a hidden and highly regressive tax.  It hurts lower income families more than high earners.  Who is accountable for inflation?  The Biden administration never admits its policies are responsible for inflation, such as suppression of domestic oil and gas production and spending several trillion dollars.  Biden claims the following are to blame:  greedy meatpackers, venal oil companies, mercenary physicians, Donald Trump, Putin's war in Ukraine, amongst others.  Never, ever blame his Day One executive orders!  Federal politicians, bureaucrats, and their complicit media avoid paying for their egregious acts by dispersing accountability and thus avoiding feedback.

Wind Turbines Are Destroying the Planet.  New York, along with other states, is moving forward with massive wind turbine projects.  The push for "9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy" comes at a high price, not only for families who are left dependent on expensive and unreliable energy, but for the planet.  Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors.  A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals.  Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment.  One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages".  "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed."

The Predatory Male Behavior Of So-Called Transgender Women.  How do you know so-called transgender women aren't real women?  Because they act just like predatory men who, rather than having sympathy for women concerned when physically intact men invade their territory, revel in the ability to impose their will on these women. [...] Women are generally smaller and physically weaker than most men, so savvy women learn to be careful.  Women also rely on the traditional social contract ensuring single-sex privacy in places in which they may be naked or exposed, such as dressing rooms, bathrooms, or locker rooms.  She expects that, in these spaces, she'll be in the company of women and free from voyeurs or exhibitionists.  Sadly, this social contract has been broken because mixed-up or opportunistic men claiming to be women are allowed to invade these private spaces.  These men's insensitivity to women's fear and discomfort is additional proof that they are not women.

'Defund the police' advocate Ilhan Omar's city experiences sharp increase in majority of crimes, data shows.  "Defund the police" supporter Rep. Ilhan Omar's city is experiencing a sharp increase in most crimes, data shows.  The spike comes just one year after she backed a failed campaign to dismantle and replace the Minneapolis Police Department.  Omar represents Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, which encompasses the city of Minneapolis.  So far this year, citywide crimes have spiked in nine of 14 categories over the same time period last year, according to a Fox News Digital review of crime statistics.

Democrats are not learning from their defund-the-police failures.  Last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) just barely won renomination in her Democratic primary.  Democratic leaders had failed to see it coming — that such a prominent member of the left-wing "Squad" could come within just 2 percentage points of losing to an opponent whom she had outspent nearly 3 to 1.  Don Samuels, a former city councilman, nearly defeated Omar in the very district where George Floyd was killed in 2020.  Having campaigned previously against disbanding the Minneapolis police, Samuels ran a law-and-order, anti-crime congressional campaign.  It was nearly enough to win a majority of Democratic primary voters in one of the most liberal cities in America.  One would hope that Omar's near-death experience leads Democrats to be a bit more skeptical about the defund-the-police movement in which she has played such a large role.  Alas, nothing else up to that point, not even the national crime wave resulting from their folly in so many of the nation's major cities, had convinced them to give it up.

IRS: Gestapo in the Making.  Inflation is skyrocketing.  Gas prices, despite Old Joe Biden's crowing about minor reductions, are still substantially higher than they were before his presidency was inflicted upon us.  America's global standing is drastically diminished by Biden's handlers' catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, due to the lack of preparedness of a politicized military distracted by wokeism.  The Southern border is essentially nonexistent, and due to that as well as to the arrival of tens of thousands of unvetted Afghan migrants, there is an unknowable number of criminals and terrorists in the country who would have been kept out by remotely sane immigration policies. [...] The people who run Joe Biden looked around at their dumpster fire of an administration, and the smoking ruin they have wrought, and decided that what America really needs are tens of thousands of new employees for the IRS.

Time to Give the Conspiracy Theorists a Break?  How many times have you heard, "That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me"? Was it because you asked if the virus was released from a lab in China?  Or did you question the safety and effectiveness of the "vaccines"?  Did you ask why doctors and nurses are not free to treat their patients according to their best judgment instead of government protocols?  Or maybe you asked about the decrease in energy, selling our oil to China, the problems with supply chains, government deficit spending, censorship on social media, inflation, food shortages, the rise in racism, the burning of our cities, our unprotected border, and the release of criminals.  Did you wonder why everything is getting worse?  Is there is a plan to destroy Western civilization?

Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class.  For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid "transition" to "green" energy was the world's preordained future — regardless of the costs.  Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts.  They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to "renewable energy."  Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation — especially in comparison to the country's vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry.  As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood — the dirtiest of modern fuels — to endure the cold.  And there is further talk of "warm rooms," where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.

The Point of No Return.  This is an election year.  But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans.  The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.  If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying "You won't know what hit you!"  There have always been irresponsible demagogues.  But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.  You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule.  It doesn't matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue.  If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge's children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

Everything Is Worse and You Are Just Supposed to Take It.  You are asking for too much, you terrible person.  You want cheap gas and a functioning supply chain, air conditioning and not to eat bugs.  But most of all, you expect the elite to actually do its job, and for that, you are terrible.  And racist.  Bums litter our streets figuratively and — in ghastly form — literally.  Criminals run rampant unmolested by the gendarmes, who have been told — expressly and impliedly — to let the crooks be.  Our economy is sensational, groovy, glorious — except for the inflation and the hollowing out of your 401K.  Try to buy a house instead of renting — just try.  The globalist elite has failed in doing what we want, but it seems to be doing what it wants.  It is gathering power and payoffs unto itself, and that is precisely the goal.

Denver — a 'hellhole' of drugs.  Once a cosmopolitan utopia of clean, safe, family-friendly neighborhoods and parks, Denver now looks and feels like a drug orgy.  The stench of marijuana wafts through neighborhoods where a small percentage of family dwellings have transitioned into pot farms.  Walking through much of Denver and other Colorado cities, one becomes accustomed to stepping over and around growing numbers of full-time drug users living on sidewalks, parks, medians, and lawns.  The broad-based degradation started when voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, which established the civilized world's most lenient marijuana law.  Critics argue legalization, problematic on its own, became a "gateway policy" that lowers political resistance to other illicit drugs.  Indeed, in 2019, the Colorado Legislature and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis essentially decriminalized all schedule 1 and 2 drugs — including fentanyl, the nation's leading killer of people ages 18-45.

Air Force Includes Drag Show In Woke 'Diversity' Festival At Langley.  The U.S. military is hosting a drag show at a family-friendly festival at Joint Base Langley-Eustis (JBLE) at the end of July.  JBLE is hosting its first ever "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summer Festival" on July 30, featuring a series of performances and speeches, including a poem on "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" and a drag show by Joshua Kelley, who performs under the moniker Harpy Daniels.

Chicago Mom Forbidden To See Teen Daughter After Refusing To Pretend She's The Opposite Sex.  Jeanette Cooper, a mom in Chicago, has missed her daughter's 13th, 14th, and 15th birthdays.  She doesn't get to be there as her daughter is learning to drive.  In fact, she has only seen Sophia for eight and a half hours in the last three years.  That's because Cooper lost custody of her daughter after refusing to go along with Sophia's belief that she is transgender.  When Sophia was 12, Cooper went to pick her up from a custodial visit at her father's house, but her daughter refused to come home.  Cooper learned that Sophia, whom the mother said had always come across as more feminine than Cooper, now identified as transgender and felt "unsafe" around her mom.

Recidivism rates for NYC criminals are off the charts.  More than two years ago, the new bail reform law in New York went into effect and the results have been obvious to pretty much everyone who lives in the Big Apple.  The law was ostensibly designed to "combat racism" and focus on "rehabilitation over incarceration."  The law's proponents claimed that most criminals are simply misunderstood and lacking in opportunities.  Given the proper motivation and a chance at a fresh start, most of them would happily take up nine-to-five jobs and turn their backs on gang activity and lives of crime.  But the latest NYPD crime statistics report shows us how that actually worked out.  The law basically alerted criminals that the door to the candy store was unlocked and they were free to ramp up their criminal business model with abandon.  Recidivism rates in Gotham are as much as three times greater for some categories of crime than they were before the law took effect.

The last major media holdout still shilling for Joe Biden.  By all accounts — by every economic indicator, every political poll, every overseas interaction, every lie at the presidential podium — Joe Biden is a miserable failure as president.  Inflation brought on by government spending has now tipped the economy into recession and there is no end in sight.  The border lies open, with the Border Patrol converted into a de facto valet and escort service for literally millions of unvetted illegal border crossers.  Crime is out of control.  America is a laughingstock abroad, with Biden's name on the most humiliating military pullout in U.S. history.  He's a man utterly unfit for the office, a man whose very placement in office demonstrates the horrific consequences of electoral fraud.

The Trans Fiasco:  Will There Be Accounting?  The "trans" fad has devastated the lives of many people, especially children.  Will there ever be an accounting?  In the U.K., there are signs of one: the National Health Service's Tavistock gender identity clinic for children is being shut down. [...] Basically, Tavistock was run according to a "trans" activist ideology, and therefore destroyed many lives.  So there is at least the glimmer of accountability in the U.K. How about here in America?  Hans Bader sums up where we stand in a long post at Liberty Unyielding.

FDA warns of brain swelling and permanent vision loss in kids taking puberty blockers.  The FDA recently added a warning to the puberty blockers used by transgender children, reports The Post-Millennial.  The warning was added after the FDA identified "a serious potential side effect" that can "cause cause a dangerous surge of spinal fluid pressure in the brain," as well as "headaches, nausea, double vision, and even permanent vision loss."  "The FDA identified 6 cases in females ages 5-12 years old who were diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri" after receiving puberty blockers.  Pseudotumor cerebri "means 'false brain tumor' because the signs and symptoms in affected patients are similar to those of a large brain tumor."  "The agency considered the cases clinically serious... this potential serious risk associated with GnRH agonists justifies inclusion in product labeling," an FDA spokesperson explained.  As the Post-Millennial observes, puberty blockers are used for gender transitions (formerly known as sex changes) by children.

New Los Angeles bridge opens, then quickly closes amid chaos.  The newest bridge in Los Angeles, a $588-million architectural marvel with views of the downtown skyline, opened to great fanfare on July 10.  It has already been closed, to great dismay, several times since then amid chaos and collisions.  The 6th Street Viaduct — which soars over the concrete-lined Los Angeles River to connect downtown to the historic Eastside — quickly became a hotspot for street racing, graffiti and illegal takeovers that draw hundreds of spectators to watch drivers perform dangerous stunts in their vehicles.

The Editor says...
This is exactly the behavior one should expect in a state that's all crime and no punishment.

Military Recruiting Numbers Lowest Since the Vietnam War.  Recruiting among the nation's military branches is at historically low numbers as COVID, woke leaders and an anti-military culture are keeping young people away. [...] RedState has reported on the services' desperate efforts to encourage more volunteers to join, with the Minnesota National Guard placing a $77,000 ad buy in an LGBTQ magazine, and the Army toying with the idea of dropping its requirement that enlistees have a high school diploma or GED, but then realizing what a stupid idea that was and backtracking.  Military.com went to press Tuesday with the story of how the Army is giving recruits who fail to meet initial body fat and academic standards a second chance by launching two pilot programs to help them lose weight and/or improve their aptitude test scores.  We've also covered how the woke silliness currently being peddled by military leaders isn't sitting well with soldiers and potential soldiers.  Alex Parker reported on how the Army will reportedly force female soldiers to shower with biological males who identify as females, while the Navy will allegedly allow sailors to use whichever locker room suits their gender identity.  There's also a huge emphasis on race:  [Tweet]

As Crime Skyrockets And Democrats Deny Blame, Remember What They Said About Police.  There is perhaps no better example of gaslighting by today's Democratic Party than when it comes to the issue of "Defund the Police."  In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, the mantra was all the rage in leftwing, Democratic circles.  Their media, their spokespeople, their elected officials — all of them — were singing the same song:  Police are evil, the system is racist, and we need to put our tax dollars to use doing something else.  The movement never made any sense.  Anyone who is old enough to remember the days of high-crime cities or who has watched movies like Taxi Driver and French Connection understand that a lack of law enforcement yields lawlessness.  And lawlessness yields more lawlessness.  Such a strategy will inevitably result in spiraling crime, and much of that crime will likely be of the "violent" variety.  Now, two years later, that highly predictable outcome has indeed come to fruition.  Since 2020 and their verbal attacks against police, Biden Administration officials have repeatedly tried to walk back their undeniable support for decimating our police departments.

The Demise of American Citizenship.  American citizenship and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the central government, the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, is under relentless assault by the nation's governing establishment and teetering on the edge of meaninglessness.  No nation can maintain its status as a nation without secure and identifiable borders.  Citizenship means nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without consequence.  It is estimated that 22 million illegals resided in the United States as of 2018.  Responding to an explicit invitation from the Biden administration, another 2+ million have walked unchallenged across the border in the past 18 months.  These so-called undocumented immigrants are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens as they openly reside in 500 sanctuary jurisdictions, receive welfare, education and medical care, are granted drivers licenses, and given tuition breaks at public universities as they, not legal immigrants or American citizens, are exempt from federal immigration, health and travel laws.

How Did Democrats Become So Out of Touch With the American People?  The republic is not in good shape.  Unforced foreign policy blunders, such as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, embarrass America on the world stage.  Our homeland territorial integrity has never been more undermined, as a wide-open southern border permits an unprecedented flow of smugglers, traffickers and other miscreants.  Homicide and other violent crime, which skyrocketed in the 2020 "summer of love" riots, continue to spike; the New York City subway is unsafe, and Chicago is a veritable war zone.  Mobocracy runs amok; a sitting Supreme Court justice just faced a near-assassination attempt.  Inflation, now over 9% and smacking those lower on the economic ladder, is at a four-decade high; the national average for gasoline is well over $4 per gallon.

France to turn lights off at night.  French President Emmanuel Macron [...] is telling French citizens to engage in energy "sobriety" and to prepare for even higher food prices.  Macron added, "From now on, I will ask public bodies, and all companies that can, to consume less.  We will create a program and try to use lighting less in the evenings.  We are launching a load reduction and sobriety program.  We have to prepare for a scenario in which we have to give up Russian gas completely." [...] And France is by no means alone.  California, the erstwhile Golden State, the Land of Milk and Honey — and Hollywood — says it expects periodic blackouts this summer as the power runs low.  In fact, California has struggled to keep the power on the past two summers, due to progressive policies that range from the nonsensical to the insane.  France is not engaged in war with Russia but is using the war as an excuse to demand energy "sobriety" from her citizens.  California is not fighting Russia either.

State conservation bill from '19 could be to blame for increased shark presence.  Great whites and other sharks have been coming close to Long Island beaches this year to feast on a particular kind of bait fish that has been flourishing in New York waters ever since the state legislature voted unanimously to preserve it three years ago.  With the population of Atlantic menhaden booming, sharks are swimming into shore like tourists bellying up to a buffet, and in the process, they are coming close to bathers — with disastrous results, experts told The [New York] Post.  "The reason why people are interacting with sharks more often this year and more than last year is because of conservation efforts over the years [that] has protected a food source known as the Atlantic menhaden," Frank Quevedo, executive director of the South Fork Natural History Museum Shark Research and Education Program, told The Post.

How Did Democrats Become So Out of Touch With the American People?  The president of the United States, equal parts senescent and feckless, garners record-shattering low approval ratings seemingly each week. [...] It is not difficult to figure out why.  The republic is not in good shape.  Unforced foreign policy blunders, such as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, embarrass America on the world stage.  Our homeland territorial integrity has never been more undermined, as a wide-open southern border permits an unprecedented flow of smugglers, traffickers and other miscreants.  Homicide and other violent crime, which skyrocketed in the 2020 "summer of love" riots, continue to spike; the New York City subway is unsafe, and Chicago is a veritable war zone.  Mobocracy runs amok; a sitting Supreme Court justice just faced a near-assassination attempt.  Inflation, now over 9% and smacking those lower on the economic ladder, is at a four-decade high; the national average for gasoline is well over $4 per gallon.

The Left Should Be Happy with Biden.  The Left should be ecstatic that Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted.  The Left likes inflation.  It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money.  Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don't have any money, suddenly do.  When combined with low interest rates, inflation roars even louder.  Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat been so insistent on inflating the money supply.

Why Is Conservative Media Calling a Male Rapist by Feminine Pronouns?  It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry when leftists insist that "men get pregnant" or refer to mothers as "birthing people" and otherwise ignore the material reality of biological sex.  While we've generally understood that this is the latest cause célèbre of the radical left, we don't really expect conservative media to follow suit.  Yet the recent case of a male inmate at a New Jersey women's prison who impregnated two inmates has shown that conservative media has also been successfully pressured to kowtow to the transgender cult, the Media Research Center has found.

The Long March to Nowhere.  [Scroll down]  Americans harbor a healthy skepticism of intrusive government and an intolerance for useless, broken institutions.  An institution is a tool with which to address a social need.  Schools should teach.  Companies should turn a profit.  Government agencies should be primarily concerned with the activity stated in their name (Commerce, Health, Defense, etc...).  And so on.  The Left has a nasty habit of tool abuse.  Any organization that progressives infest is inevitably subverted to advance their agenda, to the detriment of its official purpose.  And so, schools preach.  Companies insult their customers.  The Commerce Department destroys industries.  The CDC actively makes people sick.  The Department of Defense punishes soldiers who don't bow to the ideological flavor of the month.  Which lately involves cross-dressing. [...] Americans, being practical people, will sooner or later question the wisdom of supporting or retaining useless tools, or institutions.  Some we will abandon and replace.  Disney and the Democratic Party are two that come to mind.

Biden and The Destruction of Wisdom.  There used to be an agreed-on body of wisdom, which both Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats, generally accepted.  Heated arguments and invective centered on implementations and methods of solving problems, which at least both sides agreed were problems.  Both ideologies accepted a common core of wisdom, despite their radical differences in interpreting it.  Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and especially Biden's strange cabinet of loud Jacobin amateurs, reject the very hallowed knowledge upon which civilization is based.  In that sense the public has begun to recognize them as nihilist and anarchist.  Nearly two out of three Americans in some polls hold unfavorable views of the Biden Administration.  They fear that it is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying their lives as they have known them.

Transgender woman who impregnated 2 inmates removed from N.J.'s female prison.  A transgender inmate who impregnated two women while incarcerated at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women has been moved to a new facility, according to the Department of Corrections.  Demi Minor, 27, was transferred to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility, a prison for young adult offenders in Burlington County, last month, Dan Sperrazza, a Department of Corrections spokesman, said.  He said the DOC moved Minor to the vulnerable unit at the facility and that she is currently the only woman prisoner on the site.  Sperrazza said he could not comment on the DOC's specific housing actions in Minor's case because of policies around privacy.

After 18 Months of Biden, Have We Hit Bottom Yet?  The latest data confirm the destruction that he and his fellow Democrats have wrought:
  •   Inflation stood at 1.4%, year over year, in January 2021.  By June 2022, that figure was 9.1%, the worst such increase in the Consumer Price Index since November 1981.
  •   Gross domestic product grew 6.4% in 2021's first quarter.  In the first quarter of 2022, GDP shrank 1.6%.
  •   The Dow Jones Industrial Average was 31,188 on Jan. 20, 2021.  The Dow closed Wednesday at 30,722.  Pension savings, 401(k) plans, and other investment portfolios have shriveled under Biden.
  •   The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index measures short-term expectations for income, business, and labor markets.  That metric has slid from 92.5 in January 2021 to 66.4 last month -- its lowest level since March 2013.
  •   The National Federation of Independent Business' Small Business Optimism Index has retreated on Biden's watch from 95.0 to 89.5 -- its weakest showing since January 2013 under the Obama-Biden administration. [...]
  •   West Texas Intermediate crude oil traded for $53.24 per barrel as Biden took over.  It sold Wednesday [7/13/2022] for $96.87 -- up 82%.  A gallon of regular gasoline cost $2.39 as Biden arrived.  It hit $5.01 before easing to $4.63 on Wednesday -- up 93.7% since Trump jetted off to Mar-a-Lago.
  •   Border Patrol agents apprehended 754,538 illegal aliens during Trump's final 16 months in office (Oct. 1, 2019, through Jan. 31, 2021 -- including Biden's first 11 days).  In Biden's first full 16 months in power (Feb. 1, 2021, through May 31), Border Patrol confronted a stunning 2,975,135 illegal aliens -- up a staggering 394%.

The U.S. Misery Index Worsens as Unchecked Bidenflation Grows.  The U.S. government announced Wednesday that June's federal inflation numbers increased to a staggering 9.06% — a 40-year high.  According to the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) news release, inflation is being felt keenly and across the board: [...] From the updated BLS data, economists quantify the economic health of the country.  To do so, they add the current U.S. unemployment rate, which is a stagnant 3.6%, to the current rate of U.S. inflation, which is a jarring 9.06%, to produce a snapshot of the country's economy.  The result is known as the U.S. Misery Index.

Producer Price Index Hits Peak 11.3 Percent Inflation Driven by Biden Energy Policy — Service Prices Now Indicate Recession.  The "Producer Price Index" (PPI) is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate (processing), and then Final (to wholesale).  Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released June price data showing another 11.3% increase year-over-year in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  Overall, the wholesale inflation rate is being driven by energy prices.  The June calculation shows exactly that problem with energy prices embedded in goods driving 10% of the price increase.

The Editor says...
Yes, gas and grocery prices have gone up rapidly in the last year or so, but have you bought 9-volt batteries lately?  They used to be 69 cents apiece, and they're now over five dollars each.

Glenn Beck Asks Five Important Questions About The Tragic Story Of The Ten-Year-Old Ohioan.  One of the biggest stories in national media right now has been, in one form or another, about how a ten-year-old-girl was raped, got impregnated, and due to her residency in the state of Ohio was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion.  The story took off after Joe Biden referenced it in the immediate aftermath of leftist outrage over Roe's overturning at the Supreme Court.  Mind you, abortion was not made illegal with that ruling; it was simply returned to the states to decide on a course of action.  After all, nothing in the Constitution lays out a legal framework for federalizing infanticide.  It shouldn't even be an issue, and it certainly shouldn't have been decided in 1973 that rights were magically found in penumbras, but that's judicial activism for you.  Because the corrupt leftist media is in bed with the even more corrupt Biden Occupation, the story conveniently left out the fact that the alleged victim was raped by a monstruous illegal alien and pretended that the real problem was that she couldn't attain an abortion in her home state.  They said nothing of the act of rape itself or the fact that it was perpetrated by one of countless illegals welcomed into the country by the party of open borders.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek Summarizes all the Merging Food, Energy and Farming Issues with Stark Advice to Americans.  Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a GB News correspondent and conservative voice from Holland.  In this interview segment with NTDNews Ms. Vlaardingerbroek outlines what is happening in the Netherlands with the Dutch farm protests and how it connects to the larger Agenda 2030 goals.  In the last 20 seconds of the segment, Vlaardingerbroek has some solid advice for Americans.  [Video clip]

Cataloguing Biden's Ineptitude On Inflation.  The public would do well to ignore anything Biden says about inflation, given his horrible track record when it comes to this topic.  Since prices started their upward climb in March 2021, Biden has by turns claimed that it was the result of a booming economy, that it was temporary, that it was the result of supply chain bottlenecks, and most recently that Vladimir Putin is to blame[.]  When not making fact-free claims like those, Biden simply lies.  Take his oft-repeated claim that Europeans have it far worse on inflation.  Even Newsweek magazine felt obliged to conclude in its fact check "that Biden's statement that U.S. inflation is the 'lowest of almost every major nation' is largely inaccurate."  We don't expect readers to simply take our word for it that Biden has been out to lunch on inflation.  So we assembled a handy chart showing the annualized rate of inflation each month since January 2020.  It matches up that record with statements Biden made about inflation.

How to Cure Inflation.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics released two reports Wednesday morning [7/13/2022] that confirm the fiscal incompetence of the Biden administration and its confederates on Capitol Hill.  The BLS reported that the Consumer Price Index rose yet again in June:  "Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 9.1 percent before seasonal adjustment."  The BLS also released its Real Earnings Summary:  "Real average hourly earnings decreased 3.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from June 2021 to June 2022."  In May, President Joe Biden announced, "I want every American to know that I'm taking inflation very seriously and it's my top domestic priority."  Other than blame-shifting and bluster, however, his plan to fix it has been all but invisible.  Consequently, a number of polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe Biden and the Democrats bear the responsibility for inflation.

Inflation Hits 9.1 Percent in June, New 40-Year High.  The U.S. annual inflation rate climbed to 9.1 percent in June, reaching its highest level since November 1981 and topping the market estimate of 8.8 percent and May's annual rate of 8.6 percent.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 1.3 percent month-over-month.  The monthly inflation also was higher than economists' expectations of 1.1 percent.  While the core inflation rate, which removes the volatile food and energy sectors, eased to 5.9 percent, that was higher than the forecast of 5.7 percent.  On a monthly basis, core inflation rose at a higher-than-expected pace of 0.7 percent.  Food prices soared by 10.4 percent, while the energy index advanced by 41.6 percent.

The Rise of Black Girly Men.  I've noticed that when media represent so-called "transgender" men and highly effeminate males, they are often black.  Perhaps far too many people are desensitized to the pollution in our mass media to notice the disproportionate number of high-profile effeminate black men showcased in high rotation in all mass communication media.  These "gender-fluid" celebrities all display a common exaggerated and dramatically "flaming" exhibitionistic effeminate behavior.  It is my simple observation that whenever the secular humanist liberal class desires to impose non-traditional values into the public square, they often employ compromised black individuals or assume "black causes" to advance their self-serving agenda.  These elites care nothing for blacks or America, just their own pursuits.  The elites use blacks as human shields, as window dressing to manipulate, deflect, suppress, and silence any debate, dissent, or opposition from the majority of Americans who fear airing ideas or opinions that would result in being labeled as racists, homophobic, fascists, or all three.

Inflation jumps to 9.1%, highest in four decades.  Inflation accelerated to an explosive 9.1% for the 12 months ending in June, according to the consumer price index, the highest level in four decades.  The much-anticipated numbers reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revealed that inflation is still soaring, despite the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, and is near the worst it has been since the Great Inflation that helped bring President Ronald Reagan to office.

How Angela Merkel's Green Agenda Caused the Economic Collapse of Germany.  Remember how the world, especially the American media, fawned over former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?  The adoration was so over the top that in 2015 Time magazine named Merkel its "Person of the Year."  It described her as the "Chancellor of the Free World."  Time owes whatever readers it has left a solemn apology.  Today, Germans are suffering the bitter fruits of nearly every major economic and geopolitical decision Merkel made as chancellor.  Start with the German economy that she attempted to reset for the 21st century, which is reminiscent of how President Joe Biden explains to inflation-weary voters that we are going through "an incredible transition."  But Merkel's Germany was ahead of us in its "transition."  Today, the German economy is in tatters.

Biden's Twin Dumpster Fires:  Raging Inflation and Open Borders.  Faced with several serious domestic and foreign policy problems all at once, the Biden administration's reaction has been so catastrophically incoherent, it's hard to know whether to blame leftist ideology or just plain incompetence.  Inflation hits all of us right now. [...] Meanwhile, the effects of rampant illegal immigration are felt insidiously by most of us in crowded schools, the flow of illegal drugs, more expensive health care, and numerous other social costs, but they are hitting especially fast and hard in border communities.  After 17 months of record illegal immigration, the leaders of several Texas border counties have reached their limit in responding to the catastrophe.  They have just declared that they are under invasion, in an effort to get Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to enforce immigration law and protect them from an unprecedented, unchecked flood of illegal entrants — more than 1.5 million apprehended at the border just since October.

When Governments Do Truly STUPID Things.  They tend to collapse spectacularly and the "powers that be" almost-never survive politically — and frequently physically.  Sri Lanka is the latest example; they are literally bankrupt, having bought into the "green" thing and then... oops.  The root causes were many, but chief among them were overspending and a commitment to "green" farming practices, which decimated crop yields, spiked prices and then of course here comes higher oil costs.  The combination proved fatal to the economy.  "The rich" are being literally chased down and slaughtered, with "rich" being defined as "has something, when we have nothing."  The President fled the nation and, at least report, the Presidential home has been stormed by protestors.

Dear Democrats, THIS Is What Your Oppressive Global Initiatives Lead To.  After suffering from weeks of brutal food and fuel shortages, as well as crippling inflation, Sri Lankans have had enough.  Riots have broken out throughout the impoverished country.  Police have used tear gas and water cannons but to little effect.  Shortly after thousands of angry citizens stormed the presidential palace, even going so far as to swim in his pool, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared that he will step down.  Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe agreed to resign as well after his home was torched.  [Tweets with video clips]

'Complete Collapse': Here's How ESG Destroyed One Nation's Economy.  Sri Lanka is in a last-ditch effort to stave off economic collapse after an allegedly climate-friendly ban on artificial fertilizers devastated one of the country's largest industries, according to experts.  Sri Lanka has been wracked with poverty, inflation and fuel shortages on a massive scale, with the Prime Minister declaring Tuesday that the country has gone "bankrupt," according to Business Insider.  A ban on chemical fertilizers, implemented April 2021 in an effort to promote organic farming, proved the final straw after a string of missteps, decimating Sri Lanka's primary source of income and forcing it into bankruptcy, experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.  "Our economy has faced a complete collapse," Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on June 23, according to CNN.  The government lifted the fertilizer ban in November 2021, but the damage had already been done, Peter Earle, a former financial markets trader and economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The DCNF.

Protesters Storm Presidential Palace in Sri Lanka After Climate Hysteria Destroys the Nation.  Sri Lanka is in the middle of a full-scale collapse after the president announced the nation is "bankrupt," having run out of both money and energy.  Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, and things have devolved into a dystopian nightmare.  In the last several hours, the presidential palace was taken over by a sea of people, angry at the government for putting them in such a precarious position.  And as I'll explain, Sri Lanka's woes were not only avoidable but were purposely brought on to please climate change fanatics in faraway lands.  [Tweet]  Sri Lanka's government has been implementing ESG policies (environment, social, and governance) for years, following the lead of the World Economic Forum.  That includes banning agrochemicals such as fertilizers in an effort to lower nitrogen emissions.  Flowery tales of "organic" farming and saving the planet have now been replaced with horror, as the island nation's top exports have been laid to waste.  People are starving, they can't get gas or electricity, and none of the globalists who used Sri Lanka as a testbed for their green fantasies are coming to help.

Where Science Ends and Morality Begins.  Under the Biden administration, we are getting a foretaste of a green future.  The high costs of gasoline, heating oil, and electricity; the consequent high prices of everything else; the food shortages; and economic recessions will all be permanent features of a green America.  Tried flying lately?  Consider the phase-out of air travel to be already underway.  Supply chain problems causing empty shelves at the store?  Not to worry; when "buy local" is your only choice, you won't have to worry about supply chains.  Don't like arbitrary government mandates?  Don't like what the COVID lockdowns did to your constitutional rights?  Don't like seeing the rule of law abandoned before your eyes — from our open southern border to the homes of our Supreme Court justices?  Consider all this your introduction to socialist governance.

Army Training Says Soldiers Must Shower with Transgender Persons of Opposite Sex.  An Army training slide obtained by Breitbart News instructs soldiers to shower with transgender members of the opposite sex even if they have not undergone a surgical transition.  The training slide offers a "vignette" instructing soldiers on what to do if they encounter a female soldier who identifies as male according to the Department of Defense's personnel tracking system known as Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), but has not surgically transitioned and still has "female genitalia."

The Disappearing American?  During the nearly two-year-long COVID-19 shutdown and economic downturn, firms cut costs by laying off millions of employees.  As a result, some in their early- or mid-60s simply retired early and never came back to work.  Federal and state governments also vastly expanded financial support to the unemployed.  Other workers figured they would not make all that much more by working and so are staying home on government checks.  Still other former full-time employees became used to the new, more leisurely lifestyle and are loath to return to a full 40-hour work week.  Employers also are now convinced that a hard recession is on the early 2023 horizon when the trillions of dollars of newly printed money run out.  Many are willing to put up with worker shortages now, rather than hire too many employees only to have them idle when consumer demand soon crashes.

Did reefer drive the Highland Park parade 'killer' Robert Crimo to madness?  Those who knew the 21-year-old suspect, Robert Crimo III, say he habitually smoked cannabis, a habit he appeared to share with young mass shooters, including at Uvalde, Dayton, Parkland and Aurora.  Obviously weed didn't make them commit their evil acts, but it may have scrambled their brains enough for empathy to take a holiday.  As the country rushes headlong into the embrace of Big Weed, we need to heed the warning signs, not least in the scientific literature that increasingly shows that cannabis triggers psychosis, and in the emergency rooms where mentally ill kids are the living proof of its harms.  The higher the potency of THC, the worse it is, especially for the developing adolescent brain.

The greatest threat to "democracy" is from our elected representatives.  Federal policies have caused inflation to hit a 40-year high of 8.6% (or, using Carter-era calculations, 16%) for this past year, with energy prices rising 34.6%, eggs up 32.2%, and gas prices up nearly 50%.  The cost of meat — ground beef, steaks, pork, poultry — might more than double next year, as the costs to raise livestock skyrockets.  The average national price for gas exceeded $5 for the first time in history, causing the typical American household to spend "$160 more on gas a month than a year ago."  Overall, "typical US household is spending about $460 more every month than they did last year to purchase the same basket of goods and services."  That's a penalty of at least $5,520 per year for the average American household.  But don't worry, CNN promises "inflation can actually be a good thing for many working-class Americans" and the dumbest person at the New York Times thinks inflation is no big deal.  In reality, for many Americans, this merely adds to the pressure of significant increases in home and rental prices, and the soaring costs of college and health care.  The government has priced the future out of the American dream.

Netherlands farmers, fisherman revolt against government greenie impositions.  Greenie policies have destroyed Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and they destroy pretty much any economy wherever they go.  The revolt has now hit the Netherlands. [...] The government passed a greenie law to cut nitrogen and carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and then blandly declared that, yah, yah, "the honest message ... is that not all farmers can continue their business."  So for the Dutch farmers, who are among the world's most productive, who feed a continent and beyond from their tiny artificially created landscape, with, yes, cows, which are all about creating this newly created problem of nitrogen as well as cow-[emission] carbon, are suddenly the target.  They've got to quit producing and die.  Pay no attention to the fact that not every nation can sustain cows but would like to buy beef and leather and gelatin and milk and all the other things cows produce.  They all will now see shortages at the supermarkets and, worse still, shortages of cow "byproducts," which are sold as crop-saving fertilizer around the world.  Pay no attention to the unintended consequences the Dutch farmers are warning about.  The tsentral planners have spoken, and now the cows must die.  Too bad about the farms and farmers and consumers.

Yes, You CAN Blame Biden For High Energy Prices.  [O]n May 12, Biden's Interior Department blocked a proposal to open up more than one million acres of land in Alaska for oil and gas drilling.  Two days later, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency blocked plans to expand an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands.  Biden and his defenders said he had to block the expansion of the Virgin Islands refinery, given how polluting it was.  But had Biden's EPA allowed the Virgin Island refinery to expand, the owners would have poured nearly $3 billion into retrofitting the plant so it produced gasoline and other products more cleanly, while significantly increasing production at the same time.  Furthermore, anybody who cares about air pollution and climate change should want more oil and gas drilling, not less.  US emissions declined 22% between 2005 and 2020, mostly because cheap natural gas has replaced coal.

The Bait Car of History.  Sometimes it seems the 2020 presidential elections was history's equivalent of a bait car, a trap for those who thought it was a prize.  "Over the last 18 months, as we have confronted a range of unanticipated global challenges — from Covid variants to Putin's war", National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told CNN. "Give us a plan or give us someone to blame," one exasperated House Democrat said.  The administration is jinxed and it would be nicer for the Democrats if the whole catastrophe had befallen Donald Trump instead; but it's too late now.

The Editor says...
Obviously "the whole catastrophe [would never have] befallen Donald Trump," because Joe Biden aggressively un-did everything Trump had accomplished, whereas Donald Trump would have let the post-Covid recovery continue.  Joe Biden — or whoever makes his decisions — is entirely to blame for five-dollar gasoline, billions wasted in Afghanistan, vaccine mandates, crime without punishment, dangerously high inflation, the wide-open Mexican border, the baby formula shortage, and drag queens at the public library.

Immoral Democrats Make Excuses, Blame Others, and Divide.  [Scroll down]  America's economy is on the brink of recession.  Inflation is through the roof.  Americans are struggling with the worst price increases in their lifetimes at the gas pump and in the supermarket.  Parents are desperate to find baby formula.  Could it be that printing and spending trillions of dollars during the pandemic was shortsighted?  Is it possible that out-of-control U.S. debt and central bank "quantitative easing" devalue the dollar over time?  Is it likely that President Biden's Green New Deal policies have had their intended effect: to make it more difficult for energy companies to drill and refine hydrocarbon energy in the United States?  Is it possible that the administrative state's often-mindless issuance of regulations and rules for private businesses has inadvertently produced a nationwide infant formula shortage?  That would make too much sense.

The Coincidence of Crises.  COVID-19, Joe Biden, and Russian-Ukrainian 'crises' are pages from the same playbook written by an international clique that controls both sides. [...] The Keystone Pipeline, French nuclear plants, and German coal plants have all been intentionally and simultaneously shuttered under the façade of the convenient eternal enemy of 'Climate Change'.  A paltry sum of Russian foreign exchange reserves — already recouped by Russia due to the skyrocketing price of oil instigated by Biden and his cronies — was illegally seized, providing Russia ample casus belli to demand payment only in rubles.  Rather than ceasing to purchase Russian oil altogether, it is simply sold to Europe through India, further bolstering the oil industry and the Russian economy. [...] Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, constituting some of the largest producers of wheat and fertilizer in the world, were 'forced' to shutter their exports, just as there has been a dramatic and inorganic uptick in farm and food processing plant 'accidents' which conveniently avoided all of WEF-aligned Bill Gates' agricultural assets.  The ruble strengthens every week in tandem with both the price of oil and the controlled collapse of the dollar through inflationary money-printing.

No one should be forced to declare their pronouns.  Look closely next time you pop into your local bank, department store or supermarket and you'll notice an addition to the uniforms of put-upon cashiers and clerks: the pronoun badge.  It might be a little rainbow pin displaying 'he/him/his' in bold letters, or, far less often, 'they/them/their'.  Or it might be a small rectangle featuring the company logo alongside the employee's name and pronouns.  Pronoun badges have been around for a few years now, but in that time they have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.  They are no longer the preserve of over-enthusiastic Student Union reps or tie-dyed Labour Party conference attendees.  They've migrated on to the High Street.  Pride month is the perfect opportunity for companies lagging behind to catch up, and for those who have long been on the bandwagon to remind the world of their virtue.  Halifax is one of many banks that now expects employees to declare their pronouns.

Concerned Graduates of West Point Challenge Leadership of Military Academy:  Letter.  Three retired U.S. military officers — LTG Thomas McInerney, USAF; MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army; and Colonel Andrew O'Meara Jr., U.S. Army — signed a letter authored by "Concerned Graduates of West Point and The Long Gray Line," protesting against mandatory vaccinations, CRT classes, sanitary conditions, progressive political activism, and other "woke actions," in the military academy.  "The Long Gray Line" refers to the continuum of graduates United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.  "We wanted to challenge the leadership of the Academy and the Defense Dept on their WOKE actions, CRT, Diversity training and the other discrepancies in the Academy.  We found it pervasive at the Naval and Air Force Academies so we knew it was directed from the highest levels of our Military Leadership," Vallely told The Epoch Times.

Americans Are 'Collateral Damage' In Dems' Insane War On Energy.  Maybe the Jan. 6 hearings are, as some assert, really about distracting Americans from the Democrats' shocking policy failures.  How else can one explain the refusal of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress to address our ongoing energy crisis?  And, no, it's no exaggeration to call this a crisis.  With consumer prices rising at a four-decade-high of 8.6% in the most recent year-over-year comparison, Americans are watching their standard of living fall fast.  A just-released national survey has found that 83% of U.S. households are cutting their personal spending and travel due to soaring inflation.  These cutbacks are being driven almost entirely by energy costs, which have spiked nearly 35% in the past year.

The Invisible Power Controlling the US Government.  I have written extensively on inverted totalitarianism, that being the once nascent, now entrenched form of government that truly controls the levers of federal power in the United States.  This behemoth has turned the USA into a "managed democracy"; a bureaucracy which cannot be held accountable by the elected representatives of the people.  Sometimes called the 4th estate, this monster is also referred to as the "deep state" the civil service, or the administrative state.  Inverted totalitarianism does not have an authoritarian leader, but instead is run by a non-transparent group of bureaucrats.  This unelected, invisible ruling class runs the country from within.  They are easily influenced by corporate interests due to both the lure of powerful jobs after federal employment and the capture of our legislative bodies by the lobbyists serving concealed corporate interests.

The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F.  The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary. [...] From 2020 and onward, the American people got to know this administrative state well.  They ordered us to wear masks.  They deployed their influence to close small businesses and churches.  They limited how many people we could have in our homes.  They festooned our businesses with plexiglass and told everyone to stay six-feet apart.  They demanded two weeks of quarantine when crossing state borders.  They decided which medical procedures were elective and non-elective.  And they finally demanded compliance with vaccine mandates at the penalty of job loss.  None of this was ordered by legislation.  It was all invented on the spot by the permanent staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  We had no idea they had such power.  But they do.  And that same power which allowed those egregious attacks on rights and liberties also belongs to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest.

The Military Went Woke.  Now It Can't Find Recruits.  The military is facing the worst recruiting environment since the end of the Vietnam War.  The Army is at only 40% of its recruiting numbers for the fiscal year despite raising its maximum enlistment bonus from $40,000 to $50,000.  It now offers new recruits up to $10,000 for showing up to basic training in 30 days.  And is no longer even asking them for a high school diploma.  "We've never offered $50,000 to join the Army," Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said.  While the Army runs anime lesbian wedding ads, it's pushing away the recruits it needs, young patriotic men from traditional backgrounds.  When the Biden administration's brass decided to mandate vaccinations, they automatically rejected the 60% of potential recruits who aren't.

US Army Drops High School Diploma Requirement as Military Faces Unprecedented Challenges Under Joe Biden.  After completely bending the knee to woke ideology and gutting itself with unconstitutional mandates that forced an experimental and dangerous vaccine, the US Military is taking the hacksaw to the standards that are used to find and train new recruits as the Armed Forces struggle through what some officials are calling the "most challenging recruiting year ever."  In addition to lowering almost every single physical qualification for new recruits to pass their initial training, the US Army has now dropped its requirement that recruits must have a high school diploma or a G.E.D. degree in a desperate effort to attract new blood into the ranks.

The degradation of our military.  I believe that the Biden Administration, most Democrats, and a good number of so-called Republicans are dedicated to the destruction of the traditional USA by various means:  economic, political, cultural, immigration, and military.  This essay addresses that last listed avenue of destruction — the military.  Napoleon Bonaparte is often quoted as saying that "An army marches on its stomach," meaning that no Army can move without food.  I would submit that, today, in addition to food, an Army cannot march without fossil fuels.  The complicated logistics of modern life and warfare require reliable, consistent, and readily available fuels.  The reduction in our military capabilities is the most frightening, imminent, and insidious threat to our very existence.

LGBTQ agenda emasculating police in Columbus.  Police in Columbus, Ohio, have a new vehicle in their law enforcement lineup — a shiny white SUV painted in Pride Month glory in glossy rainbow stripes and adorned with the movement's signature phrase, "Love Is Love."  And all the criminals go:  Yay.  This is worse than "defund the police."  At least defunding means cops exit, stage left, with their dignity intact.  But this — this police cruiser blasting out pro-Pride messages with unicorn and fairy-like, cupcake-frosting fancy — this is emasculating the police.  And that's worse because Columbus can claim that it staffs its police force and that it fully supports law enforcement — all the while Not.

America Is More Fragile Than the Left Understands.  Our major cities are no longer safe.  Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade.  A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population.  It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.  We know it is so because California public officials talk of anything and everything — Roe v Wade, transitions to electric cars, hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief for illegal aliens — to mask their utter impotence to address feces in the street, the random assaults on the vulnerable, and the inability to park a car and return to it intact.  Ditto the Dodge City downtowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and a host of others.  In just four or five years, they have given up on fully funding the police, aggressive prosecutors indicting the violent, and ubiquitous civil servants ensuring the streets are free of trash, vermin, flotsam, jetsam, and human excrement.

Hundreds of NYC prosecutors [are] quitting [because of] woke bosses and onerous reforms.  The number of prosecutors fleeing the city's district attorneys offices has spiraled in the wake of criminal justice reforms that have created what one ex-top prosecutor called "insanity."  Sixty five assistant district attorneys, or about 12 percent of the staff, have resigned so far this year from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's office, up from about 44 through the end of March.  During all of 2021, 97 ADAs quit.  The situation is nearly the same in the office of Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, where 67 of some 500 prosecutors, or about 13 percent, have also called it quits as of June 17. Another three resigned on Thursday, according to a source.  That is compared to 84 who left in all of 2020 and 94 last year.  In the Bronx, 59 prosecutors have walked from January through May.  Reps from the Queens and Staten Island DA offices did not respond to requests for data.

We Are Witnessing What Happens When Unrestrained Youth Gets Power.  When most of us think of the worst emperors in Roman history we think of names like Commodus, Nero, Caligula, and Elagabalus.  To a man they were vain, self-centered, bloodthirsty hedonists who took what they wanted and tortured and killed many thousands of Romans and provincials. [...] Every day in America we see modern-day Commoduses or Caligulas wreaking havoc on our streets and in our stores, restaurants, schools, and more.  Instead of a single entitled Emperor, America in 2022 is being ravaged by a generation of young men — many of whom have grown up fatherless — who have been told that they can do and say anything they want and that, regardless of what they do, there will be no consequences for them.  Just as Elagabalus et al brought nothing but blood, despair, and dysfunction to the Empire, these 21st-century youth are bringing blood, despair, and destruction to America.  A generation of Americans has grown up being given "time outs", "participation trophies," and grades that have nothing to do with actual academic success, while at the same time they've been told that all inequality is due to racism, sexism, homophobia, or anything other than individual choices or actions.  The consequence of this indoctrination is that far too many young Americans think they can do anything with impunity.  If they want something they take it.

Tucker Carlson savages Republican politicians' disrespect for Americans.  Despite the media's covering for Biden, people have noticed raging inflation, a recession, lawlessness, broken borders, a tenderness for Ukraine denied to America, cultivated race-hatred, efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens, and the arrogance of the LGBTQ+++ crowd — and they don't like any of it.  It turns out that mean tweets aren't so bad when compared to a government that's hostile to its own citizens.  The Democrats' intentional mismanagement is so extreme that the party is losing Hispanics and blacks in droves.  In theory, this should be a golden age for Republicans.  It's not, though, and that's the fault of the Republican political class, few of whom seem to embrace conservatism or Americans.

Six major cities on pace to pass historic 2021 violent crime totals halfway through 2022.  Violent crimes are on the rise in six of America's major cities and set to outpace the already historic levels of 2021 violent crime.  Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New York City are all on pace to break their 2021 levels of violent crime halfway through this year, with the nation's largest city leading the group, according to crime data reviewed by Fox News.  New York City has seen a 25.8% jump in violent crime at this point in 2022 compared to the same time in 2021, despite seeing a small decrease in the amount of homicides recorded in the city.  Violent crime, which is typically defined as homicide, rape, assault, and robbery, had already been on the rise since 2020.  Homicides have been one of the factors driving up rates of violent crime, rising 30% from 2019 to 2020 and another 5% between 2020 and 2021.

How liberal policies have killed black communities.  Michael Pack:  You have talked a little today about how life in the black community has not been improved by many well-intentioned social programs.  Do you think, in some sense, it is worse than when you grew up?  Clarence Thomas:  It's a disaster.  When I grew up, you had family, you didn't have drugs, you didn't have gang-banging.  You could walk down the street.  There was a change in our society.  I think that these programs certainly had an impact.  Just go back to Savannah and take a look around you.  Our worst fears were realized.  We didn't want to be right; we wanted to be wrong.  It wasn't about winning an argument.  No, we wanted to lose the argument.  We did not want the damage to occur; that's why we were involved.  I don't particularly like public life; I never wanted to be in public life.  I'd like to go to football games.  I'd like not to make decisions about other people's lives, but what drags you into it is when you see these principles being undermined, which leads to such destruction.  The policies destroy people, and, ultimately, I think, we're going to destroy the very thing that allows us to have liberty and to have a free society.

Do Republicans Even Know What Democrats Did to Them With This Anti-Gun Bill?  The economy is primed to enter a recession as the second-quarter report is bound to show another period of economic contraction.  The supply chain crisis is still ongoing.  The pain at the gas pump lingers.  Inflation is torching the wallets of working Americans.  American mothers still can't find baby formula.  The southern border remains a mess.  There is not a single crisis that's being managed in any meaningful way.  Biden's crew has done nothing.  They can't even get a WNBA star out of Russia who's supposedly being unlawfully detained.

The Great Biden Recession of 2022 Is Already Here.  Last week, I was invited to testify before a House committee hearing titled:  "How the Biden American Rescue Plan Saved the Economy and Lives."  I am not making this up.  Can you imagine taking a victory lap, given our current conditions?  I told the Democrats on the committee that the idea that Congress would hold a hearing like this when the economy is coming unhinged only reinforces the suspicion held by most people that the Washington swamp is totally out of touch with the lives and hardships of everyday America.  The reality of our predicament is best summarized by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who warned investors to "brace yourself" for what he called a fast-approaching economic "hurricane."

Trans Suicide Is Not a Response to Bigotry.  In 2018, the Heritage Foundation reported suicide rates for individuals 15 years after surgical transition 20 times higher than the that of the population overall.  Even in Sweden, with long availability of transgender medications and surgeries, and social acceptance of transgender individuals, the high suicide rate is consistent with rates in other locations.  Trans activists consistently attribute high suicide rates to irrational hatred, bullying, and rejection targeted at the individual.  However, according to Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the high numbers of suicides are usually years after surgery.  The trigger, according to Dr. McHugh, is the persistent and undeniable reality that that genital surgery has not transformed the individual's sex, leading to despair.  Perhaps elevated rates of suicides and attempts among trans-identifying individuals should be no surprise.  The whole point of "transition" is that an aspect of an otherwise healthy body is so unbearable as to justify a lifetime of artificial hormones and multiple irreversible surgeries.

Biden's energy hypocrisy.  Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail in 2020 that he would "transition away from the oil industry," convert to 100 percent "clean" energy by 2035, and "end fossil fuels."  Shortly after taking office, he started to make good on this pledge by suspending all new gas and oil leases on federal property and ending the Keystone XL pipeline.  Now, faced with gas prices at a record high $5 per gallon and runaway inflation — aka the consequences of his own actions — Biden is looking for an off-ramp.

The Coming Economic Storm.  Was the Trump presidency, with $2 gas, low unemployment and inflation, peace and prosperity, the calm before the current economic storm?  Did Trump know what lay ahead, teasing out a prediction?  Regardless of what President Trump was alluding to, an economic storm is definitely coming, not just on the horizon but already taking its toll on hard-working Americans.  Inflation is at 8.6 percent, the official government number for the CPI.  This is based on a basket of goods and depending on what is measured and how it is weighted, may misrepresent the inflation rate facing consumers on a daily basis.  For example, the Truflation Dashboard reports inflation at 13.2 percent, with food costs up 26.5 percent.  The producer price index rose 10.8 percent in May, foretelling higher consumer prices soon reaching store shelves.  Small business optimism fell to a new 48 year low.  Pessimistic business owners will not be hiring new employees or expanding their businesses.  Many may close up shop instead.

American decimation:  On the front lines of the tearing of our social fabric.  When the Hampton Battery was dedicated here in 1871 to a young Civil War soldier who lost his life protecting the Union at Chancellorsville, Virginia, the granite monument was a point of pride for residents of this neighborhood. [...] Today, the battery's founder, Capt. Robert B. Hampton, who was remembered by the men who served under him as a born commander with "the chivalric nature of an honorable gentleman," is now part of a different carnage in America as he stands watch over an open heroin market that has taken over the once grand park.  Residents say the Civil War statue is literally surrounded by drug dealers, buyers, and users around the clock.  They are getting more aggressive with panhandling, trespassing, and theft.  Just yards away, along the old Pennsylvania canal, a man walks down the street, carrying a brand new patio chair stolen from the porch of a nearby home, toward the new and growing homeless camp.  Last week, there were two tents or makeshift abodes.  Now, there are over a dozen.

To Fight Marxist Education, We Need a New Kind of School.  Those with no understanding of history lack the acumen to steer the future.  Those deprived of great literature remain ill prepared for complex ideas or weighty emotions.  Those who don't first train their minds with the foundations of mathematics and logic lose their potential to build anything new.  To create automatons incapable of dissent or resistance, the Marxists simply destroyed education.  The unsavory result has been that America is now a nation of people with many titles and degrees but diminished capacity for critical thought and reflection.  Just as Congress and the White House work today to disarm Americans of their constitutionally protected firearms, the successive governments behind the Department of Education's demolition of public schooling have disarmed too many Americans of their potential for reason and rationality.  Anyone who doubts that unassailable truth need only look around to see a society unable to distinguish men from women, alleviate its existential angst over ridiculously ludicrous tales of climate apocalypse, or comprehend that the very people who speak endlessly of "saving democracy" or "fighting fascism" are the same ones destroying democratic institutions and promoting the State's totalitarian authority.

Buttigieg Is Angry That Employees Aren't Coming To Work At Airlines.  Airlines across the country, like just about every other industry in America, have been struggling for over a year now to properly staff their operations.  They just can't get enough people to come work for them, and with the employees that they have hired, they're experiencing high levels of absenteeism.  And there are several reasons why.  We have the Biden Administration's "American Rescue Plan" which provided handouts to millions of would-be workers and paid them for doing nothing.  Then there was the repeated extension of unemployment benefits by Mr. Biden, which incentivized workers to just stay home.  And of course, we have the ridiculously high price of gas which makes it much more expensive for an employee to get to work.  All these issues and more have resulted in the wage-price-spiral that we see today.  Inflation is skyrocketing because employers must pay employees more to come work for them.  But then that additional money employees have is worth less because of high prices.

Man Tries to Give Blood Amid a Shortage, Is Rejected Because He Won't Say Whether He's Pregnant.  For any men wanting to donate blood, make sure you're medically self-aware.  For example, you should be adequately informed as to whether you've been impregnated.  Such was a lesson reportedly learned by Leslie Sinclair this month.  The central Scotland resident had hoped to give life-sustaining fluid to others in need.  Sadly, the effort encountered coagulation.  According to the Daily Mail, the 66-year-old was handed a form asking if he was currently pregnant.  Furthermore, the facility needed to know if he'd been knocked up within the last half-year.  The inquiry left him less than impressed:  ["]When he complained that as a man in his 60s this question did not apply and he should not have to answer it, Mr Sinclair said staff at the clinic told him they could not accept his blood.["]

How's that Biden baby formula shortage working out?  Remember when Joe Biden "solved" the baby formula shortage by flying in big Care Package-style shipments in huge jets from Europe?  It was embarrassing, given that the U.S. isn't a typical recipient of foreign aid.  But not to Joe Biden, who had the cameras all over it.  Turns out the big public relations show did nothing.  It was about as effective as Joe Biden releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to solve high prices at the pump.  Same as the price of oil, the baby formula shortage is worse than ever.

The Democrats' Capricious Energy Policy Has Been a Disaster.  Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs and cataclysmic weather events.  Every flood, every hurricane — every natural event, really — is now blamed on climate change.  We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future.  Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won't even have children.  So, why, if we're on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is President Joe Biden begging everyone to drill?  On the days Democrats aren't blaming Vladimir Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for "freedom"), they're blaming oil companies for profiteering.  Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly $2 higher than last year), Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices — a political appeal to the imaginary "greedflation."

Wall Street finishes its worst week since the 2020 pandemic crash.  Wall Street has closed out its worst week since the COVID-19 pandemic crashed markets in 2020, despite a modest bounce on Friday.  For the week, the Dow Jones Industrial average was down 1,504 points, or 4.8 percent.  The S&P 500 lost 5.8 percent and the Nasdaq dropped 4.8 percent.  It marks the S&P's worst week since March 2020, when stocks were in free-fall as the global economy suddenly shut down at the onset of the pandemic.

The Biden Administration's Push to Normalize Drug Use Will Result in More Deaths.  We have been covering several stories related to the escalation of drug deaths across the country, namely due to fentanyl (now the leading cause of death for young Americans).  In a normal world, there would be a push to stem the recreational use of powerful narcotics.  However, the Biden administration and progressives across the country are pressing to normalize drug use.  For example, we reported that Biden's Health and Human Services department provided $30 million in funding to dole out crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its 'Harm Reduction Plan.' In the same piece, we noted that Biden's Department of Justice says it might be open to allowing safe injection sites, which are places where people can shoot up heroin and other narcotics.

Rolling Blackouts [are] on the Way.  In the recent past, California and Texas have suffered blackouts due to inadequate electricity supply.  This year, as the summer heats up, it is the midwestern states served by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) that are most likely to see their lights go out. [...] Why are blackouts suddenly occurring after many decades of reliable energy?  Because of profiteering by "green" energy hucksters.  ["]MISO may simply not have enough reliable power plants on the grid this summer after 3,200 megawatts (MW) of reliable power plants, mostly coal and nuclear, retired last year.["]  This is a scandal.  "Green" energy liberals have demanded, successfully, that reliable coal and nuclear plants be closed so they can be replaced by wind farms and solar installations.  But those unreliable, intermittent sources can never replace power plants that actually work 24/7.  Hence the blackouts that are now beginning, and will become more and more widespread if we continue to rely increasingly on undependable sources of power.

Oregon's drug decriminalization effort [is] a 'tragedy'.  The streets of downtown Portland, Oregon, resemble an open-air drug market.  Heroin, meth and fentanyl use is rampant and often visible on city streets.  Portland police officers drive by homeless addicts buying and using.  The signs of drug addiction are actually increasing throughout the state, according to law enforcement sources.  Oregon ranks second-highest among U.S. states for substance abuse with nearly one in five adults addicted.  In November 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 110.  The Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act secured 58% of the votes and decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs such as heroin, meth, cocaine and fentanyl.

Biden's Deathly Presidency.  Under Trump, America was in so many senses vibrant and "alive" with pride in our country and hope for its future.  Now we have regular mass shootings in which citizens disarmed by the State have no way to defend themselves.  Overseas, we have a war in Ukraine, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and Iran developing nuclear weapons with the encouragement of the Biden administration.  The common thread is death and the fear that goes with it.  And this does not even include Biden's aggressive defense of abortion on demand. [...] Long-term death rates are more a matter of demographics than policy, and they have been rising ever since Obama took office in 2008.  But murder rates, deaths in war and civil unrest, drug overdose deaths, and accidental deaths are attributable to policy, and they have been rising under Biden, even during his short time in office.  Under Biden, the U.S. murder rate, which had been declining under President Trump, is the highest in 25 years. [...] As a citizen, it is difficult to watch my country besieged by violence.  Biden's presidency has been deadly in every respect: turning off economic growth and imposing environmental restrictions, proposing inflation-adjusted cuts in national defense while paying off student loans, and putting citizens at risk with his anti-police rhetoric.  There is little chance of a second Biden term, but just another two and a half years is painful to imagine.  How many thousands will lose their lives because of one incompetent and wrong-headed leader?

The Fed Created the Next Recession.  The long-term driver of inflation, and the reason we have so much inflation, is the fact that we printed six and a half trillion dollars in 48 months and grew the money supply by 40%.  That is simply what's driving all of this, and all of the other things are just sort of add-ons to the supply chain.  Is Russia's invasion of Ukraine driving some of it?  Yes.  Is that the main driver?  No.  The longer-term structural issue is the fact that we grew the money supply by six and a half trillion dollars.  That's what's driving inflation at the end of the day.  It takes 12 to 18 months for all that government spending to get into the system.

Team of Fools:  Biden's Cabinet Picks Prove He is Unfit to Lead.  I have written extensively about Biden's shortcomings.  Nothing exceeds his capacity for choosing the wrong people. [...] Not to be outdone, we have Biden's Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellin.  Listen to the congressional hearings — Yellin sounds like a homeless person.  Since Biden took over, the price of gasoline and other key commodities has doubled.  "Not only did Janet Yellen fail to see any of this coming," said Tucker Carlson, "Yellen more than any single person in America caused it in the first place.  If you're mad about the current state of the economy, Janet Yellin is the first person you should blame."  When asked about inflation, Yellen originally predicted that "Inflation, if it happens, will be transitory."  Now her excuse is that no one could have anticipated the record inflation that is plaguing Biden's presidency. [...] Why didn't Yellen see it coming?  And what is her response?  "I do expect inflation to remain high," Yellen says, "although I very much hope it will be coming down now."  "Is that where we are," asks Tucker Carlson, "very much hoping?  In a functioning country, Janet Yellen would be in a retirement home.

White House says Biden has sparked 'historic economic boom' as Dow plunges into bear market amid record inflation.  The White House defended President Joe Biden's economic record on Monday as the nation experienced historic inflation, gas prices over $5 a galloon and the stock market dropping.  White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued President Biden actually made historic economic gains, which would help the American people go through these economic 'challenges.'  She blamed inflation — prices in May were 8.6% higher than a year earlier — the greatest increase since 1981 — on the covid pandemic and on Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in the Ukraine.  'You know, with this price, high inflation coming, coming out every once in a generation, global pandemic, all of those things play a factor,' Jean-Pierre said.  But, she argued, that America would bounce back under Biden.

Biden blames Republicans, Russia for soaring inflation.  President Joe Biden on Tuesday blamed Republicans and the Russian invasion of Ukraine for soaring US inflation, in a bid to deflect voter anger over his inability to keep prices down.  Speaking to trade unions in Philadelphia on the eve of the Federal Reserve's likely decision to raise interest rates again, Biden said inflation is "sapping the strength of a lot of families."  Biden said he feels Americans' pain, having grown up in a family where news that the price of gasoline had gone up "was a conversation at the dinner table.  It mattered."  But he rejected arguments that his government's massive spending to stimulate the economy at the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic was to blame, instead citing shockwaves from Ukraine and Republican obstruction.

All Stock Market Gains Erased Since Biden Took Office.  The stock market has lost all the gains it made since President Joe Biden was sworn into office, according to recent data reported by Fortune on Monday [6/13/2022].  The S&P 500 took a sharp downturn, closing on Monday 151 points below where it was in January of 2021. The other two major indexes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite fell by 876 points and 530 points respectively, both below where they were when Biden took office.  Cryptocurrency has also taken a hit.  Bitcoin lost 15% of its value, and Ethereum lost 16%, according to Fortune.

U.S. annualized inflation just peaked 17 percent for the first time since WW2, the highest rate in 75 years.  [Threat reader]  The media are misreporting the real data, and I'll explain why.  Inflation is properly defined as an expansion of the money supply.  However in the 20th century, the federal government began a series of steps to expand the money supply to facilitate more expansive federal spending (removing the gold standard, removing the gold peg, suppressing interest rates as "stimulus," printing money directly into the Treasury, etc.).  All of these are inflationary, and prices rose far more in the 20th century vs. the largely deflationary 19th century.  To cover their tracks, the Fed changed its definition of inflation from meaning an expansion in the money supply to mean rising prices.  (Again, previously, the terms were basically synonymous as an expanding money supply ALWAYS means higher prices.)  The CPI as originally conceived was intended to track the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living.  In 1980, the Fed altered its tool for calculating inflation such that it was no longer measuring a constant "basket of goods" but rather a "quasi-substitution-based basket of goods"; now, via "hedonics," the Fed would, for example, use tech improvements to offset rising prices [...]

Joe Biden Gets Smashed by Resurrected Clip, Karine-Jean Pierre Flails in Response.  If you have any money in the stock market, today was a good day to not look at it.  The Dow Jones cratered by nearly 900 points with the other markets following the same trends.  For the first time, the markets are now currently lower under Joe Biden than when he took office.  This is what a full-scale collapse looks like.

New Charts Reveal Harms of Biden's Budget-Busting Binge.  President Joe Biden has been engaging in extra-strength political spin by repeatedly taking credit for a reduction in the budget deficit.  Yet this happened despite Biden's policies, not because of them:  Record-setting deficits during the COVID-19 pandemic were already expected to come back down to earth as the worst of the pandemic seemed to wane.  A more accurate way to see whether Biden has been good for the nation's financial health is to compare where things stood when he took office with where they stand today.  The comparison in the chart [not shown here] makes it clear:  Biden has repeatedly chosen to make things worse.

The Latest Mask Research Is Bad News For Branch Covidians.  Unless you're visiting a medical facility still taken in by the mask-cult or you live in a big city or some obscure California county run by hypochondriac Democrat whack-jobs, you're probably generally living your life without being forced to wear a useless, bacteria-laden piece of t-shirt material over your face. [...] Indeed, the unabashed insistence that masks 'work' has become one of the most insane and evil lies in all of human history.  Not only did it create a false sense of security that doubtless led to more infections than would otherwise had occurred, it also led to years of speech and developmental delays in children, untold disruptions of societal cohesion, millions of tons of useless and pointless medical waste in our oceans and landfills, massive psychological issues in countless people who still mask-up in the absurdest of places and situations to this day, and even actual medical harms that are just being uncovered.  All while doing absolutely nothing towards their intended purpose.  If there has been a worse trade-off, I'd love to see it.

Inflation spoils the January 6 show.  Call it bad timing or Trump luck, but most people today are talking inflation.  This is from Fox News:  ["]The Labor Department said Friday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price for everyday goods, including gasoline, groceries and rents, rose 8.6% in May from a year ago.  Prices jumped 1% in the one-month period from April.  Those figures were both higher than the 8.3% headline figure and 0.7% monthly gain forecast by Refinitiv economists.  It marks the fastest pace of Inflation since December 1981.["]   Well, I remember 1981 and the recession that followed in 1982.  In other words, my memory tells me it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.  Wait until companies shut down and lay off people.  It's coming because I saw this movie 40 years ago.

The Editor says...
You joined that movie in progress, sir, because Gerald Ford was desperately trying to "Whip Inflation Now" in 1974.  (And also tried to solve a gasoline shortage by reducing the speed limit to 55 mph nationwide, which created the CB Radio boom and made Radio Shack stores very popular.)  Eventually he turned the inflation problem over to Jimmy Carter, who made matters worse.  But even Carter never dreamed of spending a trillion dollars at a time.

NYPD exodus:  Police on pace to quit, retire in record numbers.  More than 1,500 NYPD officers have either resigned or retired so far this year — on pace to be the biggest exodus of officers since the statistics have been available, The [New York] Post has learned.  Some 524 cops have resigned and 1,072 have retired as of May 31, NYPD pension stats obtained by The Post show.  The 1,596 total is a 38% spike from the same period in 2021, when 1,159 cops called it a career, and a staggering 46% climb from 2020, when 1,092 left the force by the same date.  Anti-cop hostility, bail reform, and rising crime have fed into frustration among the NYPD rank and file, according to one NYPD officer who recently fled for greener pastures at a Long Island police department after 6½ years with the New York's Finest.

The Subordinate Citizen.  There are lots of reasons why the looming November midterms will likely see historic levels of pushback against the Biden administration, Democratic candidates, and the entire progressive agenda.  Take your pick of the many self-induced Biden disasters, among them hyperinflation, unaffordable gasoline, out-of-control crime, and foreign policy humiliations.  But one reason why voters are furious is rarely expressed.  Americans feel that ordinary citizens like themselves who follow the rules are treated more harshly by their own government than are both noncitizens and our own progressive elites.  And they are right, and they are angry, and we will hear from them very soon.

Biden Has America on its Knees.  There have been a number of books released recently that highlight America's collective buyer's remorse in electing Joe Biden as President.  As we came through a spring of Biden's administration starting a new Cold War with Russia, skyrocketing inflation, and a baby formula shortage; the opportunities for authors to highlight the multitude of failures is easy.  You know it is dire when no one on the Left is writing a book about the glowing successes of the Biden administration and its domestic and foreign triumphs.

What would it take for the White House to commit treason?  A number of prior actions by the Biden administration directly harmed rather than helped the U.S.  These injurious executive decisions include suppression of domestic oil and natural gas production (note current gas prices); opening the southern border to a massive wave of illegal immigration, deadly drugs, and human-trafficking; fabricating a COVID scam that destroyed public trust in Washington; mandates that nullified the Bill of Rights; printing trillions of fiat dollars; abrogation of rule of law causing the current crime wave; and promotion of anti-white racism CRT (Critical Race Theory).  While all these actions hurt the American people and are frankly anti-American, they do not satisfy the definition of treason:  "betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government."  But what the White House is currently planning behind closed doors may be a different story.

How Progressive Ideology Transformed America.  Most people have now caught on to how progressive ideology has inched its way into American life through critical race theory and gender ideology.  However, few are aware of how America has been radically transformed over a period of time.  People notice the adverse effects but cannot connect the dots back to progressivism.

Trump's Right of First Refusal Isn't Enough.  [Scroll down]  Trump's tiresome tirades about his re-election having been stolen — while true enough — get in the way of the more important message for 2024:  how he will fix in 2024 all of what the Democrats have destroyed since January 2020.  This is not to say election integrity isn't a big deal, but Trump can't do anything about it now, and needs to stay focused on what matters right now.  What really matters is crippling runaway inflation, the war on energy, the invasion on the southern border, the anarchy, violence, and dystopia of Dem-run American cities, and the endless catastrophes in foreign policy and national security.  Of course, most Trump-aligned Marys and Joes are annoyed about the stolen 2020 election, but they are terrified by the state of the nation and how it is affecting them and their families — right now.  Trump needs to relentlessly pound away at the root causes of that raw fear now and every day, and what he would do about it on day one of his second term.

The dystopian state of our nation.  [Scroll down]  Fear-mongering is their number-one tool; the media, electronic and social, are completely on board.  Fomenting crime, unnecessary COVID mandates, lockdowns, calculated supply chain shortages, the doubling of gas prices, etc. — all these are part of their program to disrupt and destroy what was once the greatest nation on the planet.  Despite the seeming randomness of what is happening, it's all part of their plan:  wreck America as founded, and reconstitute it as their oligarchic playground.

Have We Become Amerika?  A 1987 television miniseries that visualized the condition of the U.S. a decade after the country had surrendered to the Soviet Union was probably not far off the mark.  Life in "Amerika" was nothing like life in America before the Soviet takeover. [...] Unlike the Americans in "Amerika," we didn't surrender to the Soviets.  We have simply handed power to the left.  The hard (and unrelenting) left controls most of the media, sets the tone for popular culture, and has hegemonized most of our institutions and many of our businesses.  Consequently, freedoms have been overrun, dissent forbidden, free speech shredded, and crime allowed to thrive.  Our Second Amendment rights are in grave jeopardy.  The price of energy is intentionally being increased.  Failure to conform to leftist demands risks ostracization.  The rule of law is being ignored.  Our justice system has been corrupted by politics.  Both policymakers and activists want to increase the middle and lower classes' dependency on government.  Wealth is not to be created but redistributed by elected officials and their functionaries in the bureaucracy.  Inflation caused by Democratic policies has wrecked the value of the dollar.  Abundance has been replaced by shortages, the worst of which are yet to come.

Seattle Implodes After Defunding Police.  Seattle's efforts to defund its police department and transfer its duties to other city agencies resulted in $5 million worth of wrongful parking tickets and other administrative dysfunction, according to The Seattle Times.  Seattle is refunding roughly 100,000 parking tickets worth approximately $5 million total after transferring parking enforcement duties from police to civilian parking enforcement officers in the fall of 2021, finding that the civilian officers lacked the legal authority to write the tickets, according to The Seattle Times.  Parking officers also conducted more than 10,000 car tows and impounded 1,700 cars without the proper authority during this period.  "What's going to happen here is that we're going to get sued, I can guarantee it," said Chuck Labertew, president of Lincoln Towing, which has the sole contract for city-initiated towing, according to The Seattle Times.  "And I'm going to forward every one of those lawsuits on over to the city."  The decision to remove this responsibility from police was part of a push in 2020 to reduce police funding and have civilians take on jobs typically handled by police, according to The Seattle Times.

The green agenda's role in global inflation.  As inflation rises and the prospects for our return to normality following the pandemic fade ever more into the distant future, criticism is rightly focusing on financial institutions and regulators.  They claim that printing money, which has inevitably caused prices to rise, was necessary to mitigate the economic chaos of lockdowns.  But now they appear to be behind a third act of immense self-harm to help to steer the world to inflation and deliberately prevent economic recovery.  The rise in energy prices the world has seen were not the result of an unforeseeable supply crisis, but engineered by those charged with managing the economy. [...] It turns out that the chief regulator of the UK economy (the sixth largest in the world) and his predecessor were far more concerned with the putative risks from climate change than with developments in geopolitics.  The Bank of England's webpages could have been written by an XR activist.  'Climate change creates financial risks and economic consequences,' it claims.  'These risks and consequences matter for our mission to maintain monetary and financial stability.'  Endless volumes of reports and links to pages after pages make the case, citing equally endless scientific reports that I have always considered to be suspect.

Guns Are Not the Problem.  [Scroll down]  It is considered offensive or stodgy even to suggest that things are not as they should be.  We're living in a male-dominated world, we are told over and over.  Men are thriving.  But it's the women who are thriving.  They are getting educated more than ever, making more money than ever, and they are finding the pickings of marriageable men with secure jobs (thanks, globalization) are slim.  The result is fewer marriages, or marriages delayed, and fewer families.  Our infertile, androgynous blob-society has destroyed masculinity and femininity both, leaving the sexes repulsed by one another.  Society ridicules masculinity and sets men up to fail with terrible advice: become docile and vulnerable, and be more like women.  While men have softened, femininity is becoming a rare quality in women.  The typical modern "boss b****" talks and acts like a man, is fatter than her predecessors, and has a sense of entitlement and an inflated sense of what she has to offer.  The marriage market is a minefield, and it's not hard to see why members of both sexes are approaching with caution.

South Africa:  Warmism creates blackouts.  South Africa — supposedly one of Africa's advanced economies — is reeling under severe power shortages and daily rolling blackouts — some for as long as eight hours.  In May, most households, commercial buildings, and industries experienced hours of blackouts.  The South African state-run power utility ESKOM supplied no power between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. due to a "loss of generation capacity."  Last month, social unrest was reported in parts of the country after frustrated citizens took to the streets to protest power failures, cable theft, and years of inefficiency at Eskom.  The utility has been notorious for corruption, poor maintenance, and failure to increase generation capacity.

Hurricane Joe — A Category Five Economic Calamity.  Hurricane season is officially underway, beginning June 1, extending to November 30.  Expect the usual stories about hurricanes becoming more frequent and severe due to global warming, despite contrary evidence.  What about a new type of hurricane?  Not rain and wind, but an economic hurricane of stagflation, a toxic combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth.  This hurricane is so miserable that a term was coined to measure the misery, aptly named the misery index, the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates.  The misery index is currently in double digits, near 12, and if economic malaise continues, expect this number to creep closer to 20, territory last seen during the Jimmy Carter presidency, the last time both the misery index and malaise were commonly discussed.

Tucker Carlson:  Biden's Lunatic War Against Putin [is] Crushing The U.S. Economy.  Let's say just for the sake of a mind experiment, that you're the secretary of transportation for the United States of America.  That's a big job, but what would you do all day?  Well, [...] your first concern would be the price of diesel fuel.  Diesel fuel is what makes transportation possible in this country. [...] Your second concern, if you were transportation secretary, would be domestic air travel.  This is a huge country.  It's far too big a country not to have reliable commercial flights from one place to another. [...] So, that's what you would be worried about if you were the secretary — diesel and airlines — and yet, remarkably, in less than a year and a half under Joe Biden, both of these things, fuel costs and air travel have gone dramatically in the wrong direction.  The price of diesel is now hit its highest price ever recorded in history. [...] Wasn't it just the other day that the United States was energy independent?  Yes, but now we're begging dictatorships to sell us oil, but it won't be enough.  Industry officials are predicting shortages very soon.  [Video clip]

The Cost Of Gas Has More Than Doubled Since The Day Biden Took Office.  The average cost of a gallon of gasoline has officially more than doubled since the day President Joe Biden took office on January 21, 2021.  On Saturday [6/4/2022], AAA reported that the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $4.819. On the day that Biden was inaugurated, gas cost motorists just $2.393 per gallon on average. [...] On Wednesday, The Daily Wire reported that Biden suggested the high cost of gasoline is here to stay for quite some time, as he lamented to reporters that it is "not likely" he can simply "click a switch" to bring down prices.  Biden made his remarks regarding gasoline from the White House-crafted fake Oval Office set — which he reportedly uses so that he can stay on a script from a teleprompter.

Matt Schlapp says Biden failures prove he's 'simply not up to the job'.  The wheels are completely coming off of the Democratic Party clown car as it spins out of control headed for the brick wall of the November midterm elections and to top it off, things are even worse inside a White House that has descended into dysfunction and disarray as it becomes more apparent to voters that the Biden administration is an abject catastrophe.  With the nation battered by record gas prices with no ceiling in sight along with the worst inflation in four decades, food and baby formula shortages, and a regime that burns through money faster than the proverbial drunken sailor on a foreign conflict where no American interests are at stake, things are looking increasingly bleak for a Democratic Party that is determined to tear down the nation and its institutions and which could be only five months away from the mother of all electoral bloodbaths.

State Officials Admit Drug Decriminalization Has Been a Massive Failure: 'We Have Overdoses Increasing at Drastic Rates'.  A 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized drug use has failed in its purpose of improving lives, Oregon state officials were told this week.  Oregon's House Committee on Behavior Health was told in testimony that the law has not done what it claimed it would do, according to the Washington Examiner.  "When the voters of Oregon passed Measure 110, we did so because it was a change of policy in Oregon to improve the lives of people, to improve our communities," Secretary of State Shemia Fagan said.

Our Rulers Have Lost Their Minds.  Have a look at the shock on people's faces as they leave the grocery stores these days, or the look as they stand filling up their tanks at the gas station.  Their jaws drop and they wonder what is happening to the world.  The answer is the policy disasters of the last two years.  The bill is coming due and everyone but the masters of the universe is paying it.  The value of the dollar is sinking rapidly, more rapidly than in our lifetimes.  The people who hold power today seem completely clueless about why this is happening.  Actually, that's a charitable interpretation.  They might just think it is great.  High gas prices are pushing a shift to electric cars, presumably to manage global climate (I'm a serious doubter that anything like that is possible by policy).  Or maybe there is an impulse here just to redistribute wealth and disorient people to create new levels of dependency.  Whatever the reason, I'm seeing absolutely no signs that anyone at the top has any intention to put a stop to this.

The Left Despises People of Color.  Under the guise of caring and concern, the Left continues its assault on Black people, aka People of Color.  First, it began with substandard education to Black children and the control of the school systems by the teachers' unions, who shill for the Democrat party.  Not surprising, these very children could not compete academically because they were never given the basic tools to do so.  But the seed was planted fostering the implicit bias that Blacks were simply not capable of doing well.  So, the next step was to institute affirmative action.  After 60 years, it has been discovered, for example, that while these very students could have done well in second tier law schools, far too many could not compete in the elite schools and dropped out.  The chaos that now describes American education has created ignorance of a magnitude that is terrifying.  Of course, it has affected the Caucasian students, but it has only worsened things for the Black students.

Our Economic Misery Isn't an Accident, It's the Plan.  There are predictions that gas will hit $6 a gallon nationwide by the summer because the Biden administration has worked hard to raise energy prices and create artificial shortages.  Biden's people just got through once again sabotaging oil and gas leases because they want higher energy prices.  $6 a gallon is not the result of political inattentiveness, that is the plan.  Inflation isn't an unintentional accident either.  The Left spends like drunken sailors to feed its agenda, but also because spending is an innate good in the Cloward-Piven sense.  Devalue money and you wipe out the middle class.  Then you can reboot the economy on new terms.  Biden wasted trillions of dollars and is busy blaming "corporate greed" for high prices. [...] The utterly blatant goal is to eliminate millions of cars by making it too expensive to drive.  And Democrats are working on this on multiple ends, from environmental and safety regulations, to raising gas prices, to artificial car shortages.  Even those who can afford an electric car or get a government subsidized one will be kept off the road by high power rates.

How The White House Fumbled The Inflation Football And Lost The Game.  Wasn't it not even a year ago we were told that inflation would, in fact, be a "good" thing?  That it was "transitory"?  Not a serious threat.  Now we're finding that the media, Wall Street economists, Fed officials, but most of all, the Biden administration, were all wrong.  Does anyone pay a price for gross incompetence anymore? [... Inflation] skews business and personal decisions, wrecks family budgets, makes millions of low-income families even poorer, destroys personal thrift and wealth, undermines faith in the economy, distorts financial markets, and discourages investment and innovation.  And, eventually, it destroys real economic growth, undermining the very underpinnings of our prosperity and standard of living.  We're on the way to that now.

The return of reefer madness?  Reefer madness is not a joke, but a real problem.  Why do you think George Soros is investing so much money in legalization?  Drugs add to the dystopian scene of our cities:  homelessness, crime, squalor.  Our current dilemma is a becoming a dirty and degenerate rendition of Huxley's Brave New World (1932).

Government Officials Blame Biden For Inflationary Surge Hurting Most Americans.  Officials in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have released reports that squarely place the rate of inflation on President Biden's stimulus efforts during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  The CBO notes that President Biden is culpable for the record-high inflation creating undue pressure on America's workforce in its latest annual report.  The nonpartisan CBO report also says that Biden's preferred fix, increasing taxes, will worsen the economy.  The CBO's annual economic outlook squarely blames Biden's 2021 COVID stimulus bill for today's high inflation.  The report notes that the stimulus checks sent to Americans in 2021 significantly boosted demand, causing inflationary pressure.  The report also notes that Biden's COVID stimulus artificially "slowed the recovery of labor force participation" by paying workers not to work.  The continued lack of employees has strained supply chains, creating an additional source of upward pressure on consumer prices.

The Fed Chair Explained How He Flooded the System by Printing Money.  President Joe Biden is meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at the White House Tuesday [5/31/2022] for the first time since taking office in January 2021.  The meeting comes as inflation wreaks havoc on American families with prices on essential items continuing to skyrocket.  [Tweet]  The meeting marks a new strategy by the White House to focus on the issue, with allies in the media deflecting blame from Democrats.

America Today:  Liberals Did It.  Let's talk money.  A century ago, it took about $20 to buy an ounce of gold.  Today it takes about $2,000.  So a dollar today is worth one percent of its grandfather a century ago.  Has this been a Good Thing?  Or the worst thing since fossil fuels?  It's your Keynesian economics that has done this, liberals, as in:  Got a problem on the economic front? A war?  A crash?  A COVID?  No problem, just print a bunch of dollars.

USDA Raises Food Price Forecast to Highest Level in 42 Years.  Have you ever seen egg prices at $1 per egg range, or $12/doz?  Hold on a few months and perhaps you will.  That is the context for the scale of food price increases the USDA is now starting to predict.  The highest predicted change in food costs in well over 40 years, that's the USDA warning in their revised May "Food Price Outlook".  This month the USDA just re-re-revised the forward price outlook, and things are grim. [...] When the USDA predicts egg prices increasing by 19.5 to 20.5% (from where those prices are now), there will be regions with much higher retail increases than estimated.  Just two months ago, USDA had egg inflation at 2.5%-3.5% range, year over year.  Again, that's the scale of change; from a 3.5% forward outlook to a 20.5% forward outlook effective right now.  Food at home (grocery store) prices: up 7% to 8% in this monthly review, versus the April outlook of a rise of 5% to 6%.  That means the USDA is predicting the highest grocery store price rise since 1980 when prices rose 8.1% (prices rose 7.2% in 1981).  There is no reason to think the USDA forecast will not rise again in June.

Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.  Inflation is running rampant.  The Producer Price Index, the most useful measure of general inflation, is up a whopping 16.3% from April 2021, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That means that roughly $1 out of every $6 that people earn has been lost to inflation in a single year. [...] Inflation comes when you have too much money chasing too few goods.  The spending part provided the excess money, but the Biden team was right there helping to ensure fewer goods, too.  Gas prices going up?  Not only was Biden's spending program stimulating inflation, but at the same time Biden policies were reducing the amount of gasoline, diesel and heating oil those dollars could buy.  Biden went wild canceling pipelines, ending gas and oil leases, imposing stricter environmental rules and — in cooperation with big institutional investors — choking off the finances of people trying to produce new fuel supplies.

How Long Can You Eat if Your Power Goes Out?  U.S. fertilizer prices have risen dramatically, in some cases fourfold in the last few years.  This not only creates huge upward price pressures, but impacts usage, potentially impacting yields.  Also Union Pacific has reduced major U.S. fertilizer companies, like CF Industries, one of America's largest, to shipping about 80% of their potential volumes.  This can result in some of America's premier farmlands, the Corn Belt, not getting adequate fertilizer during the critical spring planting season.  Ironically, "Union Pacific has said it is limiting rail traffic and hiring aggressively as part of a plan to improve service after grain and ethanol shippers complained about shortcomings."  So U.P. is limiting the food supply to further limit the food supply by converting more corn into ethanol — a devil's twofer.  And the Biden administration plans to increase ethanol limits.  A threefer.

Militarizing The Baby Formula Crisis Is Infantile.  America is unique in having this problem because its regulatory state caused it.  The proximate cause of the shortage was the February recall of products made at America's largest manufacturer of baby formula, Abbott Labs' facility in Michigan.  The Food and Drug Administration was concerned about outbreaks of death and illness among infants fed with the formula but was slow to inspect the facility.  Abbott has indeed announced that it will reopen the facility, as the FDA found no evidence of contamination.  As 40% of America's supply comes from that facility, the shortfall hit supplies hard.  Ordinarily, however, the market would respond to such a shock by two means — raising prices to signal a shortage and importing substitutes from abroad.  However, regulation precludes those two responses.  Much of the American market depends on price agreements with the country's welfare agencies, which are there to stop poor mothers from having to face difficult choices for their pocketbooks.

It's Not The Guns:  America's left-wing culture of death and self-mutilation is a factory that produces mass shooters.  In the wake of the mass shooting yesterday in Uvalde, Texas, we must remember that on the very same day, over 2,700 human babies were murdered in America via abortion factories, according to reliable abortion estimates.  The same Leftists who demand abolishing the Second Amendment by falsely claiming it will stop shootings also celebrate the mass slaughter of human babies as they're being born... or even after they're born, via "post-birth abortions" that the Left celebrates.  What they care about is stripping armed Americans of their last remaining line of defense against tyranny:  The Second Amendment.  Left-wing Marxists and tyrants know that if they can successfully take away firearms from the American people, they can then run whatever totalitarian scenarios they want, including rounding up conservatives and throwing them into concentration camps under the cover of an "outbreak."  If Americans give up their guns, the radical left-wing fascists will treat the American people in the same way Australia's government treats their citizens:  Like prisoners in a giant prison camp.

Cannabis causes psychosis.  Psychosis causes violence.  Yep, there it is, the first reference to cannabis use by Salvador Ramos, the Texas elementary school killer.  In the New York Times.  Took 24 hours, give or take.  ["]And Ms. Rodriguez recalled he would often talk about how much he despised his mother and grandmother, whom he told her did not let him smoke weed or do what he wanted.["]  [Source]  This is only one case.  Except it's not.  Nikolas Cruz, the Florida high school shooter, was a heavy user and told the police detective who interviewed him that he heard voices.  Devin Patrick Kelley — who shot up a Texas church and killed 26 people in 2017 before blowing his head off — had THC in his system when he died.  (Kelley had anti-anxiety drugs too; a lot of heavy cannabis users wind up using Xanax or Klonopin to try to tamp down their paranoia.)  Darrell Brooks Jr., last seen allegedly racing through the Waukesha Christmas Parade, is a self-described stoner.  Meanwhile, cities like Portland, Oregon have suffered an explosion in violence following the legalization of cannabis.  Portland had 16 murders in 2013, the year before voters in Oregon approved full legalization.  Last year it had 90.  It's on pace to have even more in 2022.  It has gone from being one of the safest medium-sized cities in the United States to one of the most dangerous.  Denver has seen a similar trend.

A Dark Age in America.  America has been fundamentally transformed — and not for the better. [...] Racism is rampant.  Not only is racism accepted, but it is celebrated.  With Critical Race Theory, schools teach children to hate anyone who looks different, to feel guilty if they're white or empowered because they are not white.  Children barely out of diapers are being taught to question their sex before they are capable of comprehending what sex is.  Our southern border is nonexistent, and politicians are loath to do anything about it.  Illegal aliens pour across and then demand — as if it were their God-given right — support and acceptance.  If they're intercepted by Border Patrol, they get medical care and free transport to wherever they want to go.

Democrats are breaking America.  AP amused me with its tale, "After 3 months of war, life in Russia has profoundly changed." [...] With Biden's ignorant economic sanctions, he has brought down two economies.  I could not care less about Russia, but the United States is in deep trouble.  Destroying America is the goal.  I call it the Venezuelation of America.  The combination of runaway inflation and shortages is astonishing and unprecedented here, but common throughout the communist world.  Along with a rampant rise in violent crime, Democrats are scorching the Earth to punish Americans for daring to elect Donald John Trump as president.  Democrats desperately are speeding up their fundamental transformation of America into a Union of Soviet States of America.  The use of mail-in voting to accommodate illegal ballot harvesting installed Biden in the White House.  Democrats know they have very little time to make the changes they desire.

We Aren't Raising Adults.  We Are Breeding Very Excellent Sheep.  I taught English at Yale University for ten years.  I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students — people who went on to write novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few years.  But mostly I taught what one of them herself called "excellent sheep."  These students were excellent, technically speaking.  They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.  But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.  I was so struck by this — that our "best and brightest" students are so often as helpless as children — that I wrote a book about it.  It came out in 2014, not long before my former colleague Nicholas Christakis was surrounded and browbeaten by a crowd of undergraduates for failing to make them feel coddled and safe — an early indication of the rise of what we now call wokeness.

They Want You to Suffer.  In a sentence I've typed way too often over the last year, inflation continues to sit at astronomical levels, gas prices keep increasing, and the border is in shambles.  To make matters worse, over the past month, the stock market has crashed, eating away at people's retirements and investments.  Dreams that people had are now going to be on hold for years based on the hope that things will recover, and time isn't something you can get back.  The response from the White House in the face of so many of their self-inflicted wounds hasn't been empathy, though.  Not that such would mean much, but it would at least give people peace of mind knowing that their leaders aren't actively rooting for their destruction.  Unfortunately, that's exactly what appears to be happening.  These people want you to suffer.

The consequences of the stolen 2020 election are increasingly catastrophic.  [Scroll down]  The elephant in the room is this: why has no DOJ investigation been mounted, given the overwhelming volumes of evidence of election fraud?  Why have the courts dismissed each case without even looking at the evidence?  The only answer is that the DOJ, every other federal law enforcement agency and the corporate media are corrupt.  They are all agents of the Democrat party.  As Dennis Prager often comments, truth is not a left-wing value.  Beyond the mules; the illegally harvested ballots; fake ballots that were never folded, mailed, or signed; the finagling of people like Republican Gov. Kemp and sec. of state Raffensperger of Georgia and the NeverTrump powers that be in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and probably numerous other states, the 2020 election was the most dishonest, the most unscrupulous in American history.  Unable to accept her defeat in 2016, Hillary Clinton fabricated the notion that Russia facilitated Trump's win, which gave birth to the entirely phony Mueller investigation, the trumped-up impeachments based on nothing, and the equally fabricated "insurrection" charges about January 6.

My Biden-Voting Friend Had 'No Idea' Things Could Get This Bad.  A friend told me yesterday he voted for Biden because he was tired of Trump's "drama." He said he "didn't vote for Jared Kushner or Ivanka" and didn't like them "hanging around" the White House.  "Right message, wrong guy," he said of Trump.  My buddy considers himself a "non-Trumping, Democrat-hating conservative."  I guess his "non-Trumping" bias trumped (heh-heh) his hatred of Democrats.  He claimed he had "no idea things would get this bad under Biden."  My friend also doesn't like the far-left judge in the Bronx who has a habit of releasing violent criminals from jail.  He lives nearby.  "She's causing a one-woman crime wave," my friend lamented.  He fears for his family's safety and worries about his 2-year-old granddaughter's future.

The Collapse of Trust.  Looking at the issues facing our country, there seems to be something pernicious for which we don't seem to know what to do to correct the downward trajectory that is shaking us to our core. [... For example,] The sky-high cost of energy:  Why do we have a shortage of energy and are we being told the truth?  The salient question every American should ask is, have they been deceived by the President?  Old "circle back" Psaki was asked endlessly why we are producing less energy, even today?  Pre-Pandemic, under Trump, the U.S. was producing a record 13 million barrels of oil per day and we were even exporting it.  Production fell 3 million BPD due to slackened demand.  Production is now back up to 11.6 [million] BPD but is not accelerating.  Why?  Could the underlying reason be the simple truth that Biden articulated in 2019 "I want you to look at my eyes.  I guarantee you.  I guarantee you.  We're going to end fossil fuel."  Is he just keeping his promise and lying to the rest of us?  My take is simple; he wants high prices and cares not about the damage to the American family and its position in the world to support his Green New Deal initiatives.

It Sure Looks Like Joe Biden Is Trying to Purposely Destroy the Country.  The last several weeks in the United States have been a wild ride.  Everything that could go wrong, short of a full-blown apocalyptic situation, has gone wrong.  The stock market is currently in the midst of a collapse, with the Dow Jones losing nearly 5,000 points over the last 30 days.  Inflation clocked in at 8.3% for April, representing another crushing blow to Americans.  Of course, gas prices continue to break milestones on a daily basis. [...] With all that in mind, you'd expect the current administration to be scrambling to fix things, or at the very least, soften the blow.  Instead, it sure seems like Biden is purposely trying to destroy the country.  For example, in the midst of exploding gas prices and a diesel shortage, which exacerbates inflation because products have to be transported, the administration decided to cancel more oil and gas leases.

Morgan Stanley analyst directly blames Biden's 'excessive' fiscal stimulus for surge of inflation.  An analysis of the economy by Morgan Stanley put the blame directly on the "excessive" fiscal stimulus spending by the Biden administration for the surge of inflation that is hurting so many Americans.  Michael Wilson led a team of analysts in the assessment released on Monday.  "In summary, the slack created by the covid recession is being absorbed much faster than usual.  While some of this absorption is due to the supply disruptions created by the lockdowns, we think it was more so due to excessive fiscal stimulus provided during the pandemic, particularly the last $1.9T package at the end of March 2021 just as the economy was already emerging from the lockdowns," the analysis read.  "In our view, this was what turbocharged consumption and drove inflation to 40-year-highs," it continued.

How the Left Shuts Down Talk of Election Fraud.  [For instance,] The Law of Merited Impossibility:  This is when Leftists tell you, "Oh, what you're worried about will never happen," and then when it does, tell you, "It will be for the best and you deserve it, anyway."  One example of this, to counter the Right's "slippery slope" concerns, might be, "Oh, just because men are able to self-identify as women, that doesn't mean they'll be exposing themselves in locker rooms!  Goodness, that will never happen."  And then, when it does, they say, "Now it's the way it should be, and if you have a problem, deal with it because you're homophobic."  As I apply this to election fraud, it might start out with them saying, "Mail-in balloting will never lead to fraud big enough to change elections!" Then, when you suspect it has, they say, "Hey, the important thing is to make every vote count and not disenfranchise any racial group, you racist."

Put a Fork in Portland.  Portland use to be one of my favorite towns to visit.  It had fun bars and groovy thrift stores.  Now it looks like Detroit on a bender.  The difference between my hometown, the Motor City, and Portland is that Portland's death was intentional.  Whereas Detroit was murdered by a perfect storm of crotch-kicks from the auto industry and a racist, corrupt mayor, Portland was killed by its own citizens and the Democratic Party.  I should have seen what the future of Portland would look like.  The last time I was there was in 2010.  Everything seemed fine except for the huge homeless population.  Note to self:  when you have hundreds of drugged-out homeless people living wherever they want in a town, death is nigh.

The Takeover of America's Legal System.  The adversarial legal system — in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning — is at the heart of the American constitutional order.  Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.  Not so much anymore.  Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality.  The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.  Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools.

What's Wrong With Price 'Gouging' In Baby Formula Crisis?  As night follows day, the shortage of baby formula around the country has politicians shouting about the evils of "price gouging" and vowing to stop it.  But what if "price gouging" relieves shortages and makes sure parents who need the formula the most can get it?  News accounts tell the story of panicked mothers who've had to drive hours in all directions to find formula.  In response, President Joe Biden is pressing the Federal Trade Commission to "bring all of the Commission's tools to bear" to stop sellers from raising formula prices.  Parents would be better off if the Biden administration had instead focused on boosting supply.  The Food and Drug Administration sat on warnings about contamination at a major plant in Michigan for weeks.  And then dawdled in getting the plant cleared to reopen.  It was only after the shortages made headlines that Biden claimed to be "on top of it."

Democrats Blame Inflation on 'Greed,' Instead of Their Own Failed Policies.  Democrats in Congress and the White House are reticent to take any responsibility for inflation with their reckless spending and deliberate hampering of getting petroleum products out of the ground and into cars and homes.  After presiding over a more than doubling of gasoline prices during his first year and a half in office, President Biden is adding fuel to the inflationary fire by canceling offshore oil lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf Coast.  Gas prices hovered around $2 per gallon during most of 2020 only to set records four days in a row this past week, settling at $4.44 per gallon, hence the ubiquitous Joe Biden "I did that" stickers peppering gas pumps nationwide.  Not only fuel, but also food prices, increasing at the fastest rate in 40 years according to the US Department of Agriculture.  For example, meats, poultry, fish, and eggs are up 14 percent with fruits and vegetables costing 8 percent more.

Inflation:  The Price You Pay for Biden's Delusions.  When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had risen at an annual rate of 8.3 percent in April, the White House and many news outlets made much of the minuscule decrease from the 8.5 percent rate reported for March.  President Biden issued a statement, for example, that called the infinitesimal decline "heartening."  CNN ran a story titled, "US inflation slowed last month for the first time since August."  This wasn't terribly comforting, however, considering that the inflation rate has nearly doubled since last April while real wages declined by 2.6 percent.  Nor is it "heartening" to see that Biden is still in denial about the role his administration's spending has played in igniting inflation.

Lawlessness.  Everybody to the right of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez knows that the root cause of the crisis facing America — the most serious since the Civil War — is lawlessness.  And everybody not under the spell of the Democrat spin machine understands that the lawlessness begins at the top, with government and the many agencies of the executive branch who are tasked by our Constitution with enforcing the law.  Whether by failing to enforce our immigration statutes, or failing to prosecute criminals in our streets, or violating our election procedures to favor one party, Democrat administrations in our nation's capital and our major cities have brazenly supported criminal behavior carried out by Black Lives Matter rioters, common street thugs, and anti-Supreme Court agitators seeking to extort decisions by fear.  The effect has been to systematically undermine the rule of law, stoke the fires of anarchy, and sow chaos in our institutions.  This trend has been evident since the revival of the radical left on the eve of the 9/11 attacks and its creation of Sanctuary Cities designed to flout the law and prevent the enforcement of the PATRIOT Act.  It escalated with Obama's illegal, unconstitutional — and self-acknowledged — violation of America's immigration laws.

The November 2022 election is going to be really hard to steal!
Baby formula crisis punctuates steep decline in support for Biden, Dems, with suburban moms.  President Biden and his Democrats were already in trouble with suburban women due to inflation, high gas prices and an agenda these voters say does not align with their priorities.  Then baby formula disappeared from store shelves.  Images of empty store shelves and stories of frantic parents searching for food to feed their infants, coupled with reports that the Biden administration is shipping pallets of scarce formula to the southern border to feed illegal immigrant children, now threaten to crater the party's already weakened support among suburban women.  "Democrats have seen a double-digit decline among their strongest groups, especially women who are already struggling to stretch a dollar," Republican strategist Ryan Girdusky told the Washington Times.  "But now they're trying to find food for their children."  Women were a pivotal voting bloc for President Biden and Democrats in 2020.  Exit polls show they backed Mr. Biden over Donald Trump 57% to 47%. But over the past few months, polls show women have soured on Mr. Biden.

Biden's supply problem isn't just 'treadmills' anymore.  It wasn't that long ago that former White House press secretary Jen Psaki was downplaying the nation's supply chain problems as "the tragedy of the treadmill."  Just as she dismissed the topic of inflation as something that only affects rich people, Psaki spoke of the broken supply chain as if only leisure purchases for the wealthy were at risk.  But even as they put on a brave face, officials in the Biden administration were aware that the problem went much, much deeper.  And they did nothing.  The administration's handling of completely predictable supply chain problems stemming from COVID-19 has been just as appalling as Psaki's earlier insouciance suggests.  And this is how the current baby formula shortage was made possible.  Biden and Democrats don't have any answers to the current inflation crisis, nor the supply-chain crisis that is contributing to it.

Pop Goes the Presidency.  Nice-sounding growth, job, and wage numbers do not count for much when the American standard of living is in decline.  Inflation has outpaced income gains since last year.  It remains at a 40-year high.  Gas costs more than four dollars per gallon — sometimes much more — in every state.  Americans under 40 years old are experiencing consumer delays, shortages, and scarce necessities, including baby formula, for the first time in their lives.  According to the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Americans say that inflation is "a very big problem."

Producer Price Inflation Continues Surging at 11 Percent, Annualized Processed Food Increases Now 34.8 Percent.  The "Producer Price Index" (PPI) is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate (processing), and then Final (to wholesale). Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released April price data [Available Here] showing another 11.0% increase year-over-year in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  Last month when looking at internal economic activity that showed a contraction in consumer purchases of goods, we said pay attention to the service side of the ledger now.  Knowing people have stopped buying 'stuff', if people are starting to run out of money, they will cut back in the service sector (dining out, etc).

Get ready for more blackouts because of environmentalist policies.  People across the United States and in many other countries are already experiencing sticker shock when they receive their utility bills this year.  The price of energy is continuing to climb along with the price of gasoline.  Unfortunately, according to the leader of one energy industry analysis group, that's not going to be the end of the bad news.  There are already places where the electrical grid is under so much strain that rolling blackouts have been enacted again and we're only going to see more of that going forward.  This issue has little or nothing to do with Russian energy supplies or the war in Ukraine.  The reality is that in many parts of the United States, we're barely producing enough electricity to meet the demand for power, and thanks to environmentalist policies put in place by the government, we're shutting down coal-fired power plants at a rate far faster than we can replace all of that juice through other methods.

Biden's America:  The Land Of  Plenty  Shortages.  It's taken President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats all of 16 months to turn the land of plenty into one plagued by empty shelves and rationing.  Well, Biden did promise to "transform" America, but how many voters knew that this is what he had in mind?  The latest in the growing list of shortages is the chronic and dangerous scarcity of baby formula that is causing new parents to scramble to find supplies and stores to ration how much customers can buy.  The latest industry data show that 40% of America's baby formula supplies are out of stock, up from 29% in March and 11% last fall.  This is a potentially deadly situation if parents can't get the food they need for their babies or try to make their own formula.  As CNN reports, "Specialized formula is even harder to locate amid the widespread shortage.  Parents are driving to neighboring states to try their luck, and many are pleading for help on social media, imploring strangers to share or even barter any extra supply they may have."  One industry observer said that "supply chain issues, product recalls and historic inflation" are driving the baby formula crisis.  As it turns out, Biden is at least partially responsible for all of those.

Electric grid operators warn of potential summer blackouts.  While some major cities are already seeing their lights go off due to electricity use overload, grid operators and energy advocates gave a warning to states closing their coal-fired power plants even quicker than they can build new ones.  "Any plans to remove nuclear plants or coal power plants or natural gas plants that are slated to be closed, that has to be completely suspended," Power the Future executive director Daniel Turner told FOX Business' Jeff Flock Tuesday [5/10/2022].  Eighty coal-fired power plants are slated to close across 14 states in the next six years, Flock mentioned in his report, which poses a threat as some blackouts have already begun and coal and nuclear power still source 41% of the country's electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration.

HVAC Company Refuses to Take Downtown Jobs, Citing 'Needles, Human Feces, Vans Getting Broken Into'.  A Colorado heating and air conditioning company is now refusing to provide service to businesses in downtown Denver, Colorado, citing dangerous conditions in the area.  Tony Cirbo, operations manager for AC Mechanical and Engineering, explained why his business would no longer service the area in an interview with KCNC-TV.

Grocery Store Prices Up 10.8%, Most in Nearly 42 Years.  It got even more difficult in April for American families to put food on the kitchen table in January.  Food prices rose 9.4 [percent] compared with a year earlier, data from the Department of Labor showed on Wednesday.  That is the fastest rate of inflation for food since 1981.  Grocery store prices were up by even more, 10.8 percent.  The broader Consumer Price Index rose by 8.3 percent.

Tom Cotton Torches Woke Military Brass Over Pathetic Standards.  One of the more ingenious aspects of our Constitution is its requirement that our military leaders are accountable to non-military officials.  All our generals and admirals ultimately report to the Secretary of Defense and his underlings at the Pentagon who are part of the Executive Branch of government.  Our Legislative Branch of government, aka Congress, is responsible for, among other things, funding and monitoring the Executive Branch, aka the White House, which is why we have committees such as the Senate Armed Services Committee.  During hearings run by that committee on Thursday, we saw firsthand how valuable Congressional oversight of the White House can be, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) completely schooled Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth.  Watch, and note that the set-up to the video erroneously refers to Wormuth as Secretary of the Navy:  [Video clip]

The Impending Economic Crash.  This week, Donald Trump's favorite Latino food supplier, Bob Unamue, CEO of Goya Foods, spoke of an impending food shortage that we should all start to see by this summer.  As a byproduct of fertilizer shortages emerging from the Russian/Ukrainian War, food suppliers are tamping down expectations of food availability later this year.  It is yet another indicator of a global economy on the retreat. [...] I'm not an economist and I don't pretend to be one, though it's debatable that the mainstream discipline has shot straight with us to date.  If you were attuned to the corporate press, you might be led to believe that the growing hardships we are experiencing were unforeseen.  Far from it, much of what we are experiencing we were warned about by economists across the political spectrum.  Some might say that the Biden administration selling the American economy down the river is a matter of incompetence.  I tend to lean toward malice.

Our Immigration System Isn't Broken, Democrats Are.  Our immigration system worked just fine (not perfectly, mind you, but fine) until a few years ago.  What happened then?  Democrats decided to stop deportations in any real way.  Yes, Democrats had already screwed it up by introducing the concept of birthright citizenship — meaning anyone born here to illegal aliens was given citizenship, a concept so incredibly stupid it's only been adopted by third world hell-holes and the United States, thanks to Democrats.  But the stopping of deportations made things exponentially worse.  Sanctuary cities and states made it clear to would-be illegal aliens that the thousands of dollars they were thinking about dropping on the drug cartels to smuggle them or their children several thousand miles would not be in vain.  The odds of them being returned to wherever they're from if they made it to, say, California were slim to none, even if they committed heinous crimes, because California changed its laws to protect non-citizens over citizens.  Kill a citizen and you might face deportation after a prison sentence, but rob a liquor store or drive drunk repeatedly, abuse a child or spouse?  Meh, the chances the state bothers to call federal immigration authorities increases only slightly, but still don't register in any real way.

Inflation Can't Be Censored.  An increasingly disturbing feature of American politics is the routine suppression of major news stories that reflect poorly on candidates favored by the Fourth Estate.  The most egregious example in recent years occurred in October of 2020 when corporate news outlets and social media platforms colluded to bury a New York Post article on Hunter Biden.  Fortunately, some stories just aren't susceptible to such censorship.  Inflation is a case in point.  It can't be hidden from the voters because soaring prices shout the bad news from every grocery store shelf and gas pump in the nation.  And the voters don't like what they're hearing.  A new Gallup poll reports:  "Americans' confidence in the economy remains very low, and mentions of economic issues as the most important problem in the U.S. are at their highest point since 2016."  Moreover, when asked to specify the most important economic issue, inflation topped the list.  Not coincidentally, the survey found that Americans identified "the government/poor leadership" as the most important non-economic problem facing the country.

Things Are Going Well in the Capital of Police Defunding.  Portland was one of the few places to defund the police by $15 million.  The efforts to lynch police officers over battles against violent rioters and left-wing mobs led to massive resignations and retirements leaving the city with the smallest police force on record in a generation.  Violent crime continues to rise and Portland cops are shorthanded.

A Government Disinformation Board?  You Don't say!  Under Biden and as a result of his misbegotten policies, the price of natural gas is up 192%, diesel 176%, regular gasoline 74%, and foodstuffs 59%. Supply chain problems are creating shortages of building supplies, fertilizer, food, medicines — you name it.  Massive government giveaways have gotten many people used to the notion that work is unnecessary, and employers are having difficulty staffing up.  While homeowners in many places may feel richer because the value of their homes has increased on paper, fewer homes are now within reach of buyers, and replacement housing for sellers — obviously — will have risen as well.  The stock market tumbled and, with it, a large chunk of many people's savings as inflation eats up what's left.

Natural Gas UP 192% Under Biden, Diesel UP 176%, Regular Gasoline UP 74%, Foodstuffs UP 59%.  We all know (except for Biden apparently) that inflation is up 8.5% YoY as measured by the change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). However, the CPI change doesn't fully capture what is crushing Americans' pocketbooks.  Here is a brief update on where we stand prior to the upcoming Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting on May 4th.  Since Biden was installed as President on January 20, 2021, prices for key commodities have soared.  Natural gas futures UP 192%, Regular Gasoline prices UP 73.6%, Commodity Research Bureau Foodstuffs UP 59%, Low sulfur Diesel futures UP 176%.

What if Joe Biden forgives all student loans?  [Scroll down]  Let's say we go down that road and the government forgives all student loans because education is a right.  Why stop there?  Perhaps home loans could be forgiven too because every human being deserves to live with dignity under a roof.  Why should only students and homeowners be the beneficiaries?  How about forgiving loans of businesses?  Small businesses in particular suffered losses during the COVID-19 lockdowns and they deserve to be bailed out.  Why just small, though?  Let's help big businesses too, because they employ thousands of people.  What about farmers?  They literally are providers of food, why not waive their loans as well?  What about doctors who have set up practices?  Quite soon, everybody from the big corporates houses to the smallest borrowers begins to feign poverty because they know the government will pardon their loans.

Team Biden finally admits there's a war on cops — which it's inflaming.  The Biden Justice Department is finally acknowledging the war on cops:  FBI Director Christopher Wray denounced the 59% increase in cop murders in 2021.  An officer is murdered nearly once every five days, yet violence against law enforcement "doesn't get enough attention," Wray said Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes."  That is an understatement.  Wray's bosses — Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden — have instead focused almost exclusively on alleged white-supremacist criminality, which they claim is the biggest domestic threat facing the country today.  That charge is preposterous.  It is violent street crime — drive-by shootings, sadistic robberies, carjackings — that has been destroying lives at an increasing rate since the George Floyd race riots.  White-supremacist violence played no role in the record-breaking 29% national homicide increase in 2020 or in the ongoing crime surge since then.

Stagflation is staring Biden in the face — but he refuses to change course.  First we were told inflation was imaginary.  Then we were told it was "transitory," the result of COVID-inflicted supply-chain problems.  Then we were told it was Russian President Vladimir Putin's fault.  Now people are starting to admit the massive runaway spending of the Biden era has something to do with it.  But we're also facing stagflation, a mixture of inflation and slow growth, and the government also plays a role in turning inflation into stagflation.  As Milton Friedman famously warned, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.  When the government pumps the economy up with excess dollars — something usually referred to as "printing money," though a too-literal USA Today fact-checker hastened to assure us that much of the money created isn't actually printed on paper — inflation results.  When you have more money in the system than goods, the price of goods goes up.  That's inflation, and it's what's happening now.

The Inflation Draining Your Wallet, Grocery Cart, And Gas Tank Is Far Steeper Than 8 Percent.  The Labor Department's March inflation numbers released this month skyrocketed past February's, hitting a 12-month increase of 8.5 percent and the steepest annual increase since 1981. [...] According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in the average U.S. city, ground beef is up 14.9 percent since last March, boneless stew beef is up 24.3 percent, bacon is up 23.1 percent, boneless chicken breasts are up 17.6 percent, eggs are up 25.9 percent, milk is up 17 percent, frozen orange juice concentrate is up 18 percent, and ground coffee is up 15.8 percent.  Meanwhile, fuel oil has jumped a whopping 71.5 percent, and utility gas is up 23.3 percent.

The Editor says...
I can report, from my own shopping experiences, that rice pudding has gone up 35 percent in the last year, and Diet Coke is now holding steady at $1.98 (for two liters), whereas it was $1.38 a year ago, and 98 cents about three years ago.

Democrats: 'It's Not Us, It's You!'  Considering we've entered a currency inflation death spiral, violent crime rates are through the roof, the foreign invasion at the southern border grows exponentially, and the FBI continues to hunt half the country as "terrorists" not deserving of constitutional protections, I'm not sure how many more Slow Joe "accomplishments" we can survive.  Or perhaps the real quandary is this: who actually benefits from all these magnificent "achievements"?  Certainly not the American people!  Most Americans alive today have never been more financially insecure, less safe, or more uncertain about their futures.  Never have so many Americans or their loved ones been struggling with alcohol and drug addictions.  Never have Americans reported feelings of isolation, loneliness, and despondency in such high numbers across all demographics.  Never have more Americans agreed that the nation is following a broken moral compass and headed in the wrong direction.  After years of enduring psychological abuse from governing institutions selling nothing but fear and invasive bureaucratic mandates, parts of the country look as if they've been rattled into a permanent state of PTSD.

The terrible unintended consequences of the Biden presidency (unless they were intended).  As a result of all the left's skullduggery, the American people are facing the highest inflation in forty years.  The invasion across the southern border has brought over two million migrants into the country since Biden took office.  Many of these people are being secretly flown to cities throughout the country.  Count in it:  the Democrats plan to give them all amnesty so they can vote.  They assume they will all vote Democrat, but one has to wonder if that is true; they are all fleeing crime-ridden totalitarian tyrannies.  They just might opt for a law-and-order civil society.  On top of this obvious moonbattery, the Biden administration has eviscerated our once world-class military by weeding out Trump supporters and those who chose to remain unvaxxed.  The damage this progressive cult has done has crippled America in nearly every way possible.

Fraud is the Only Issue.  From a straight political standpoint, things are not going well for the Democrats.  It's difficult to cite a time in post-World War II America when so many things on so many fronts went this badly this quickly, and the voting public knows it's their fault:
  •   Inflation at 40-year highs and spiking energy prices
  •   Out of control illegal immigration, being encouraged by Democrats to bolster liberal voting rolls
  •   Weakened military, with an inexplicable emphasis on woke social issues instead of combat readiness
  •   Crime running rampant, with many big-city DA's refusing to prosecute the offenders
Woke policies and wildly disproportionate attention on gender and diversity issues eroding the once-dependable foundation of American society
These Democrat policies have tangibly and dramatically degraded the quality of daily life in America, to the point where many people are starting to doubt that things will ever return to normal.

Prepping the Mind.  [Scroll down]  Those running the clown show in Washington D.C. are flush with this collectivist resentment toward the success of a free market and free people.  Killing both of them is the goal, not to achieve anything, or cure any ill, but just to destroy.  They think in finally ending the supremacy and wealth of Americans they will achieve some sort of victory for the cause.  In the last few years, they've tried to bankrupt the US, with help of the federal government and the federal reserve and have largely succeeded.  They've tried to poison not only America, but Western civilization.  Now, they're trying to starve us all.  Twenty something food distribution centers have gone up in flames recently.  American farmers have been paid to stop planting crops.

Baltimore has been expunging the criminal records of felons and people are dying.  For some time now we have covered the disappointing and dangerous trends in the courts of Baltimore, Maryland that make it harder to convict criminals of anything.  This has resulted in the same "revolving doors" in the jails and courthouses that we see today in so many large cities.  But in Charm City, they've taken this trend another large step further.  In addition to making it harder to lock anyone up, for the smaller number of people who do manage to be apprehended and prosecuted, they've been erasing the criminal records of many of them.  This makes it impossible for the public to research potential problems and removes information that prosecutors may need when the individual is arrested again and they have to determine the charges to be filed.  In an editorial at the Baltimore Sun this week, former Deputy State's Prosecutor Page Croyder describes the damage that these changes have wreaked on the legal system and the impacts they have had on the citizens.

Biden surpasses Jimmy Carter as the most incompetent steward of the American economy.  President Joe Biden has accomplished in just 14 months what many thought was impossible — surpassing President Jimmy Carter as the most incompetent steward of the American economy.  Biden just broke another record, leaving Americans saddled with 8.5 percent inflation — energy alone is up 32 percent since last year. [...] President Biden's actions to date appear to be directly taken from President Carter's playbook.  Excessive spending and anti-supply-side policies have contributed to the worst inflation since the Carter era.

Biden Economy:  Dow Down 981 Points at Close — Worst Day Since June 2020.  The Biden economy is doing bad and getting worse.  Inflation is at an all-time high by some measurements and at 50-year highs by other measurements.  With inflation at all-time highs, Biden's economy is a mess.  The cost of gasoline has reached all-time highs.  Interest rates are up near 7% now, the highest rates in years and still they are way behind inflation.  This all happened due to Biden's reckless spending.

Politics Is Downstream from Culture, but What Is Culture Downstream From?  The profundity of the nightmare we are living through is hard to grasp.  The tone of our everyday lives as Americans is an anti-civilization controlled by the government-media-educational megalith that is anti-God, anti-American, and pointedly anti-Christian.  American social process now originates in the bitter energy of left-wing politics as replacement for religion.  That element of opinion maintains an inquisition of judgment of good and evil people based on a false, anti-historical obsession with long gone oppression by race, sex, and sexuality.  Left-wing politics operates as increasingly divisive fanaticism, which can be called scientistic materialism.  Science is prostituted to justify a hollow-eyed, humanity-hating doomsday cult of climate change.  The reverse cycle of civilization originating in godless political opinion has made a sacrament of disposing of pre-born humans, which idolatry is inexorably expanding to include post-natal infanticide.

Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket.  According to a recent NPR report, the global food price index hit its highest recorded level in March 2022, rising 12.6% in a single month.  On average, food prices were one-third higher than in March 2021.  In the U.S., food prices rose 9% in 2021, and are predicted to rise another 4.5% to 5% in the next 12 months.  But while the Ukraine conflict is cited as the primary cause, it's not the sole reason.  Price inflation was already ramping up well before Russia went into Ukraine, thanks to the uncontrolled printing of fiat currencies that occurred in response to the COVID pandemic.  Governments' COVID response have also wreaked havoc with global supply chains, causing disruptions that continue to this day.

In 13 months, Biden has just about finished the job of destroying America.  It has not taken long at all for fake "president" Joe Biden to finish the job of collapsing the United States.  In just 13 relatively short months, the Resident-in-Chief helped usher in the highest gas prices on record, along with soaring food costs.  Millions of Americans were also forced to get injected with mystery chemicals from Operation Warp Speed, and all for a manufactured plandemic that never really was.  The country went from a trend towards energy independence to becoming a net importer of crude oil ever since Geriatric Joe started occupying the White House.  Biden's destruction of the Keystone XL Pipeline project certainly contributed to this.  Americans are worse off than they have been for quite some time as housing prices skyrocket and wages stagnate.  Millions of them are now having to work multiple jobs just to barely stay above the poverty line.

How America Became La La Land.  America was energy independent until the arrival of the Biden Administration.  On the orders of his Green New Deal masters, Biden immediately began canceling federal oil and gas leases.  He stopped new pipelines.  He jawboned against the private financing of fossil-fuel production.  Biden was hellbent on his way to fulfilling his campaign promises of eliminating the use of natural gas and oil on his watch.  Then prices soared and the public grew irate.  In response, still more incoherence followed.  The Biden Administration would not reverse its destructive energy policies.  But as it floundered in desperation, Biden begged American enemies Iran, Russia, and Venezuela to pump more oil on our behalf.  In vain, it beseeched Saudi Arabia to produce more of the hated icky stuff that we had in abundance but would not fully produce ourselves.  Biden tapped the strategic petroleum reserve.  Yet the existential peril was not war or natural catastrophe but Biden himself and his far more dangerous policies.

Massive increase in Black Americans murdered was result of defund police movement: experts.  Support of Black Lives Matter and calls to defund the police reverberated across America in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, igniting social justice protests and riots at a time when the coronavirus and lockdowns upended society in unprecedented ways.  What was left in 2020's wake was a massive increase in the number of murders, dealing a disproportionate blow to Black Americans.  "Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we've seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.  This pattern has been termed the 'Ferguson Effect': police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously," Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital.

Earth to Prognosticators:  Cool Your Jets.  [Scroll down]  The question is not to "remember the past" but to dodge the ruling class's self-serving narrative about the past, for instance that our rulers first freed the slaves, then protected the workers, then stopped Hitler, then liberated the women, then rolled back Jim Crow, then saved the environment, then protected gays, then sent transphobes to somewhere where the Florida sun don't shine.  My self-serving narrative is that the rulers have successively led workers, women, blacks, and LGBTs into the wilderness.  That's why workers are "dying of despair," women are less happy than they were in the Fifties, blacks like Frank James have been carefully taught to hate and to fear whites, and transgenders are humiliating and canceling the feminists.  The way I understand the world, I would expect that, after this unjust rule of the last century, the ordinary people of America would be getting restless.

How History Will View the Biden Years.  [Scroll down]  When Biden took office, the first big economic debate was over his nearly $2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, the so-called American Rescue Plan.  Coming on the heels of multiple Trump COVID-19 stimulus policies, many leading experts in both parties warned that Biden's spending was going too far.  Overstimulating the economy in this way, they argued, would come with the risk of high inflation. [...] The "Putin Price Hike" is only the latest Biden attempt to deflect responsibility.  At first, the White House insisted that inflation was "transitory."  This was, of course, repeated throughout the press.  Those who dared dissent were even fact-checked.  Inflation was all about COVID-19, they argued.  Then it was all about "supply chain disruptions." All this would come to an end, and everything will be fine, they told us.  This was all before Vladimir Putin even began his war.  Now it's Putin's fault.  People often don't have the time to study issues at length, but they can smell pure political spin from a mile away.

LA Residents got What They Wanted:  Criminals Who Aren't Afraid.  This is what the people of Los Angeles wanted.  They put their police force on a short leash, blaming the overworked officers for the least amount of violence against criminals while at the same time absolving the criminals of responsibility.  It has led to increasing numbers of officers leaving the force or retiring early.  With fewer officers on the street and those that are being hesitant to act, the criminals are taking advantage of the situation.  The Los Angeles Police Department recently started warning people not to wear expensive jewelry in public, or they might become the target of thieves.  Thieves have become so brazen that they smashed in the front window of Luxury Jewels, a Beverly Hills jewelry store, in broad daylight and fled with merchandise estimated to be worth $3 to $5 million dollars.

Two inmates at all-women's New Jersey prison are pregnant after both had sex with the same transgender inmate after.  Two women at New Jersey's only all-women's prison have both fallen pregnant after having sex with transgender inmates.  The pregnant women, who were not identified, are housed at the embattled Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, in Clinton, which New Jersey Governor announced plans to close last year.  Prison bosses said that in both instances, the sex was consensual.

Yes, It's Biden's Inflation.  This week, America received news of yet another shocking inflation report: over the past 12 months, inflation has skyrocketed 8.5%, outpacing wage gains by 2.9%.  That inflation has flooded every area of American life, from gas (up 48%) to airfare (24%) to furniture (16%) to milk (13%).  Inflation is costing the average American family hundreds of dollars per month — and, as we know, inflation is a highly regressive tax, harming those at the bottom of the income spectrum the most.  For its part, the Biden administration blames Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  White House press secretary and incipient MSNBC employee Jen Psaki announced, "we expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike," and blamed gas prices alone for the spike.  That, of course, is ludicrous.

Inflation rises to 11.2% in producer index, highest on record.  Producer prices increased a scorching 11.2% for the year ending in March, according to a report Wednesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest on record.  The inflation rate in Wednesday's producer price index report was up 1.4 percentage points from the previous month and is the highest in the gauge's 11-year history.  Wednesday's [4/13/2022] news signals more inflationary pain to come for households.  The producer price index gauges the wholesale prices of goods, which are eventually passed down to consumers.  The news came just a day after a report for the month of March found consumer prices increased by 8.5% — the fastest annual rate in more than four decades.  The high rate of inflation has wounded President Joe Biden politically and undercut support for his spending proposals.

Inflation exposes the arrogance of the Biden Democrats.  Of all the Democrats' gestures of contemptuous indifference toward ordinary people, President Joe Biden's 8.5% inflation rate is the most provocatively insouciant.  Bidenflation, more than any of his many other culpable failures, will prompt voters to respond in November with a gut punch to the party's solar plexus.  One should not minimize the impact of other blows to public morale from outrages such as the cultural revolution against every traditional norm, the disgrace of U.S. capitulation to a ragtag army of medieval Afghan farmers, Biden's abandonment of national sovereignty at the Mexican border, or the performative diktats of his tinpot COVID bureaucrats.  All these contribute to our sour national mood. [...] Biden's decision to print money, enthusiastically backed by congressional Democrats, has produced the sharpest inflation spike in four decades.  This was entirely predictable and frequently predicted.

Inflation surges 8.5% in March, hitting a new 40-year high.  Inflation accelerated to a new four-decade high in March as supply chain constraints, the Russian war in Ukraine and strong consumer demand fueled rapid price gains that wiped out the benefits of rising wages for most Americans.  The Labor Department said Tuesday [4/12/20222] that the consumer price index — which measures a bevy of goods including gasoline, health care, groceries and rents — rose 8.5% in March from a year ago, the fastest pace since December 1981, when inflation hit 8.9%.  Prices jumped 1.2% in the one-month period from February, the largest month-to-month jump since 2005.  Economists expected the index to show that prices surged 8.4% in March from the previous year and 1.2% on a monthly basis.  So-called core prices, which exclude more volatile measurements of food and energy, climbed 6.5% in March from the previous year — up from the 6.4% increase recorded in February.  It was the steepest 12-month increase since August 1982.

Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March, slightly hotter than expected and the highest since 1981.  Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday [4/12/2022].  The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.  Excluding food and energy, so-called core CPI increased 6.5% on a 12-month basis, in line with the expectation.  However, there were signs that core inflation appeared to be ebbing, as it rose just 0.3% for the month, less than the 0.5% estimate.  That in turn sparked some hope that inflation overall was easing and that March might represent the peak.

California school enrollment drops even more — and somehow, 'experts' don't know why.  They think it's a COVID problem.  They call it a 'gentrification' issue.  They say it's housing costs.  They say it's 'demographics.'  That's the response from the 'experts' to the [bad] news about California's school enrollment. [...] What they don't say is that mask mandates, vaccine mandates, Zoom classes, wokester critical race theory in the classrooms, drag queen story hour, school officials working behind parents' backs to promote transgenderism among kids and treat their parents as enemies, state-encouraged abortion on demand, ending advanced and honors classes in the name of 'equity,' and massive numbers of Californians fleeing the state for economic and tax reasons have all taken their toll on enrollment.  Chase the locals out, don't be surprised to see fewer kids in school.

MSNBC Panics About Midterms as Inflation Looks to Get Even Worse.  Axios has a scoop on the new inflation number that's scheduled to drop tomorrow and it's bad.  They're citing analysts from FactSet that expect the new number to be 8.4 percent, the highest inflation rate since December 1981.  That's up from the rate from last month, which was 7.9 percent.  Some of that will be reflecting the high gas prices that have since moderated somewhat.  However, even without counting gas and food, the forecast is 6.6 percent, the highest since August 1982.  So while the Biden team ordered the release of a million barrels of oil a day for 180 days from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and it might have a tiny effect on the prices, he hasn't done anything to change the general trajectory of inflation — the cause for the rise to begin with.  He's just basically emptying our reserve which is supposed to be for emergencies — not to avoid doing the right thing for the country to save himself politically before the midterms.  But it's not changing the problem ultimately.

White House warns of 'extraordinarily elevated' March inflation rate.  White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted Monday [4/11/2022] that fresh monthly inflation data will be "extraordinarily elevated" when it's released Tuesday[,] after inflation hit a 40-year high of 7.9 percent last month.  "We expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's price hike, and we expect a large difference between core and headline inflation reflecting the global disruptions in energy and food markets," Psaki said at her regular press briefing.  NPR reporter Asma Khalid pressed Psaki on the White House's attempt to blame Putin's invasion of Ukraine, saying she had just returned from a reporting trip to Michigan, where many people told her "they feel that inflation has predated this war."

There are some things you can question and some things you can't.  In today's America, there are some things one can question... and some things one cannot.  You can question the existence of God. [...] You can question your own gender, but you can't question the LGBTQ agenda in any way, shape or form — for any reason.  Nor can you question the process or results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in any way, whether on a national, state, or local level.  If you do, you will promptly be cancelled, disappeared, or otherized.  Seriously questioning how COVID-19 was loosed upon the globe is also strictly verboten.  As is asking questions about the Biden family's ties to — and relations with — China or Ukraine.  In fact, you can't ask a pertinent question of Biden at all.

"Green" Dreams Kill People.  Currently, the war between Russia and Ukraine dominates the headlines.  We all know that global petroleum supplies have been disrupted by the war, but perhaps more significant is the war's impact on agriculture.  Ukraine and Russia are two of the top grain-exporting countries in the world.  Ukraine has been selling grain to the West since ancient times.  With those supplies disrupted, a global food shortage impends, and many are predicting that populations in some vulnerable areas that can't produce enough food for themselves will starve.  So where are the environmentalists in all this?  They are doing their best to reduce agricultural output.  In Sri Lanka, the government mandated organic farming, with the result that yields declined catastrophically, prices skyrocketed, and, no doubt, many died.

Speaker Carl Heastie's 'mercy' leaves a teen girl dead at hands of another teen.  Angellyh Yambo had just turned 16 when she got caught in gangsta crossfire outside a Bronx high school, torn from this world far too soon.  Yet her accused killer, Jeremiah Ryan, might have escaped jail pending trial under New York's insane laws, merely because he himself is a teen.  This is justice according to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and his all-too-many allies in the Legislature.  Ryan even had a perfect score to qualify for release, according the city Criminal Justice Agency, because he has no priors.

The Leader Who Never Was.  [Scroll down]  But the sequential disasters Biden's struggled to manage in the last few months are not mere accidents of fate; they're cumulative, with progressive policy blunders setting the stage for the next failure.  Appeasing the green new deal fanatics in their war on American fossil fuel production even before his Oval Office chair was warm, predictably pushed energy prices sharply higher, lighting a fuse to runaway inflation that's won't be easily stamped out.  Opening the human floodgates on our now notional southern border — aside from the exploding crime and youth-poisoning fentanyl implications — signaled to the world a lack of commitment to the basic defense of the nation that goes beyond mere incompetence, to near self-immolation.  The Taliban quite understandably recognized a propitious moment, so their offensive operations intensified, leading to our horribly ill-considered, disgracefully botched flight from Afghanistan — for which no one has as yet been called to account.  Such incomprehensible malfeasance was not lost on the covetous Vladimir Putin, convincing him his time had arrived.  And so his bloody grab for Ukraine began.  The "presidential" bearing that was the major selling point of Biden's campaign pitch is decomposing before our eyes.

Fed Study:  Stimulus Checks Worsened Inflation.  Four economists at the Federal Reserve say the high rate of inflation in the United States compared to the rest of the world is due to the COVID-19 stimulus checks given to Americans during the pandemic.  The direct payments to American citizens enlarged the money supply enormously and overheated the economy. [...] Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary, has been warning about this almost since Joe Biden took his oath of office.  Summers believes that massive government pandemic spending — including stimulus checks — has put too much cash into circulation while the pent-up demand from the pandemic isn't catching up to supply.  Supply chain bottlenecks don't help.  But how bad would they have been if far more modest and targeted pandemic relief had been proposed?  Now we have the war in Ukraine effectively shutting off one-quarter of the world's supply of grain.  Food prices are going to skyrocket, and it's going to hurt everyone.

COVID Stimulus Checks Worsened Inflation.  Inflation has surged across much of the developed world in the past year as COVID-19 lockdowns eased and pent-up demand for goods and services collided with ongoing supply chain snafus.  But inflation is running higher in the United States than just about anywhere else right now.  Why's that?  According to a new paper from four economists at the Federal Reserve of San Francisco, it's because the American government was relatively more generous during the pandemic, borrowing and spending trillions of dollars to not only fund COVID-19 relief efforts but to line the pockets of Americans with direct payments that enlarged the money supply and overheated the economy.

Has Biden become expendable?  Why are the media suddenly attacking the president when they supported many of his policies during the 2020 primaries? [...] The corrupt media called President Trump's border fence "racist" while praising Biden's promise to provide free health care for anyone crossing the southern border illegally.  With such a generous and rewarding immigration policy, the media knew that the southern border would see an explosion of illegal crossings — and so there was.  As illegal entries hit record levels, murder, drug crimes, and sex crimes skyrocketed in the border states.  Suddenly, Biden's border policy was being criticized by the propaganda media.  They were all in until things started collapsing.

Texas governor's plan to bus illegals to Washington D.C is amusing, but not practical.  Homeland Security reported that more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants crossed the southern border since Biden took over.  The Title 42 policy, that President Trump implemented during the pandemic, empowers border officials quickly to expel migrants on health grounds.  Under Biden, that will be terminated on May 23.  The migrant caravans are now massing in Central America and Mexico, and would-be illegals have told the press they are tightly focused on that day.  Once the surge of migrants makes it in the states, the migrants are then transported to poor and working-class neighborhoods.  The result is that working-class citizens either lose their jobs, or else face depressed wages because the migrants often work off the books for less than the minimum wage and don't pay taxes.  Resources such as hospitals, law enforcement, and fire services that are meager in working-class areas, are already overburdened.  Free spaces such as pavement and parks that are occupied by migrants are rendered unhygienic.

Babies Struggle to Understand "Basic Facial Expressions" as a Result of Adults Wearing Masks.  Adults wearing masks as a result of COVID lockdown rules has created a generation of babies who struggle to understand "basic facial expressions" and have stunted speech and language development.  The conclusion os based on an Ofsted report that warns of serious delays in learning caused by lockdown restrictions.  "Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly," states the report.  Despite a highly contentious debate over the effectiveness of face masks, mothers giving birth were forced to wear face coverings in NHS hospitals.

Mask Wearing Has Left a Generation of Toddlers Struggling With Speech and Social Skills.  Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report.  Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities.  Those turning two "will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly," the report found.  "Some providers have reported that delays to children's speech and language development have led to them not socialising with other children as readily as they would have expected previously," it added.

Understanding the Progressive Mind.  Everyone in Washington understands the basic causes of inflation.  If you print more money than you have real assets like gold to back it up, you devalue your currency and make everything cost more.  If you declare war on fossil fuels, shut down pipelines, close vast oil fields like Anwar, and don't approve drilling licenses generally, you cause the price of everything to go up, because virtually everything requires energy to produce.  If you spend vast amounts of government money inducing individuals not to work, employers will raise wages to entice them to work, and that, too, will cause prices to go up.  It's not rocket science.  Despite understanding these consequences, the Biden administration has instituted all these inflationary measures, and avoided taking responsibility for them and the suffering they cause.  They did this to advance their progressive agenda, which is really a reactionary socialist agenda that has not changed its fundamental premises since 1848, when Marx published what is and has always been the progressive agenda.

Why is a "study" necessary to prove that which is obvious?
New Fed study shows Biden owns our economic disaster.  President Joe Biden loves to blame our sky-high inflation on corporate greed and Vladimir Putin.  But a new study from the San Francisco Fed shows it was Biden himself who put America on this grim trajectory.  Specifically, it was the massive $1.9 trillion stimulus dumped into the US economy in early 2021 by the president's American Rescue Plan.  As the nearby chart demonstrates, the nation began heading into the inflationary stratosphere in early 2021, while other advanced economies, the other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, haven't seen anything like the soaring prices now punishing workers across America.  Which means that the spike is due to something US-specific, rather than global prevailing conditions.  That policy, was, of course, Biden's signature economic "achievement."

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Understand Why People Don't Appreciate Everything Democrats Are Doing for Them.  [Scroll down]  So, which is it?  Is this administration getting nothing done, or are the Democrats accomplishing so much that we don't understand their greatness?  What I'd love to ask Clinton is this: which accomplishment should we peons appreciate the most?  Should we give Biden credit for skyrocketing gas prices?  Is a flippant response of "just buy an electric vehicle" one of those accomplishments?  Should we celebrate spiraling inflation, which, by the way, affects minorities disproportionately?  Or should we just combat it with the advice of out-of-touch urban elites?  Should we get excited about the Democrats' ridiculous attempts to gin up racial animus by talking about "voting rights"?  Are we missing something about the administration's efforts to wrest elections from state and local control?  What about the sexualization of everything — including our schoolchildren?  Is that something to be thankful to the Democrats for?

Already stretched thin, border agents must now use politically correct pronouns under new edict.  Battered by COVID-19, waves of illegal immigrants and fears of even larger surges ahead, Customs and Border Protection officers have a new burden: they must now be sure to use proper pronouns for LGBTQI+ migrants.  The new requirement was included Thursday at the bottom of a much larger announcement by the Homeland Security Department concerning changes instituted on International Trans Day of Visibility.  "Facilitating effective communication at U.S. ports of entry and beyond:  CBP has provided a job aid and memorandum to all staff that will serve as a guide for facilitating effective communication with the diverse public CBP serves, including LGBTQI+ individuals," the agency said.

What the Bible Says About Money Inflation, Debt, and The Fed.  It's now common knowledge that the U.S. dollar is in danger of losing its status as the world reserve currency.  This is primarily due to two factors, the first being the Federal Reserve's inflation of the money supply, which drives price inflation.  Money inflation destroys the purchasing power of the dollar, acting as a crippling tax on the poor, middle class, and retirees on fixed incomes.  But the money inflation also distorts prices, supply and demand structures, and markets.  This drives the boom-bust economic bubbles which blow up into recessions.  In addition, the money inflation also funds America's destructive welfare state (which only incentivizes additional welfare) and America's bankrupting wars of choice, as well as the ever-expanding federal Big Government.  All of the above are as destructive as they are unsustainable.  What they amount to is fraud and violence against the American people.

Democrats in New York Debate How to Hide Their Radical Proposals on Bail and Incarceration.  The debate happening in New York state over Gov. Kathy Hochul's proposals to show how tough Democrats are on crime mirrors the debate happening across the country and in Washington, D.C.  On the radical left, the debate is over:  no bail, light sentences for everything except violent offenses, and don't send too many black people to prison because ... slavery, or something.  But Hochul is running for election in November after taking over when the serial sexual harasser and rapist, Andrew Cuomo, was forced to resign.  She has to run in the real world where there are an awful lot of people scared witless about crime.  Not everyone in New York is a crazy, left-wing nut.  The same holds true elsewhere in the United States.  The facts are that releasing people without bail isn;t leading to more crime and more violent crime.  Democrats like Hochul might recognize that but are still running scared.

LGBTQ+: Leftism's corruption of God's sacred gift to humankind.  [Scroll down]  But today's secularism has dropped society into an intellectual quicksand that repudiates matters of faith and objective reality.  It is fitting to define this neopaganism as "sexolatry," with sexuality warped into a bizarre dark comedy of dysphoria and disorientation.  Now it's "hookup culture," it's a casual "participation sport."  The unremitting truth of male and female — something assigned immutably at conception — yields to a whole zoology of "preferred pronouns," with a spectrum of genders absurdly more varied than a fat folder of decorator's paint chips.  This toxic climate of deranged permissiveness has desensitized the population to a torrent of coarseness and spawned an epidemic of tragedy.  Teen pregnancy.  Human trafficking and sexual slavery.  Public school teachers demonically pushing gender manipulation on students.  Pornographic graphic novels in school libraries.  Teacher-conducted "Pride" festivals.  Jarring messaging from the entertainment world.  Reared in this sexual jungle and drenched with such thought, word, image, and deed, it seems unsurprising that some, even many, young people emerge, confused and depressed, into adulthood.

A World Gone Mad.  There is no denying it.  There is a madness, a type of cancer that has taken hold of our world.  Yes, this planet has never been at peace... mankind is what it is, we go our own way, but we are seeing a craziness at a level never seen before.  Governments everywhere, including here in the USA, have abandoned God, good government, law and order, common sense, and traditional Judeo-Christian values.  They have jumped in with both feet into the dark and shadow without bothering to look back at seeing what they have already wrought.  Absurdity and hypocrisy are everywhere.  The Left insists that we abandon fossil fuels NOW without even the slightest idea of a viable alternative.

Democrats Have Painted Themselves into a Corner.  [Scroll down]  The Democrats do not have a single reasonable leader that is acceptable to any major portion of real America.  Whatever moves they make or don't make will have little effect on the November election.  The destruction that Democrats have unleashed on America is mind-boggling.  Who would possibly imagine that doubling gas prices would gain votes?  Sanctioning Russia while simultaneously sanctioning our domestic energy industry is beyond insanity.  And it has been done with such rapidity that even voters with short memory can see it.  Inflation around ten percent according to the Everyday Price Index is hitting poor Americans in the wallet.

People Are Getting Tired of One-Way Tolerance.  There was a time not long ago when even the most based conservative was willing to live and let live with all manner of divergent and bizarre people, but live and let live has become "I live and you submit" and that's just not going to work out in the long run.  The tolerant have been rewarded for their tolerance with intolerance, and if you look, you can already see the backlash brewing.  The breaking point may have been when the man who won the women's swimming championship and all the smart, moral people of our garbage elite demanded we celebrate it.  Or it might be weirdos trying to chat up our kindergarteners about sex.  Or it might be CRT. Regardless, people are getting fed up.  There's a difference between living your life as you wish and making the rest of us live their lives as you wish too, especially when it's a lie or when it means some freak gets to groom our kids.

America's Truck Driver Shortage.  There is a trucker shortage... and it's worse every year.  This is not news; this national driver shortage is no shock to businessmen or policymakers.  Our driver shortage contributes to empty store shelves, idled assembly lines, retail price inflation, a reduced Gross Domestic Product, and the global supply chain crisis.  This is not just one industry's problem; it's everybody's problem.  What is odd, however, is that so many people believe the trucker shortage is caused entirely by not enough people choosing the profession of truck driving as a career.  While that is certainly a part of it, it's not our real problem.  In fact, our truck driver shortage is caused primarily by a series of destructive government policies at every level.

No Amount Of Incremental Wind And Solar Power Can Ever Provide Energy Independence.  With war raging in Ukraine following Russia's invasion, there is a renewed concern in many quarters for "energy independence."  Until recently, the sophisticated countries of Europe had thought the whole idea to be passé.  They built large numbers of wind turbines and solar arrays, while simultaneously banning fracking for natural gas and shuttering electricity plants that used coal and even those that used no-carbon nuclear.  Suddenly, at the very worst possible time, they found themselves completely dependent on Russian gas for heat and reliable electricity.

How Democrats Made America Dependent on Russian Uranium.  Uranium prices have shot up by as much as 40% since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  With nuclear power providing about a fifth of our energy, this is another blow for Americans.  Unfortunately our nuclear power plants are dependent on uranium imports from Russia and countries in its sphere of influence because our domestic mining industry was suppressed.  In December 2016, on his way out the door, Barack Obama announced that he was inventing the Bears Ears "National Monument" on over a million acres of land.  While California environmentalists celebrated, tens of thousands of locals bitterly protested the move.  Billboards and stickers reading #RescindBearsEars were plastered across Utah towns in the area that expected catastrophic consequences from the destruction of their livelihoods.  Among these was uranium mining.  A uranium mine in the area has the potential to yield 500,000 pounds of uranium.  Miners warned that the Bears Ears monument would force us to rely more heavily on foreign uranium.  But the Democrats, still busy blaming their election defeat on some sort of phantom Russian-Trump conspiracy, did not see any problem with making America dependent on Russia.

Here Comes the Food Shortage!  Socialist takeovers always progress to the food shortage stage sooner or later.  Remember reading in horror about how Venezuelans were gobbling up their zoo animals in an effort to remain alive?  Seems like it was only yesterday.  But since horsemen Pestilence and War have already galloped through, I guess Famine can't be far behind. [...] But our Democrat leaders, together with their Globalist pals, are here to heap food scarcity on top of the supply chain crisis, fuel crisis, and violent crime epidemics they've already brought us.  And as usual, we'll be told it's all the fault of our enemy-du-jour, Vladimir Putin.  But, hey, when you're trying to stampede everyone into a war that doesn't affect them, I guess making it affect them is one way to accomplish your goal.

Gas rationing, food vouchers and hunger are now being normalized for the war phase of the plandemic.  As predicted, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is advancing the next phase of the plandemic, which involves widespread shortages of fuel and food that lead to mass starvation.  Already in Ukraine, residents are running out of food and medicine.  And the economic fallout from this is spilling over into the rest of the world, too.  The chance of a U.S. recession in 2023, according to banking giant Goldman Sachs, has risen to 35 percent.  Conversely, global growth indicators are being slashed as everything continues to move downwards amid the conflict.

KBJ Hearings Typify Our Debased Political Discourse.  Since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was chosen by President Biden to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, we've been encouraged by the White House, congressional Democrats, and the corporate media to celebrate her as the "first Black woman" nominated to serve on the Court.  Yet, when asked during her confirmation hearing to define the term "woman," she responded, "I can't ... I'm not a biologist."  The problem with this answer isn't just that it was unworthy of a serious SCOTUS nominee.  It is symptomatic of a debilitating disease that has infected our political discourse, rendering substantive policy debate all but impossible and endangering the republic.

Democrat policies destroy lives.  A gruesome crime of murder occurred in New Orleans this week.  Four black teens, ages 15-17, walking down a sidewalk, decided to push a 73-year-old white lady, Linda Frickey, out of her car and go for a joyride.  As one of these teens pushed the pedal to the metal, the lady's arm got caught in her seat belt strap.  While all four teenagers were in the car, this lady was hanging out of her car being dragged in the street, that is until her body broke off from her arm still entangled in the seat belt.  These teens continued to drive approximately ten minutes longer until they abandoned the car. [...] This murder is a result of Democrat policies.  The three main policies pushed by Democrats affecting crime are:  defund the police, critical race theory (best described as hate whitey), and free or reduced sentences of criminals.  All three of these policies have been marketed to our citizens — and our children have taken notice.

The Editor says...
It is inaccurate and misleading to say, "our children have taken notice."  The carjackers in New Orleans, Washington DC, New York and California are all black, as far as I can tell from the news reports.  Not everybody's children act like that.

Consumer Sentiment Sinks as Hope Crashes and Inflation Expectations Hit Four-Decade High.  Everyone has jobs and no one is happy because prices are rising so sharply.  U.S. consumer sentiment fell in March to the lowest since 2011 despite the level of jobless claims declining to the lowest level in decades and unemployment likely sinking to multi-decade lows.  The University of Michigan's sentiment index dropped to 59.4, from 62.8 in February, data released Friday showed.  This was lower than the mid-month read of 59.7. Economists had projected no further deterioration from the mid-month reading.  "Inflation has been the primary cause of rising pessimism, with an expected year-ahead inflation rate at 5.4 percent, the highest since November 1981," said Richard Curtin, the surveys chief economist, in a statement.  The sentiment index has taken a severe beating in the first year of Biden's presidency, falling 30 percent compared with March of 2020.

What's happening to the Marines?  Lately, when we think about what's happening to America's military under Biden, we've been focusing on the Pentagon's obsessions with race, LGBTQ+++ issues (especially transgenderism), women's rights, and political "wrong think" (i.e., conservativism).  That obsession has consistently put progressive social policy ahead of military cohesion and readiness.  However, Jim Webb, who was a Marine infantry officer while in Vietnam, then the Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan and, lastly, a Virginia senator during the Obama years, has written an op-ed about a different concern:  The potentially damaging, purely operational changes Marine commandment Gen. David Berger intends to impose on the Corps.

The pandemic city exodus revealed:  New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago lost the most residents.  New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and other large cities lost the most residents during the pandemic city exodus last year as about 75 percent of U.S. counties experienced a loss in population, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau.  The agency revealed on Thursday [3/24/2022] that American's fled metropolitan areas between April 2020 to July 2021 in favor of the South West, with Dallas, Houston, Austin and Phoenix among those to see the largest growth last year.  The Census Bureau said:  'In 2021, fewer births, an aging population and increased mortality — intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic — contributed to a rise in natural [population] decrease' across the country,' but particular hitting big cities the hardest.'

The Editor says...
Covid is the all-purpose fig leaf for other problems created by socialist Democrats.  All four of the cities named in the headline above are Democrat-controlled cities where violent homeless people roam the streets, mobs of looters do whatever they want because leftist prosecutors don't want to incarcerate blacks, and taxes are sky-high.  Covid has little or nothing to do with this mass exodus.

LAPD: You probably shouldn't wear expensive jewelry anymore.  The Los Angeles Police Department has a message for the denizens of Tinseltown and the rest of the City of Angels.  When you go out and about, you should probably avoid wearing any sort of flashy, expensive jewelry or other expensive possessions.  Why would they say that?  Because thieves have continued to become more and more brazen about pulling a weapon on pedestrians or motorists and robbing them of their belongings.  And displays of wealth will just make you more of a target for these types of crimes.  At the same time, gangs are also stepping up attacks on jewelry stores and other outlets selling expensive and easily fenced merchandise, so you might want to avoid those stores as well.  LA is looking more and more like a scene from Escape from New York these days.

Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid Of Him?  Biden of course also has the advantage of a wildly favorable press and social media monopoly while Trump had the strong headwind of a wildly negative one.  That factor obscured for a great many of American voters actions that easily demonstrated long before his election that Biden was unfit for the presidency.  Now that he's president, however, and very publicly bungling essentially every major issue all the way up to U.S. national security, Biden's weakness and incompetence have been impossible for the corrupt media to entirely cover up.  Biden's appalling withdrawal from Afghanistan may have been the first major blow to public confidence in his governing ability, and it's been followed by blow after blow:  the repercussions of ending U.S. energy independence, historic inflation caused by massive government spending, aggression by America's foreign foes, a tacitly open border with human trafficking of historic proportions, not to mention fueling America's legalized mass killings of unborn infants and forcing schools to inflict gender dysphoria on the children in their care.

The Biden Administration Does Not Have a Strategy.  The current U.S. administration's blunders are only mounting and already include the following:  a complete lack of strategy for energy security, the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, a softening on Chinese aggressiveness by abandoning the Department of Justice's "China Initiative," and rising inflation that is swiftly decreasing the living standards of average Americans.  The administration seeks to blame the problem on Russia or various supply chains issues while refusing to admit that its own reckless government printing and directionless infusion of capital into the economy, combined with its nonsensical policy of cutting domestic oil production, are to blame.  These issues are the result of an administration that has either a lack of understanding or worse, great contempt, for realist geopolitical strategy.

UK Hospital Denies a Victim Was Raped Because the Ward Was for 'Women Only'.  There are times when reading about how we are adapting to a many-gendered world that I have to check to make sure I'm still on good old Planet Earth and have not been transported to Cloud Cuckoo Land to live with people who deny the reality of existence.  The Cloud Cuckoo Landers who 30 years ago may have been living under lock and key in some insane asylum are now taking their place in positions of authority and are dictating how the rest of us should view reality.  It would be amusing if there weren't real-life victims of this nonsense.  A British woman reported to police that she had been raped during a stay in a hospital.  But the police were told that simply wasn't possible because the ward where the woman claims she was raped was for "females only."  And since there "was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened."  Emma Nicholson, the Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, stood before the members of the House of Lords and pointed out that the rape was caught on CCTV, but it took nearly a year for the hospital to admit there was a transgendered person in the ward who raped the victim.

Obama's Lawless Legacy Is The Cancer Consuming America Today.  You don't have to be any kind of intellectual savant to recognize this increasingly hyper-accelerated and precipitous decline our nation has been stricken with now for over a decade.  A deliberate decline, wholly manufactured and implemented with malevolent intentions among the usual suspects of political ruling class malefactors and their various radical militant acolytes.  A calculated decline whose subversive, accelerated machinations I believe to have been set in motion and implemented throughout the 8 years of Barack Hussein Obama's dumpster blazing presidency, setting the stage for these subsequent years of successive, surreal and intensifying social anarchy, civil unrest and unparalleled political corruption.  All done for the express purpose of seeking to subvert and decimate the pillars and foundation of our Republic.  To be sure, no one man could accomplish as much division and social upheaval as Obama managed to do without the help of accomplices and fellow conspirators.  How else can you explain an obscure community organizer whose own past was shrouded with vague content, going from an unaccomplished Illinois state senator with the sort of radical political associations that would see any of us put on an FBI terrorist watch list, to a U.S. senator to president of the United States in the span of a decade, void of having any substantive legislative achievements and possessing no executive experience?

Amazon Bails Out of Downtown Due to Violent Crime Surge, Dodges the Consequence of Woke Policies.  Amazon is getting out of Dodge.  Well, more accurately, Seattle.  The massive, mostly online retailer announced recently that it's relocating 1,800 employees out of a downtown Seattle location due to a huge uptick in violent crime.  "Given recent incidents near 3rd (Ave) and Pine (St), we're providing employees currently at that location with alternative office space elsewhere," an Amazon spokesman said, according to the New York Post.  "We are hopeful that conditions will improve and that we will be able to bring employees back to this location when it is safe to do so."  The Post noted that violent crime has rocked the city.  In just the first week of March around the Amazon offices, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed, a homeless man was stabbed, and police had to shoot and kill a man who rammed into a federal building and fired a rifle.  Amazon has been only too eager to hop aboard woke causes, but the company seems a little less enthusiastic about woke consequences.

Will Joe Biden Oversee The Collapse Of The U.S. Dollar?  Will Joe Biden oversee the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency?  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell appears to think it's a possibility, based on his recent quip:  "It's possible to have more than one reserve currency."  This is a staggering admission from the one person who wields the most influence over the dollar.  Then again, given the $30 trillion-and-counting federal debt, Powell's comment should come as no surprise.  Distilled, the chances are multiplying daily that the Biden administration is hurtling towards ringing the death-knell for the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

10 Realities of Ukraine.  [#6] The Ukraine war did not cause inflation and record gas prices.  Both were already spiking by early February 2022.  The cause was the Biden Administration's year-long radical expansion of the money supply at a time of post-COVID, pent-up consumer demand.  It foolishly continued de facto zero-interest rates.  Its generous COVID subsidies for the unemployed discouraged a return to work, while slashing U.S. oil and gas production and pipelines.  Prior to Putin's invasion, Biden was quite publicly blaming greedy corporations, oil companies, COVID, and former President Donald Trump for the inflation he had birthed in 2021.  And he was claiming undeniable high prices were only temporary or mostly an obsession of the elite.

First, Do Some Harm.  Until now, the people in full control of the minds of our youth have been the army of 31-year-old TikTok-and-Adderall addicts with multiple piercings and furry fetishes and baroque multisyllabic pronouns who seem to work at every preschool and elementary school in the country.  I don't know where these weirdos come from, but I want to thank the China-owned TikTok app for giving them a platform on which to expose themselves. [...] But don't get too comfortable.  A new, even more powerful enemy has entered the game: the pediatric industrial complex.  This battle is going to be more difficult.  Why?  Because if your school is bad, at least you can switch schools or homeschool.  But unless you went to med school and can write prescriptions, stitch a wound, and reset a dislocated shoulder, you can't home-doctor.  Teaching multiplication is one thing, diagnosing pediatric cancer is quite another.

Why Don't American Cities Deserve the Same Care as Ukraine?  Of course, Russia's "special military action," otherwise known as an invasion of Ukraine, is a humanitarian catastrophe.  Photo-journo accounts of hospitals suffering rocket attacks, civilians slaughtered by bomb bursts and sweeps of gunfire, apartment buildings, entire neighborhoods obliterated, are indeed horrific.  Some two million refugees pouring into Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia add to the despondent emotions.  While the spreading incineration in Ukraine is impossible to ignore, neither should be conditions in American cities.  The scenes of ravaged American inner cities, with entire sections of cities burned out, abandoned and derelict, are no less war zones than what we see in Ukraine. [...] Have you driven through urban battle zones from the Bronx to Philadelphia, to Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles, and now Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis?  You could interchange photos of those American cities almost indistinguishable from scenes in Kyiv to Kharkiv to Mariupol.

Biden is to blame for inflation and driving America off an economic cliff.  Since the first day of his presidency, Joe Biden has waged all-out war on our domestic energy industry, crippling our nation's ability to provide the needed resources to sustain our own economy.  It was a grievous mistake that has caused prices to soar and left consumers struggling financially.  Americans are smart.  They know that Biden is responsible.  70 percent disapprove of his handling of inflation and gas prices, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.  It is a damning indictment of Biden's policies, if not his incompetence.  Instead of having the fortitude to admit that his misguided green agenda badly damaged the U.S. economy, Biden blames Putin.  And our nation's oil companies.  And OPEC.  And bankers on Wall Street.  And transportation companies.  And COVID.  And the kid who kicked the cat.  Never once has Biden looked in the mirror for a moment of self-reflection.  He is incapable of recognizing that he was wrong in his decision to reverse our nation's energy independence.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide:  A little perspective, please.  When President Biden was sworn into office, crude oil was selling for forty dollars a barrel or less.  The price was reasonably stable, and gasoline and diesel were affordable for most drivers.  Biden came into office preaching the benefits of clean energy and stopped the new drilling on and leasing of federal lands to promote it.  As a result, the United States went from being an exporter of crude oil and natural gas to an importer with a large source of imported oil being Russia.  As the supply tightened, producers raised the price and the crude that was selling for forty dollars a barrel when Biden took office has been selling for up to one hundred and thirty dollars a barrel and the price of fuels has increased proportionately.  The cost of shipping goods has increased to reflect this cost of fuel which has given the United States a problem with inflation.  Biden has said he can't do anything about solving the problem he caused, by stopping drilling on federal land.  It is not a matter of him being unable to do anything.  It is a matter of him not wanting to because he believes the carbon dioxide from the exhaust of vehicles burning gasoline is causing global warming.  This is what he has been told, not a conclusion he has the knowledge to arrive at on his own.

Four Charts Prove Biden Is Lying About Putin And Inflation.  As inflation has continued to climb, so have the number of President Joe Biden's excuses for why he's not to blame.  First, it was a "transitory" effect of the economy rebounding from COVID lockdowns.  Then it was the result of supply chain problems because ports didn't operate 24/7.  Then it was due to a lack of competition among beef suppliers.  Then it was greed.  Now he's settled on Vladimir Putin.  None of it is true.  But the White House is so determined to take advantage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine it invited TikTok "influencers" to propagandize them.  The mainstream press had already fallen in line, delivering stories about why Biden is not at fault.  But Biden is to blame.  He set off the current inflationary spiral with the $2 trillion "rescue plan" he and his fellow Democrats jammed through at the start of 2021.  They claimed the money was desperately needed to get the economy back on track (it wasn't) and dismissed warnings from even liberal economists that dumping all that money (while paying people not to work) at a time when the economy was rapidly rebounding would spark an inflationary spiral.

What Did Democrats Deliver?  What have Democrats delivered?  How about the worst inflation in four decades thanks to President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan and misguided energy policies?  They've delivered near-record prices at the pump and at the grocery store.  Delivered endless supply chain woes.  Delivered a wobbly economy and equally volatile stock market.  Delivered an open border and growing concerns about the security of the nation.  But there's more.  Democrats have delivered prosecutors who are weak on crime, especially in the nation's biggest and bluest cities.  They've delivered more division in an already divided country, more hostility between schools and parents, and a foreign policy record that gives new meaning to the words "leading from behind."

Get ready:  Here comes the Biden Recession.  Yes, just when you thought things could not get worse, along comes the very real possibility of a downturn, thanks to Bidenomics, the war in Ukraine and an inept Federal Reserve.  A year ago, during a robust recovery, such a forecast would have seemed ludicrous.  A top Wall Street economist recently conducted an informal poll of his firm's clients.  To his surprise, 100 percent thought the U.S. would be in a recession by next year.  Why such gloom?  It starts with accelerating inflation, caused by out-of-control government spending and measures taken by the Biden White House that kept workers on the sidelines.  Inflation is also being fueled by soaring energy prices, thanks to lower U.S. production amid reviving growth and now the disruption to Russian oil exports.

Put a Fork in Seattle.  When Detroiters are laughing at your city, you know you've made a mistake.  I grew up in the Motor City and I have no sympathy for what used to be Seattle.  Detroit's death was drawn out over years and involved a perfect storm of nonsense, including foolish decisions by auto execs, stupid import/export laws, and a corrupt mayor named Coleman A. Young.  Detroit languished.  Seattle was executed.  Hundreds of local Seattle businesses are leaving, and Seattle residents have no one to blame except voters and the communists they've elected.

Does Anyone Recognize This Country Anymore?  The present has been marred by riots, which are not only condoned but even encouraged by the insiders, who are at war with those they consider to be deplorable outsiders.  This establishment, which like the revolutionaries of the 1960s is hoping to reshape Western society, has also brought us historic inflation; a new oil shock; rising food prices and scarcity; orders to give up fossil fuel-powered automobiles in favor of electric cars or public transportation; greater dependency on expensive and unreliable "green" energy; cruel pandemic lockdowns; and iron-fisted vaccine and mask mandates.  It wants more privilege and power for itself, less autonomy for the working class and those who aren't on board with its manipulations.

House Democrats Cancel Looming Embarrassment.  Even as post-Covid demand surged in an America and world that still rely on oil, gas and coal for 80% of their energy, Congressional Democrats, the White House, federal agencies and activist groups worked in consort to cancel pipelines, impose leasing and drilling moratoriums, slow-walk permits, and pressure financial institutions to stymie funding for oil and gas operations.  As they choked off production and supplies, oil, natural gas and gasoline prices nearly doubled during Mr. Biden's first year in office.  The price of food and nearly all consumer products and services soared in response.

Larry Summers Is [the] Second Obama Economic Adviser To Blame Biden For Inflation.  This week Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner said that Biden shouldn't be blaming Russia invading Ukraine for inflation.  He said Biden owns this.  Now another Obama economic adviser, Larry Summers, is blaming Biden for inflation.  Biden used to work with these men in the Obama White House.

The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause.  [Scroll down]  Replacing religion with politics has made for more frictionless souls who never grow.  The emotional retardation can be seen everywhere as adults behave like teenagers and teenagers behave like children.  No one ever grows up, instead they feign maturity through politics.  Advocating for causes makes them seem like they care about something more than themselves.  The right politics bestows membership in a community based on politics, but behind all the virtue signaling is the fundamental immaturity of people who only truly care about themselves.  That is the dirty secret of leftist politics whose egocentrism is thinly masked as altruism.  Leftism is not an act of conscience, but an escape from conscience.  Its causes, legitimate or illegitimate, are manifold, but what they all have in common is an underlying denial.  The only form of liberation that their politics truly offer is the liberation from moral accountability and personal growth.  The more radical the politics, the more radical of an escapism it represents.

"Bacon is as expensive as filet mignon used to be.".  The New York Times hired Morning Consult, a polling firm usually associated with Politico, to ask people where inflation hits hardest.  It was a pretty good piece of journalism. [...] From the Times story:
"A car battery costs almost two times as much."
"Bacon is as expensive as filet mignon used to be."
"Cold cereal has gone up, and the box has shrunk."
"Gas.  It's painful at the pump."
"Horse feed keeps going up every week."
"I never thought I would ever see eggs at $5 a dozen."
"The cheap brand of hamburger meat is not cheap anymore."
"The price of pet food is hard to even fathom."
Morning Consult asked 2,200 people and those are some of the answers given.

Don't let Biden lie his way out of the energy crisis he created.  President Joe Biden is trying to distance himself from soaring gas prices by blaming Russia and lying about his restrictive energy policies.  Deflection and dishonesty — the two things at which Biden is best.  "It's simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production," he told reporters Tuesday.  "That's simply not true.  Even amid the pandemic, companies in the U.S. pumped more oil during my first year in office than they did during my predecessor's first year."  That last claim from Biden is particularly insidious because it omits two material points.  First, domestic oil production only decreased during former President Donald Trump's last year in office because the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down; second, domestic oil production could be higher, but instead, it has been steadily decreasing ever since Biden's first day in office.  The decrease is no coincidence.  Contrary to what the White House might say, the explicit purpose of the climate agenda Biden has spent the last year pushing is to rid us of our dependence on fossil fuels.  To him and to most Democrats, that means less domestic oil and gas production.

From Massachusetts, 10 talking points to counter Democrat positions.  A Democrat vote means you favor:
  [#1]   No fossil fuel production.  Like the price of gasoline, heating oil and natural gas these days?
  [#2]   Inflation at a 50-year high.  The government prints money and hands it out, and it becomes worthless.
  [#3]   No freedom of speech.  Say the "incorrect thing," and you're sued.  Or fired.  No opinions allowed.
  [#4]   No civil liberties.  Don't think the vaccine is right for you or truly safe?  Sorry — you have no say.
  [#5]   De-funding the police.  Smash and grab.  No bail for criminals.  Policemen being shot.  Feel safe?
  [#6]   A weakened military.  Our top generals are more concerned with "equity" than winning wars.
  [#7]   Higher taxes.  You think the government spends your money more wisely than you do, right?
  [#8]   Unrestricted illegal immigration.  Your taxes support their education, health care, and housing.
  [#9]   Choosing your gender.  Do you like 45-year-old men in the girl's room with your daughter?
  [#10]   Woke corporations.  Everything is racist all of a sudden.  Color and sex far outweigh qualifications.

As Financial Markets Crash and Ukraine Burns, There's Nowhere Left to Hide for the Biden Administration.  Time, they say, is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.  If that's so, then maybe time has stopped because all of a sudden everything seems to be happening at once.  Three things, actually:  1) a Russian military operation in Ukraine that a lot of people in America want to turn into World War Three;  2) an epic crack-up of the world financial system; and  3) the breakdown of the fishy Covid-19 affair and especially the story behind its holy avatar:  the mRNA vaccine.  In a sane society, that might be enough to trip the institutional reality-test apparatus, but we are not a sane society these days, so we plunge ever-deeper into a hurly-burly of wrongful endeavor vectoring toward self-destruction.  The immediate problem is a nation (us) that is powerfully bamboozled, led by a figurehead nobody believes in, backed by a hidden coterie of actors who appear to hate our country enough to try to sink it.

The 'Hobbes Index' Is Making A Comeback Under Biden.  Americans are becoming poorer as the highest inflation rate in 40 years cost the average household $3,500 last year.  The erosion of wealth has no end in sight as the annualized inflation rate hit 7.5% in January.  Real wages are declining as prices have risen across the board, with food and fuel leading the way.  In contrast, annualized inflation stood at 1.4% and oil was $55 dollars/barrel in January 2021, when Biden terminated the Keystone XL pipeline, a mindless infliction of pain reminiscent of Franco's bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in its lack of strategic benefit.  Coherence not among his strengths, Biden curtailed domestic energy production while simultaneously imploring OPEC to increase production.

Award-Winning HIV Researcher Forced Into Re-Education For Dressing Up Like Michael Jackson.  A resurfaced blackface photo wasn't enough to get Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam fired, but a medical researcher was forced out of her senior vice president position last month after dressing up as Michael Jackson for Halloween in 2009.  Dr. Julie Overbaugh was an award-winning senior vice president at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ("Fred Hutch") and a faculty member at the University of Washington Medical Center.  She's known for her research on HIV in Kenya.  But her career is being ruined over a costume.  Nearly 13 years ago, Overbaugh attended the party at a lab at Fred Hutch.  The theme of the party was Jackson's album "Thriller."  But after a photo of her costume was anonymously emailed to senior leadership at the University of Washington, UW Medicine, and Fred Hutch, she's been forced to undergo "an intensive education process."

This Invasion Is Brought to You by ... Western Environmentalists.  The Democrats came into power in 2021.  The average closing price of oil in 2020 was $39.68 a barrel; the closing price of oil in 2019 was $56.99 a barrel.  As of this writing it is $138.00 a barrel.  The extremely high price of energy — a direct result of the environmentalist policies of the Democratic Party and the liberal and Left parties in Europe — is one of the two primary reasons for the ever-increasing rate of inflation.  (The other reason is the result of another Democrat policy:  the printing of trillions of dollars.)  Serious inflation leads to very bad things.  The Nazis did not come to power because of their antisemitism or even because of the Versailles Treaty as much as they did because of the terrible inflation under the Weimar Republic.

Expect To Pay $3,000 More This Year For Gas And Food As Prices Skyrocket.  Prices at the pump have now soared to $4.173 per gallon for regular gasoline, according to Price Information Service (OPIS).  This firm collects and calculates US pump prices for American Automobile Association (AAA).  On Monday evening [3/7/2022], prices surpassed the previous record high set in 2008 and continue marching higher Tuesday.  As gasoline prices increase and inflation reaches the highest levels in four decades, times are becoming much harder for the average consumer, experiencing a persistent rise in the prices of many goods and services.  Steeper gas and food prices have forced millions of people to rejigger household budgets.  The latest research note from Yardeni Research estimates the average household will spend an additional $2,000 per year in gasoline on top of an extra $1,000 in food expenses.  Adding this all up, the typical household will spend $3,000 less this year on other things.

The Crude Hypocrisy And Rot Of Green Politics.  That gasoline prices are becoming unaffordable to many Americans is becoming old news.  What got us here, though, is a story unheard by much of the public.  It starts and ends with green politics.  As gasoline reaches prices that made it a luxury good during President Joe Biden's year in office, the White House is considering asking the Saudis to produce more oil.  At the same time, the administration apparently wants more oil from Venezuela, which is languishing under a dictatorship that's squarely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iran, a member in good standing with the axis of evil.  "Joe Biden is frantically searching the globe to see if anyone but Texas might have some spare oil," says a tweet from Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA officer and Oregon Democrat, that sums up well the comical blundering as well as the corrupt decision-making of the current White House.

Why Should Deplorables Fight for Those Who Hate Them?  [Scroll down]  Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe the wars of the future will all be fought by politically correct, "detoxified," androgynous know-nothings marching uniformly into battle because MSNBC, Google, and Teen Vogue tell them doing so will prove they are committed to fighting racism and global warming.  Maybe that gender-confused pipsqueak huddled in a "safe space" because he/she/they/it is afraid of being "triggered" by words or the carnage of free speech is just what the U.S. military needs when going mano a mano against the Russians.  I'm sure those pink [...] hat-wearing womynx are ready to jump out of a good airplane, parachute into chaos, and start slitting throats for good Ol' Uncle Sam (or is it non-binary Auxnt Sam now?).  Where are all the climate change warriors when their country needs them?  Come on, "gladiators," get to it! Go find out what it's like to fight something that's fighting back.  Let's move, wokesters!  Show the mean Russkies how dangerous you are with your ski masks, bike chains, and fondness for attacking people from behind.  All that burning, looting, and murdering in cities across the USA over the last few years had to prepare Democrats' wannabe soldiers for something, right?

In Wisconsin, a fight over whether children belong to the state or the parents.  In 1991, the European release of Zero Wing, a Sega video game, contained a now-classic badly translated phrase:  "All your base are belong to us."  In the massive battle shaping up across America, public school districts are metaphorically carrying a banner saying "All your children are belong to us" in their battle against parents over children's gender (not to mention racial issues).  What's happening in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, exemplifies this battle and can be summed up in a sentence from a staff training session:  "[P]arents are not entitled to know their kids' [gender] identities.  That knowledge must be earned."  That arrogant message came from a "professional development facilitator guide" that was used in the school district at a staff development session: [...]

Food Prices [Have Gone] Up 20% Over the Past Year.  If your grocery bills continue to frustrate you, you're not alone.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released its report on worldwide food prices for February, and prices hit a record high last month.  The February FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) reached a new high of 140.7 points, which reflects an increase of 3.9% over January and a whopping 20.7% over this time last year.

How 'Social Justice' is Killing the Military.  "Some 41 percent of the military identify as members of minority groups," the Department of Defense (DoD) reported on Feb. 9, 2021. [...] Yet, while admitting that 41 percent of the military identified as minorities, the DoD reported that diversity, inclusion and equity were military necessities.  Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE) is the language of Critical Race Theory (CRT).  Diversity is the promotion of division based on identity quotas or targets.  Inclusion is code for exclusion of specific groups based on race, gender and sexual identity.  Equity is CRT's ambiguous terminology, easily confused with equality.  Equity is equality of outcomes (usually quotas), which is reformulated Marxism.  Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services, Inc. ("STARRS") was formed in 2021 to educate the services and America that our once-capable military has been diverted from its core national defense mission into social justice warriorship.  STARRS has incontrovertible evidence that this divisive threat spans all branches.

7 Major Failures of the Biden Presidency.  [#3] Return to Energy Dependence:  In 2018, during Donald Trump's presidency, the United States became a net exporter of oil for the first time in 75 years.  Technological innovations, alongside the Trump administration's policies to open up more opportunities for drilling while eliminating regulations, dramatically boosted American energy independence and global influence on energy issues.  Not only did this energy independence benefit Americans economically, it weakened the position of petro states such as Russia.  But the Biden administration shifted away from this strategy.  It encouraged an increase in green energy projects at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.  These renewable energy sources are a long way from meeting global energy needs.  Biden put more regulatory burdens on the oil and natural gas industry, slowing its production considerably.  And perhaps most dramatically, he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project to move oil from Canada to the U.S. while effectively greenlighting financing of Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry natural gas to Germany.

Owner of Seattle bakery says she was forced to close her business because drug users were constantly blocking entrance to her store and police would do nothing to help.  A Seattle bakery owner has slammed city leaders after she says she was forced to close her shop due to the record-breaking high levels of crime.  Piroshky Piroshky bakery owner Olga Sagan, 38, made the tough decision after she constantly found the entrance blocked with drug users who refused to move — and she says the Seattle Police Department did nothing to help.  The last straw was when a man was shot dead just round the corner from the city center bakery.

Biden's war on fossil fuels has strengthened Putin and weakened America.  Russian President Vladimir Putin was emboldened to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine because he believed that President Biden was bluffing when he threatened serious consequences.  On Thursday, Biden proved him right.  Not only did the United States and its NATO allies fail to kick Moscow out of the SWIFT banking network used by almost all major financial institutions to wire money — which would effectively exclude Russia from the global economy — Biden failed to sanction Putin's two most significant exports:  oil and natural gas.  To the contrary, Biden announced that he had specifically designed the sanctions "to allow energy payments to continue."  Putin gambled that Biden was not willing to risk sanctioning his lucrative energy exports, and thus driving up energy prices for U.S. consumers just months before the midterm elections.  The bet paid off.  This failure of deterrence shows the folly of Biden's war on fossil fuels.

Fake 'Environmentalism' Fueled the Ukraine War.  The truth is that people like [John] Kerry and many of his colleagues and predecessors who have been obsessed with the same supposedly imminent ecological disaster literally for decades now, are to blame as much as anyone — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, of course — for the carnage in Ukraine.  This environmental obsession obviously swept up our current president to such a degree that from the minute he was inaugurated he worked to reverse the American energy independence achieved under the Trump administration.  He succeeded and then some in less than a year.  Result:  The United States imports oil to the tune of millions of dollars a day, including from Russia (even as it invades Ukraine).  As Bloomberg reported last year, Russia provides more oil to the United States than any other country, except Canada.  Around 20 million barrels per month.  This makes the so-called sanctions a pathetic sideshow — laughable, really.

The green dream goes lethal.  Britain's capital has been dubbed "Londongrad," because British governments have allowed so many of Putin's fellow oligarchs to use its infrastructure to launder stolen Russian funds — contributing in the process so much to Britain's GDP.  Then there's the European embrace of pacifism, which has led Britain and other European states to cut their defence spending and rely instead on America's protective umbrella which they all took for granted.  That parasitic illusion went belly-up with the advent of the Biden administration, whose refusal to defend the free world and its preference instead to throw in the towel wherever possible — as demonstrated most graphically by America's disorderly scuttle from Afghanistan — has been duly noted by Putin, along with the regimes in China and Iran, as evidence that the Biden administration would take no effective action to counter their own aggression.  But even more shocking that all this is that, through their unhinged obsession with "climate change," America, Britain and Europe have handed Putin his greatest weapon against them.

The West's fixation on climate change is proving disastrous.  The crisis in Ukraine has highlighted, once again, the foolishness of the Western world's climate change gambit — that is, shackling ourselves with economy-crippling restrictions that the globe's largest, dirtiest, and most dangerous countries will ignore. [...] Years ago, I shared on the radio about a scientific study that compared the general scientific knowledge of those who were panicked about the imminent calamity of man-made climate change to the scientific knowledge of those who were skeptical of such hysteria.  Despite all the routine claims from the former that the latter are little more than knuckle-dragging flat-earthers, it turned out that the skeptics scored slightly higher.

This Is Downtown Seattle At Night.  If this looks like a scene from an apocalyptic movie set from Hollywood, guess again.  This is a typical night from downtown Seattle, filled with homeless people and junkies tweaking out.  The area of 3rd and Pike is just one of the man areas that keeps getting worse and worse, unsafer and uninvestable.  [Video clip]

What if San Francisco Does Not Recover?  San Francisco looks worse now than I've ever seen it.  Like any major city, San Francisco had bad areas before 2020 — those rough areas you knew to avoid — but you could go anywhere else, basically unmolested.  Today is something entirely different.  The streets are dirty.  Homeless encampments, trash, and excrement can be found all over.  Car break-ins are so frequent that it has basically become a non-government-imposed tax for people who come here.  Of course, some areas are much worse than others, but almost all areas of the city suffer from this decay, and it is appalling.  Every year, the city seems to find new ways to dig deeper and deeper toward ruin.  But what happens to San Francisco if it really does not recover?  What if the financial woes, homeless encampments, rising crime, and dwindling police force are the new normal for this once great city?

The Americans Who Voted For Joe Biden Owe The Rest Of Us An Apology.  We have an affirmative-action Supreme Court nominee who will join the leftist wing of the court in attacking the U.S. Constitution for likely another 30 years.  We have Congress contemplating eye-watering spending while the nation's economy is not only extremely weak but also saturated with the most government debt in all of world history.  We have historic levels of price increases especially harming the poor and working class. [...] We have a southern border that has been opened wide to mass human trafficking by international drug cartels and a presidential administration flying unknown foreigners all around the country in the dead of night.  The United Nations is even aiding this effort to end U.S. sovereignty, as it has for other manufactured migration "crises."  Don't forget the rising crime, deterioration of infrastructure, the self-destruction of our K-college education systems, the refusal of historic levels of able-bodied, working-age men to work, governments and employers doubling down on pitting Americans against each other based on race, the allowance of election systems that befit a banana republic, forcing predatory males into girls' and women's private areas, and the now-repeated deployment of the U.S. military against American civilians.

Check out how beautiful the streets of Seattle are.  Yo, huge shoutout to Joe Biden for throwing money toward safe syringes so the folks on the streets of Seattle can get high.  They seem to be putting them to good use.  You know what we should do now?  We should get the government out there recycling these bad boys in case the addicts run out.  We wouldn't want them to go without their drugs, now would we?  [Video clip]

Before We Go To War, Let's Take A Look At The Current State Of The U.S. Military.  If we are going to have a war with Russia, perhaps we should determine if our military is actually prepared to fight such a war first.  Unfortunately, as I will detail below, the answer is very clear.  At one time, the U.S. possessed the greatest fighting machine ever assembled, but decades of neglect, incompetence and cultural deterioration have taken a devastating toll.  Just look at what happened in Afghanistan.  After nearly two decades of fighting, we couldn't even defeat a ragged bunch of drug dealers and goat herders known as the Taliban.  In fact, the Taliban appears to be even stronger today than when we first invaded.  And now we think that we can take on the Russian military?  Sadly, the truth is that we aren't ready for any sort of a major conflict at this stage.

A New Age of Barbarism.  Political leaders in the US, Canada, Germany, and France — all NATO countries — got back on script yesterday. [...] The part we do not see is that many of these people — together with media organs and administrators of many deep-state bureaucracies — are absolutely thrilled to start a new season.  Away with the appalling mismanagement of the pathogen.  Away with public anger toward the lockdowns and mandates.  Forget the collapse in children's literacy, the rise in cancer, the waves of depression, the trucker protests, the collapsing polls of many elected leaders, and forget too the inflation, the federal debt, supply-chain snarls and goods shortages.  Forget all the astonishing botches of everything.  Life was never as good in living memory as when we had a solid foreign enemy named Russia with a leader with a name and a face.  Everything wrong with the world could be personalized, and with storybook thematics:  good vs evil, freedom vs despotism, democracy vs dictatorship.  This great struggle was so good for both sides that they made it last 40 years.

Key inflation gauge hit 6.1% in January, highest since 1982.  An inflation gauge that is closely monitored by the Federal Reserve jumped 6.1% in January compared with a year ago, the latest evidence that Americans are enduring sharp price increases that will likely worsen after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  The figure reported Friday [2/25/2022] by the Commerce Department was the largest year-over-year rise since 1982.  Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core inflation increased 5.2% in January from a year earlier.

Is this the end of the climate change scam?  Perfectly phrased by John Kerry's nonsensical plaint that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will increase the combustion rate of fossil fuels is the abject silliness of the whole concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Particularly recent U.S. policies against fracking, pipelines, coal, and internal combustion engines have placed us at a severe strategic disadvantage.  It has taken only a couple of days for it to become common knowledge that such policies have seriously enriched Vladimir Putin.  The grotesque human price of such a debacle will continue to mount, as will resentment for the foolish notion that weather can be subject to political influence.

Law Enforcement Pins Colorado Overdose Spike to Dem-Passed Law.  On Sunday [2/20/2022], five people died of fentanyl overdoses in a suburban Denver apartment, leaving a four-month-old baby parentless as a result. [...] The tragic event has revived calls from local prosecutors and police to reverse a 2019 law that made the possession of four grams or less of many hard drugs — including fentanyl — a misdemeanor instead of a felony.  That law passed shortly after Colorado Democrats expanded their majority in the state House and captured control of the state Senate.  At the time, Colorado prosecutors called on lawmakers to exempt fentanyl from the penalty reduction, noting that four grams of fentanyl is the equivalent of 13,000 deadly doses.  But the bill's sponsors refused, and opioid overdose deaths in the state went on to spike by 54 percent in 2020.

A Decade of Deceit and Division:  What Trayvon Wrought.  [Scroll down]  Outraged by the [George Zimmerman] verdict, three Marxists "of color" promptly formed a group called Black Lives Matter.  Working their combined magic in Ferguson a year after George's acquittal, BLM and the media helped reverse an eight-year downward trend in homicides.  As a result of the so-called "Ferguson effect," 3,000 more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014.  BLM was just warming up.  The multi-city mania BLM helped generate in 2020 — Minneapolis, Louisville, Kenosha — triggered a nationwide 30-percent-plus increase in homicides over 2019, the greatest annual spike ever recorded.  Had the media paid any attention to Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert's brilliantly researched book and film, The Trayvon Hoax:  Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, released in the fall of 2019, much of the death and destruction could have been avoided.

US projected to give up net oil exporter status this year.  The United States is projected to lose its status as a net petroleum exporter this year as refiners and other customers seek out more product from elsewhere amid ballooning demand.  This change in trade dynamics would disrupt what the Energy Information Administration described as the "historic shift" that took place in 2020, when the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products due to its strong production output and the effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on oil markets.

Biden misses deadline for reporting how many jobs were lost due to canceled Keystone pipeline.  The Biden administration is flouting a law that requires it to produce a report on the number of jobs lost by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, in addition to describing how its action may have affected energy costs.  The roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in November included a provision mandating the Department of Energy to produce a report to Congress detailing the impact to American jobs and energy as a result of Mr. Biden's decision to end the pipeline.  The legislation allowed Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm 90 days to provide the information to Congress.  But that Feb. 13 deadline came and went last week with no response from Ms. Granholm, according to several Republican lawmakers who have since pressed for answers.

Masking Facial Expression in Children.  We humans are social creatures that communicate through complex languages and facial gestures.  Our personalities are ingrained in these unique expressions, which impart visual messages that words alone cannot convey.  Facial expressions provoke a variety of cognitive processes, including emotional gesticulations that elicit rapid responses and ostensive ones that signal a willingness to communicate.  A hidden face deprives us of one of the most basic aspects of humanity and the ability to constructively interact in social settings.  Face masking children constitutes a sacrifice on a scale that can only be made in response to a danger of proportionate magnitude.

Bidenflation Runs Hot Sending Rents Soaring Across the Country.  First gas, then heating and now rents.  Runaway inflation is driving rents skywards across Joe Biden's America, delivering an average of a 20 percent increase in the U.S.'s biggest 50 cities over the past 12 months, a study details.  At the same time, U.S. Census Bureau statistics show rental vacancy rates during the fourth quarter of 2021 fell to 5.6 percent, the lowest since 1984 in the the world's largest economy.  The rent spike has stung wallets nowhere more than in the Miami metro area, where the median rent surged to an eye-watering $2,850, 49.8 percent higher than the previous year.

Fifth-Grade Parents at California School Discover Men Using 'Non-Male' Pronouns Allowed to Sleep in Girls' Cabins on 3-Night School Trip.  Parents of a California elementary school were shocked to discover recently that their daughters had male counselors sleeping in their cabin for three nights at an annual science camp organized by the school.  One parent of a student at Weaver Elementary School in Los Alamitos, said she couldn't believe it when her daughter returned from the trip and said the girls cabins were staffed with adult males who shared their sleeping area for the three-night trip.  She contacted the school to ask if men were actually sleeping in the same room as the young girls, but they could not confirm.  The camp, however, did not hesitate to confirm that men employed with the camp are allowed to stay in the cabins that suit their preferred pronouns.  Men who used "they/them" pronouns are allowed to choose.  Apparently these particular men chose to stay with the girls.  That's not creepy at all.

The Power of the Powerless Is Real.  The growing tyranny in the West has not happened overnight.  It did not suddenly arrive at our doorsteps with the Chinese Flu.  It has been a nightmare decades in the making.  The difference today is that previously slumbering citizens once sublimely content in the normal humdrum of their lives are waking up to realize that the enemies from our past have returned with a vengeance.  Free speech is treated as dangerous.  Western governments, corporations, and social media platforms engage in rampant censorship.  Race and sexual identity are used as the defining attributes of a person to the exclusion of talent, character, and achievement.  Teachers' unions openly demand the right to indoctrinate children according to the interests of the State.  Parents are threatened for believing that their children belong to them.  The criminal justice system is used as a place to punish political opponents and to protect political friends.  Religious expression is outlawed.  Leftists' "secularized religion" is imposed.  Freedom is disparaged as "right-wing."  Coercion has replaced consent.  Victimhood has replaced virtue.  Conformity has replaced individuality.  "Correct" thinking has replaced freethinking.  "Social justice" has replaced real justice.  And the protection of government has become more important than the protection of human rights.

Why are the police we revere doing the tyrants' bidding?  The American left has made its contempt of our police abundantly clear for several years now.  Encouraging the BLM riots, excusing the damage done, decreeing no punishment for those who did billions of dollars in property destruction over the summer of 2020 was their coin of the realm.  Lacking common sense and any skill at predicting the consequences of idiotic policies, they have doubled down on stupid as cities like N.Y., Chicago, D.C., and L.A. rack up homicides committed by career criminals repeatedly let loose on an unsuspecting public.  On a daily basis, innocent victims are attacked, injured, or killed by violent perpetrators who have been released by cavalier lefty judges who have become self-appointed social justice warriors.  This explains the parade massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin and nearly every other violent assault on innocent victims for the last year.  Our American left reveres criminals over law-abiding citizens.  There can no longer be any doubt about that fact.  The Democrat party is, quite simply, pro-criminal.

Biden the Bloodshedder Steals Our Livelihood.  [Scroll down]  One industry has been especially hard hit, and not because of the normal business cycle.  The decline in the oil and gas industry is almost entirely Joe Biden's fault, and instead of apologizing for it, he brags about it.  The long held dream of the left is to force energy prices high enough that consumers will turn to wind and solar.  With gas prices heading toward five dollars a gallon, electric cars may seem more attractive.  There should have been a huge recovery in U.S. oil production, what with oil prices more than quadrupling since their COVID low.  That has not been the case, and that is why gas prices have remained high — as have prices for heating oil, natural gas, and other petroleum products.  The most recent rig count figure is 392, down from 900 or more through most of 2019 and 2020.  Current drilling is not much improved from the lows of 2021, when economic activity stagnated due to Biden's handling of the epidemic.  Drilling is less than expected because Biden has carried out a war on fossil fuels, including his executive orders halting the Keystone XL pipeline, banning new drilling on federal lands including ANWR, and strong-arming banks not to lend to energy producers.

Leftist Nonsense Is Killing Washington DC, And It's Time To Let It Die.  [The District of Columbia] has been [deteriorating] under Democrat leadership for a while.  Homicides in D.C. were up 14 percent in 2021 over 2020, which was up 19 percent from the year before that.  Motor vehicle theft was up a whopping 50 percent in 2020 and then another 8 percent in 2021.  Last spring, I watched an attempted carjacking right in front of my own car in a "safe" neighborhood at dusk.  The month before that, a Pakistani immigrant and UberEats driver was murdered by two teenage girls when they tased him and stole his car with the owner still hanging off the side.  Long before the vaccine mandate went into effect, the city was suffering under other heavy-handedness that the government blamed on Covid-19.  Isolation exacerbated civil tensions and drove many restless Americans to the breaking point.  The mentally ill became sicker still, and the parts of the city once populated by excited tourists were overtaken by vagrants and tent burroughs.  This skyrocketing crime — thanks to "progressive" policies, unchecked rioting, and severely understaffed police departments — paired with a government-induced Covid craze, chased the first wave of D.C. residents out of the District and into the rest of the country.  But it's amazing how rapidly the pointless, month-long vaccine power trip wreaked so much additional havoc on the D.C. residents and businesses that remained, turning our nation's capital into a bleak and pathetic ghost town.

The Crazy Years.  Precisely who's gone crazy is a matter for debate.  But some of the headlines seem to hint at odd behavior by ostensibly sober statesmen.  It is almost as if they've forgotten how to act in their own best interests.  After two years of demonizing "fossil fuels," decommissioning nuclear plants, and shifting energy grids to things like windmills, the West is suddenly facing an oil shortage crisis that makes it vulnerable to blackmail by Vladimir Putin.

Heritage Foundation index:  U.S. economic freedom at all-time low after Biden's first year.  The conservative Heritage Foundation says economic freedom is at an all-time low under President Biden.  The Washington-based think tank said the U.S. fell 2.7 points from its 2021 Index of Economic Freedom to a record-low score of 72.1 and to its lowest ranking globally, from 20th last year to 25th, in 2022 as the U.S. struggles with rising inflation and debt.  "This year's Index of Economic Freedom paints a disturbing picture, both at home and abroad," Heritage President Kevin Roberts said in a statement reported by Fox News.  "The decline of American economic freedom is serious cause for alarm and has real and tangible consequences for all Americans, especially low-income families and the working class."

Joe Biden, Alchemist?  Unlike Joe Biden, even a child knows that too much demand and liquidity and too few available goods and services cause prices to rise.  The rate of inflation is increasing at an annualized rate not seen in 40 years.  And the jump already follows a prior 2021 annual rate of 6.8 percent.  The prices of gas, food, and houses — the stuff of life — are collectively rising far higher than just 7.5 percent. [...] Biden is hunting for the same magic excuses to fabricate a golden spin on crime.  After demagoguing the police, contextualizing the 2020 riots, and supporting openly or quietly the Soros district attorney revolution, crime has exploded.  Carjackings, smash-and-grab robberies, and violent assaults come to American screens each morning on social media and the news despite the denials of the Biden filters.  Rather than address the crime wave, the FBI prefers to harrass after parents at school board meetings, to fixate on mythical "white supremacist" conspiracies, or to retrieve lost property of the wayward Biden offspring.  Murder is at all-time highs in 12 major cities.

Biden's Popularity is Sinking Like the Titanic.  Domestically we have inflation hitting a 40-year high, which along with rising unemployment, is reminding older Americans of a blast from the past called the misery index, a relic of the Jimmy Carter presidency.  Our southern border is wide open to anyone and everyone from around the world, along with rising crime, homelessness, and squalor in American cities.  Biden promised to "Beat COVID," yet more Americans died of COVID in 2021, during Biden's presidency, compared to 2020 when Trump was in the White House.  Foreign affairs are faring no better.  Biden's Afghanistan surrender to the Taliban, a force we have been fighting for 20 years, left China smiling as we left billions of dollars of weapons and infrastructure behind, along with many Americans which the media are incurious about. [...] America at home is in a civil war, pitting Americans against each other based on everything from skin color to vaccination status to mask wearing, destroying families and friendships in the process.

How Biden and the Democrats Reignited Inflation.  As has been widely reported, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the latest inflation numbers last Thursday, and they were ugly.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 7.5 percent during the 12-month period ending in January, its largest one-year spike in 40 years.  This dwarfs the inflation rate of 1.4 percent that President Biden and the Democratic Congress inherited in January of 2021.  BLS also reported that real earnings decreased 1.7 percent from January 2021 to January 2022.  All of this is directly attributable to the incompetent economic policies of the Biden administration and wild spending by congressional Democrats in the midst of a supply chain crisis.  Inflation on this scale is new to most Americans.  According to the Brookings Institution, more than half the current U.S. population had not yet been born the last time prices were rising at such an alarming rate.

Biden issues a completely tone-deaf announcement about electric cars.  It's a certainty that Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake," when she heard about France's peasants starving for lack of bread.  However, it's the absolute truth that, even as 82% of Americans are paying above sticker price for cars, while the last year has seen them struggle with rising fuel prices, Biden chose to announce that he's going to buy a whole new fleet of cars for federal workers — 600,000 cars, to be precise — all of them electric.  The past year has been a tough one for Americans.  Inflation has rocketed, with three primary causes:  the government's non-stop money-printing presses; rising fuel prices that boost the price of everything and hugely increase the cost of driving; and the supply chain shortages, including chips and other car parts from China.  It's no surprise, then, that Edmunds, the market research firm, says that 82% of Americans who bought a car from a dealership in the past 12 months paid above the sticker price.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu lit up on Instagram live by critics over vaccine mandates, COVID restrictions.  Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was lit up with criticism during an Instagram live video over the city's vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions.  Wu started up her Instagram live question-and-answer session this week addressing several coronavirus mandates in Beantown.  The stream did not go as Wu had planned.  Angry Bostonians unleashed a torrent of criticism at Wu over the COVID mandates.  "Why do you hate kids?  Teachers?  Cops?  Firemen?" one of the commenters said, while another accused Wu of "ruining" Boston.  Another user said Wu is "ruining our great city!"

My Latest Groundbreaking Interview with Trump.  Trump brought us prosperity, opportunity, mobility, jobs by the millions, the greatest middle-class income growth in history, a secure border, and peace around the world.  President Joe Biden has brought us massive inflation, supply chain disaster, open borders, a massive crime and murder wave, more COVID-19 deaths than ever before, vaccine mandates that have ripped this country apart, attempts to ban and censor free speech, the worst retreat in American military history in Afghanistan, and don't forget the news reports about free crack pipes to be handed out in minority communities.  Yes, I said free crack pipes.  Why not?  Biden runs the country like a man hooked on crack.

They're Coming For You.  You Know That, Right?  [Scroll down]  But the Democrats' destructive war on the country isn't simply limited to COVID.  Last month they tried to take over the way we conduct elections from the states while threatening some of their own party who wouldn't go along.  George Soros-funded Democrat district attorneys refuse to prosecute theft and violence in major American cities.  Homicides are through the roof.  Retail and auto theft is through the roof.  Homeless, drug-addicted zombies lay waste to city streets.  Worse, the Democrats who run these cities have gone to war with and called to defund and strip authority from the police officers that remain the single thin, blue line between anarchy and their residents.  Joe Biden's Department of Justice has conspired to frame Americans for wild, politically motivated schemes.  They currently hold many in federal custody without formal charges related to undefined law breaking on January 6th, 2021.  Two Republican members of Congress have accused the DOJ of going through their constituent mail and interrogating their staff.  They've threatened to deploy resources to school board meetings to keep an eye on parents who get too uppity.  Democrats want a peek into your bank accounts if you have $600 bucks or more.

Decoding the disastrous Bidenflation.  Joe Biden has once again led the US into unchartered catastrophes due to his ignorance about the fundamentals of economics.  On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation in the US climbed to its highest level in 40 years in January, causing prices to rise by 7.5% from a year ago.  When Biden took up residence in the White House in January 2021, President Trump gifted him an inflation rate of just 1.6%.  This was when Covid-19 restrictions were still imposed, causing businesses to either be closed or operate with restrictions.  The current numbers are more troubling considering restrictions across the US have been eased.  To sum it up, in just one year, Biden managed to increase the overall rate of price increase by almost five times.

The Jig is up for Transgenderism as Child Abuse.  The campaign to convince minors that girls can become boys and boys can become girls continues unabated.  However, the consequences of that campaign are now being exposed and are proving unacceptable.  Critics of the campaign have long known of the dangers and have deemed them to be child abuse.  Federal, state, and local governments have ignored the obvious in a case of willful blindness, but the evidence that children and adolescents need protection is now so apparent that government must intercede.  Some states have already begun.

America's enemies are delighted to hear this:
US Army goes green, announcing new climate strategy.  The U.S. Army unveiled a plan this week to tackle issues surrounding climate change, including the establishment of an electric vehicle fleet, as well as the reduction of the branch's greenhouse gas emissions.  The plan, outlined by the Army in a document titled "Climate Strategy," calls for the service to cut its emissions by 50% by 2030 from 2005 levels and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.  The strategy aims to establish an "all-electric light-duty non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2027" and an "all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035."

The bad inflation numbers are even worse than the government says.  You couldn't miss the headlines:  The annual percentage increase in inflation clocked in at 7.5%, making it the worst increase in 40 years.  For anyone on a fixed income, living off of savings, or in a low-paying job, this is a disaster.  Rich people don't feel it (much) but ordinary people do.  But here's the kicker:  Inflation is almost certainly worse than it was 40 and more years ago.  Moreover, because the government is in thrall to Modern Monetary Theory, it's going to get worse, lots worse. [...] Certainly, inflation has shot up with incredible speed, as happened in 1982, but real inflation is probably even worse than the accelerated rate suggests.  That's because, in 1990, the government changed how it calculated inflation (something it also did in 1980).

Biden's oil nightmare.  If you think the highest overall inflation rate in 40 years of 7% is bad, get ready for a real shock coming to a pump near you.  Oil prices are surging so much that, ironically, even the "Green New Deal" president is begging global and domestic producers alike to ramp up production and pump, pump, pump!  And despite his releasing millions of barrels of crude from the strategic oil reserve and pleading with oil-rich nations to increase their output, prices continue to climb.  In early December, oil was trading at $65 per barrel.  Today, it's over $90, which is more than a 50% increase in little over a couple of months.  This past week, the average price of gasoline in the United States hit a seven-year high at the pump, but there's still much more to come.

Inflation surges 7.5% on an annual basis, even more than expected and highest since 1982.  Consumer prices surged more than expected over the past 12 months, indicating a worsening outlook for inflation and cementing the likelihood of substantial interest rate hikes this year.  The consumer price index for January, which measures the costs of dozens of everyday consumer goods, rose 7.5% compared with a year ago, the Labor Department reported Thursday [2/10/2022].  That compared with Dow Jones estimates of 7.2% for the closely watched inflation gauge.  It was the highest reading since February 1982.

Inflation hits new 40-year high ... again.  [Scroll down]  Just yesterday, a Fed board member claimed that a 0.5% hike in the base rate was unlikely.  Well, it looks at least slightly more likely now, and perhaps a whole lot more necessary.  Even the 6% "core" reading is a disaster, but politically speaking, it's almost irrelevant.  Voters experience inflation mainly through food and energy prices, which means the political pressure from this report will skyrocket.

A Color Map of the Fronts of World War III.  Demographic warfare is most evident on our porous southern border.  But it's being waged from many directions and is a massive threat to national security.  Last year alone, two million people — from Haiti, Chile, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries of terrorist concern — breached the U.S. illegally.  The campaign for "abortion rights" is also a part of the plan for demographic disruption.  If abortion seems reasonable, you might disabuse yourself of the idea with this statistic: in 2021, abortion was the leading cause of death globally (43 million), more than from cancer, malaria, HIV/AIDS, smoking, alcohol, traffic accidents combined.  Lawfare — or the legal fight against Western civilization — is evidenced by the plethora of lawsuits against First Amendment rights.  Corporations are coerced into having 'diverse' boards and workforces at the cost of competence and excellence.  University professors are fired, censured, or cancelled for 'wrongthink.'  Businesses face lawsuits for refusing to provide services that run against their owners' religious beliefs.

Black History and the Democrats.  During the [2020] riots, Democrats adopted an anti-police mantra to secure the African American vote.  Following BLM's leadership, they lined up in lockstep to defund the police and remove qualified immunity.  But it was minority communities who sought more, not less police service.  The impact was devastating.  Officers retired or resigned in droves, recruiting was stymied, ambushes of officers reached a fever pitch, and violent crime, especially in Democrat-run cities, has broken records.  Today, as in the past, with the election behind them, Democrats are backpedaling their "defund or abolish the police" support.  In other words, they are following their predictable historic pattern.  Democrats manipulating race for political gain is black history.

Study finds Biden's climate policies added $1,000 to Americans' energy bills in 2021.  President Biden's plan to make combatting climate change a "whole of government agenda" resulted in Americans shelling out more than $1,000 extra in energy costs last year, according to a new report by conservative think tank Heartland Institute.  Mr. Biden's climate change policies coupled with rising inflation contributed to the highest single-year increase in energy costs in decades, found the analysis by the Heartland Institute.  "Rapidly rising energy prices are no accident, but instead the predictable result of Joe Biden's war on energy," said James Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute.

Accelerated Buck Passing Ahead.  There is not enough space in this column to discuss all the boneheaded decisions that this President has made since assuming office. [...] There is a reason Brandon has become the least popular name for American baby boys.  Consider energy policy and the negative consequences his bad decisions have had.  Terminating the Keystone XL pipeline was only the beginning.  It didn't just affect the 10,000 hardworking people who lost their jobs, it has affected everyone.  Our economy has been compared to a giant ship.  It can't stop and turn on a dime.  So it is amazing that in less than a year we went from energy independence (actually exporting oil and gas) to again begging OPEC to open the spigots.  The administration is winning its war on domestic energy production.  American consumers are losing.  Gasoline and home heating oil prices have risen over 40% since Inauguration Day.

Germany to raze a 1,000-year-old forest in the name of 'going green'.  Germany, as we well know with its Russian gas capers, is a highly industrialized society in need of a lot of energy.  Fine and dandy.  But how they get it presents increasingly bad options.  They got rid of their nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown after a big earthquake in Japan, (despite Germany not being in a quake zone), driving themselves to dependency on foreign suppliers.  That's presented problems for them what with Russia filling that role, so their other recourse has been the one Joe Biden is touting for America:  Green energy — like wind and solar power.  It's costly, requiring state subsidization, given that Germany is not a big sunshine zone nor particularly windy:  But it's costlier than just the wasted cash.  They also are now looking at the loss of their 1,000-year-old Reinhardswald old-growth forest — known as the Grimm's Fairy Tale forest.

Zero Clue:  Democrats' Quest For Zero Cancer Deaths, Zero Road Deaths, And Zero Covid Deaths.  It must be nice to be a Democrat in 2022.  Think about it:  You don't have to be constrained by truth, reality, or the consequences of ignoring them.  Isn't postmodernism great?!  Nothing — and I mean that literally — that a Democrat politician says or their clueless voters believe is rooted in objective truth.  Pick a position of theirs.  Any position.  Jen Psaki recently made a spiteful, idiotic comment that highlights this phenomenon.  The soft-on-crime approach that she scoffed at is resulting in record-breaking carjackings, murders, and retail theft.  When Chicago DAs refuse to prosecute witnessed murders in broad daylight or when California passes legislation to not even bother with retail theft worth less than $950, what do they expect will happen?  Yet somehow we're the ignoramuses?

Covid-era Americans are using public transit less and having more car crashes.  The Covid-19 pandemic has seen two pernicious trends emerge as to how Americans are getting around their country:  public transit is struggling with a reduced number of paying customers, while there has been a sharp increase in car crash deaths.  The shuttering of businesses, the rise of working from home and a fear of contracting the coronavirus saw public transport use plummet across the US — commuter rail alone reported a 79% decline in ridership in the year to September 2020.  Despite a slight resurgence in 2021, trips taken on all modes of public transit are still around half of what they were before the pandemic, federal government figures show.

The Editor says...
Maybe it isn't due to Covid.  Perhaps the public transit ridership is down because of all the violent crime aboard the trains and buses, as well as at the bus stops and platforms.  Maybe the traffic crashes are due to the "defund the police" people making the cops more scarce and more reluctant to enforce traffic laws.

The 'Ugly' of Progressive Public Policy.  In large part, policies currently implemented in many states show a profound misunderstanding of human nature. [...] The ideas of defunding police, sending social workers to active crime scenes, promoting "safe" drug use, and other idealistic remedies of the ugly, have known a flourishing in recent years, especially in Western society.  Moreover, a profound misunderstanding of the complexities of human sexuality has produced a "remedy" that consists of normalization at all costs, which has spilled over into promoting indiscriminate conversions from one sex to another in impressionable individuals who may have had mental disturbances that should have been addressed psychologically, and not surgically.

Austin Thinks Again.  In 2019, the city council of Austin had the bright idea to legalize homeless camps.  Unfortunately, they took the vote in the middle of the night — 2:00 am to be exact — when virtually all citizen stakeholders were asleep.  A year later, the same council voted to defund the city's police budget by more than a third.  These decisions caused wholesale disaster and immediate negative consequences for public safety.  Moreover, they led to even more chaos, violence, and, recently, a backlash from some grassroots groups actively rejecting the council's dangerous progressive agenda.  Like other cities across the nation, Austin residents had the chance to move in favor of restoring order as they voted on Proposition A to "re-fund" and restaff the police.  This ballot measure came a year after they voted on another referendum to curb the rampant homeless crises created by that first middle-of-the-night council vote.  But unlike other cities, Austin voted down the measure in early November.

Inflation.  Inflation is the worst in 40 years.  The price of cars is up 37%.  Gas is up 49%.  During the last few years, as politicians spent ever more money, experts told us not to worry.  Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, said inflation would be "transitory."  Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, "I don't anticipate inflation is going to be a problem."  Now she says, "I'm ready to retire the word transitory."

First Black Woman Supreme Court Justice Could Be... a Man?  President Joe Biden has made clear he will keep his promise to elect the first black woman to the Supreme Court, following Justice Stephen Breyer's retirement.  But in a curious tweet announcing he will pick someone with excellent qualifications, he said, "And they will be the first black woman nominated to the United States Supreme Court."  They?  Yes.  Don't be surprised.  "Diversity and equity" are of paramount importance to the Biden administration.  He is making sure you remember it as he is making this announcement.  So why would you assume it is a "she"?  At least theoretically, the first black woman Supreme Court justice could be a biological male who self-identifies as a woman.  The move would go right along with current White House practice.  Recall that the Biden administration celebrated with great pride the appointment of Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological male who transitioned in order to appear as a woman, as the "first female four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps."

There is no such thing as a pregnant man.  Science is under attack.  Human biology, specifically, is under attack.  The attackers are those who falsely claim that men can have babies.  It is a lie — a fiction that must be challenged every time it is mentioned.  No matter how ardently leftists try to propagandize such things, men have never had babies.  They cannot have babies.  They will not ever be able to carry children.  Any claim to the contrary is nothing more than a Frankenstein-esque, scientifically altered concoction.  The truth demands that all such radical, toxic, left-wing indoctrination be rejected and repudiated by whatever means are necessary.  Such propaganda occurred late last week when it was revealed that Apple's latest software update, iOS 15.4, included a "pregnant man" emoji.  Obviously, the powers that be at Apple are trying to normalize such lunacy in the hope that there are enough stupid people willing to be bullied into accepting it.  In turn, this acceptance would (someday) lead to a cultural norm that men can indeed become pregnant — a scientific impossibility.

Biden's war on American energy made us dependent, again.  There are few issues where Trump and President Joe Biden have differed more broadly on policy than on energy production.  Trump went full speed on fossil fuel production.  He lifted drilling restrictions, especially in states such as Alaska and on federal lands in the continental states.  He gave the green light to vitally needed pipelines.  He blocked new extreme environmental regulations that were intended to choke off our oil and gas supplies.  He recognized the shale oil and gas revolution as an unparalleled opportunity to reduce reliance on foreign oil.  The Trump energy policy was an astonishing economic success story.  By January 2021, exactly a year ago and Trump's last month in office, for the first time in nearly 50 years, the U.S. was producing more oil than we were consuming.  We imported no net oil from Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel nations.  We were also producing more oil and gas than the Russians and the Arabs.

Joe Biden, enemy of America.  From the moment Joe Biden stepped into the Oval Office as president it became clear that he stole the job in order to destroy America from within.  He stopped the construction of the Keystone Pipeline on day one, costing thousands of good paying jobs.  He stopped the construction of the southern border wall, costing more jobs and leaving millions of dollars' worth of equipment rotting in the desert.  Biden would not even let Texas use the construction materials themselves; any wall would impede the Biden plan to import over two million migrants from around the world, to be given funds and to spread them throughout the nation into unsuspecting cities.  The Democrats voted unanimously that these illegal invaders would not be required to be vaccinated or even tested for Covid.  That should tell us everything we need to know about how seriously the left really takes this phony pandemic.  They know it is phony because it's wirked for their advantage from the outset.  They had to do something to derail President Trump.  So, with a stroke of Biden's pen, the energy independence Trump had achieved was gone.

Yes, Really: Apple is Adding a Pregnant Man Emoji.  Every day under the woke regime, one has to ask "can things really get more insane from here?"  The answer is always "yes," as Apple recently proved when it decided to add a "pregnant man" emoji to the iMessage emoji options.

NYC restaurants starved for diners — crime and COVID blamed.  Table bookings in Manhattan restaurants are down 64% in January 2022 compared to pre-pandemic January 2020 — only San Francisco (-66%) and Cambridge, Mass. (-75%) have fared worse, according to new data released by OpenTable and crunched by celebrity statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.  Brooklyn boites are starved for diners, too, with reservations down 55%.  Data for the other boroughs were not available.  "It's a ghost town out there," one Little Italy restaurant manager told The [New York] Post, citing the failure of city officials to contain crime and chaos, which drives away both tourists and local diners.  "New York City can't recover unless bars and restaurants are at the core of the recovery," said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance.

Police Officers [were] Attacked in Five States in the Last Week:  What Gives?  At least 10 police officers in five states — mostly in big cities — have been attacked in the last eight days.  What's especially troubling is that several of the incidents appeared to target police officers specifically.  Both criminal justice reform advocates and police unions blame the same thing: a violent crime crisis.  Reformers think the violent crime spree is the result of inequality and police brutality.  The cops think it's due to lax prosecutors and spineless politicians.  Whatever the reason, the number of lives lost is rising.

Supply chains:  Kick them when they're down.  I have written previously about societal planners actively working to disrupt supply chains and devalue currencies in pursuit of a reimagination of global capitalism.  They have advertised their intent in recent years, utilizing corporate finance publications like Forbes and Bloomberg to sell their vision of a new system with themselves positioned comfortably at the top.  Others like The Hill advertised the Biden administration's devotion to this vision of a new capitalism.  There was always going to be a correction after our ill-advised COVID retreat policies.  Locking down supply chains in an attempt to run from viral contagion based on a high-school experiment was never going to be without consequence.  Perhaps our greatest error was allowing these policies to persist unfettered for as long as we did.  Earlier course correction may have saved us from our current trajectory.  Recent reports of economic indicators saw inflation climb to 6.8 percent, the highest rate in forty years, and 4.5 million people quit their jobs in anticipation of OSHA-enforced vaccination policies, the highest number ever recorded.

Is the second American Civil War nearing its conclusion?  Leftists, through a combination of brilliant projectionist strategy and callously evil use of their political opponents' naïvité, decency, and tolerance, have transformed America's institutions.  They have weaponized them and used them against their less aggressive fellow citizens.  In the process, they have transformed Americans, their beliefs and expectations, too.  Much like the Chinese Communist Party, they own nearly all the levers of influence and power, exercising an iron grip on the education establishment, the mass media, Big Tech, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, the health care industry, and Hollywood — and now the CIA, FBI, Defense Department, and ironically named Department of Justice (DOJ).  This in addition to effectively controlling all three branches of the U.S. government.  They are using this power to obliterate the democratic representative republic our Founders built, even as they loudly and incessantly claim they are trying to "save our democracy."

Chickenhawk Joe.  Say what you will about Donald Trump's foreign policies.  He didn't start wars.  He didn't vaporize a family of 10 in a suburb of Kabul, He did however vaporize actual terrorists.  He didn't abandon Americans in Afghanistan in a disastrous pullout that killed 13 American soldiers.  Crimea was abandoned to the predations of Putin during Barack Obama's watch.  Taiwan wasn't buzzed by Chinese fighters on a daily basis while Trump was in the White House.  Daily Chinese provocations are Joe Biden's enduring legacy.  The Ukrainian border is filled with a hostile Russian army and it's due, in no small part, to the fool in the White House.  The foreign policy of the former vice president is one of weakness and stupidity and mismanagement.  Joe Biden doesn't know what to do because he didn't bother to look.  He and his inept administration are now engaging in the silly practice of "hash-tag" diplomacy, apparently to frighten Putin into backing down?  Smart move when dealing with a thug.

Democrats Rushed to 'Reimagine' Policing in Washington State.  Now It's Unsafe.  Democrats in Washington state rode the wave of anti-police sentiment after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  Their goal was to "reimagine policing," and it's exactly what they did.  Consequently, Washington experienced a surge of violent crime.  Now Republicans, and even some Democrats, are rushing to fix as much as possible.  With total control of the state Legislature, Democrats used the 2021 legislative session to rush through sweeping "reforms" that dramatically changed policing in the state.  These passed bills clamped down on police use of force and detainment, banned departments from deploying large-caliber weapons, and even prohibited most high-speed chases.

Americans' trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows.  Republicans' faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more, with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows.  It's the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972.  That is unsurprising to more than a dozen scientists reached for comment by The Associated Press, but it concerns many of them.

Manhattan Rite Aid pharmacy closing after rash of thefts, customers and workers say.  The days are numbered at Rite Aid's Eighth Ave. and W. 50th St. location.  The 24-hour store and pharmacy is scheduled to fill its last prescription on Feb. 8, and the Hell's Kitchen community is already mourning its loss.  Workers and customers speculated that the store had been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and an endless stream of shoplifters who have hurt the store's bottom line.  They say the drug store should step up its security or cut back its hours before throwing in the towel.

The Editor says...
Retail stores exist to make a profit.  A pharmacy is not a magnanimous public service.  If shoplifting goes unchecked, theft goes unpunished, and violent crime is laughed off, every retail store will close, and the neighborhood will become even more insufferable than it already is.  In this case, Google Street View is especially useful, since I'll never see this intersection in person.  On the surface, it doesn't look like a terrible place, if you don't mind high-rise apartments and teeming masses of random strangers.  Unchecked crime can ruin any city, and that's what's happening here.

Biden's regulatory bender is crushing the US economy.  By so many measures, Joe Biden's presidential administration falls at the bottom of the scale.  But there is one metric by which Biden is tops — in fact, the very tops in all of history.  That is the regulatory costs his administration has imposed on the nation in a single year.  The American Action Forum, a conservative think tank that tracks government regulation, has tallied up what government agencies estimate their regulations cost.  The Biden administration has now imposed $201 billion in regulation — more than three times the cost that President Barack Obama's very left-wing administration imposed on families and businesses in its first year.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser Asks Residents to Begin Voluntary Rationing of Food at Grocery Stores.  DC Mayor and COVID Compliance Minister, Muriel Bowser, asks residents in/around her region to enter a phase of voluntary rationing. What comes after the voluntary phase is the part many have been studiously preparing to avoid.  In the bigger picture, I find it rather revealing that only when leftist policies are followed to their natural conclusion do you see officials in the leftist economic system they created, a system not coincidentally always based on the outcome of scarcity, asking people not to engage in economic activity.  Chasing socialism always creates an outcome where the expressed intent from government is NOT to buy stuff, rationing.

Washington, D.C., slides into Soviet-style conditions.  Anyone alive during the Soviet era remembers that one of the hallmarks of Soviet countries was that there were chronic shortages of goods.  Without the profit motive, production never kept up with demand.  Rationing was the order of the day.  Now, in Washington, D.C., rationing is also the order of the day.  D.C.'s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has been asking people to ration voluntarily.  However, we all know that, if grocery items continue to be in short supply, mandatory rationing will soon replace that voluntary shtick. [...] This has a decidedly Soviet feel about it.  When governments interfere with the flow of goods and services, those goods and services cease to exist.

Why Accepting Child Transgenderism Will Pave The Way For Accepting Pedophilia.  The last several years can be viewed as a testament to the remarkable strategic power the woke left wields.  The speed at which absurd ideas have been thrust into the limelight by vested media and a wide array of well-financed academics and non-profits is both startling and impressive.  Not long ago, it would've been unimaginable that a seven-year-old boy's innocent preference for Polly Pockets over Power Rangers would find its tragic end in puberty blockers, chemical castration, and 15 minutes of fame on Snapchat's explore page.  Calling this abuse doesn't encapsulate the full extent of the damage.  It is a culturally bolstered, politically incentivized mass grooming campaign with a disturbing history.  Even worse, this all may be eclipsed by a much darker future should it continue unabated.

Biden's Economy is Setting Records with Some of the Worst Results Ever Seen in US History.  President Trump had arguably the greatest economy in US and world history in 2019.  The opposite is true with the Biden economy and Americans are really suffering as a result.  Under President Trump the US saw unemployment at less than 4%, the best in decades.  The stock markets were at all-time highs, real wages were growing and outperforming the increase in the cost of living.  The US GDP was the greatest in US and world history and inflation was near zero.  In addition, the US became an energy producer for the first time in decades and the price of gas was near or less than $2 a gallon.

"Safe streets worker" (replacing police) gunned down in Baltimore.  During the course of the madness that promoted "defunding" or abolishing the police, there was an emphasis placed on replacing police in some circumstances with "community safety" workers who would supposedly act as unarmed "violence interrupters" and reduce the number of lethal use of force incidents by police officers.  In Baltimore, Maryland's violent gang territories, an existing organization known as the "Safe Streets Program" gained a lot of attention and municipal support in this effort.  The goal of the program is to deploy former gang members into areas controlled by the gangs to negotiate nonviolent resolutions to conflicts.  Unfortunately, as we've seen with other proposed "violence interruption" programs in major cities, sending someone with a clipboard out to resolve a beef between gang members isn't always effective.

Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?  In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a "systems collapse."  The term describes the sudden inability of once-prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it.  Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities.  They feel their streets are unsafe.  Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably.  Every day things stop working.  The government turns from reliable to capricious if not hostile.  Consider contemporary Venezuela.  By 2010, the once well-off oil-exporting country was mired in a self-created mess.  Food became scarce, crime ubiquitous.  Radical socialism, nationalization, corruption, jailing opponents, and the destruction of constitutional norms were the culprits.

The monetary chickens come home to roost.  The December 2021 all-item Consumer Price Index rose 7% since December 2021.  The companion Producer Price Index was up 9% for the same period.  This data should put to rest any suggestion that inflation was beginning to wither away.  What consumers in grocery stores and filling stations have known for months, politicians must now grudgingly admit:  The cost of living is going up and far faster than average wage increases will cover.  It feels a little late in the game to call inflation "transitory."  On average, we average people are getting poorer.

How to Counter Biden's National Security Incompetence in 2022.  From his disastrous withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan, lack of coherent policies to deal with Russia and China, a stubborn determination to appease Iran to revive the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal, and an obsession with climate change as a national security issue, Biden in just one year severely undermined America's global reputation as a strong and principled nation.  Making this worse is a global perception that Joe Biden is not mentally competent to be the U.S. commander in chief.  America's enemies have been watching this unprecedented deterioration of American global leadership and are preparing to cash in.  This could include in 2022 China attacking Taiwan, Russia invading Ukraine, and increased provocations by Iran and North Korea, including possible nuclear tests by both nations.  There is also the threat to the United States directly by criminal and national security threats resulting from Biden's failure to secure our southern border.

Everything Is Worse Under Biden.  Everything.  Store shelves are bare, not all the time, but did you ever see that under The Donald?  Did you ever walk into a store, fuming because Trump had been mean to Rosie O'Donnell on Twitter, and see the aisles bereft of salad and milk?  No.  Did it cost you $75 bucks to fill up your sedan, like it did me in LA the other day?  No.  Did inflation hit 7% under Trump?  Did your pay get cut 7% under Trump?  Nah.  But no mean tweets, right?  That's worth 7% of your dough, right?  The pandemic is still here.  Who had more people buy the farm from COVID, Trump or Grandpa Badfinger?  I thought the rule was that if they die on your watch, they're your fault.  Looks like now they are going to solve that awkward problem by stopping counting.  Weren't we were informed by all the smart people that the crusty candidate was going to make the bad virus go away?  It has not gone away.

Mediocrity in power.  One can clearly see that today the upper echelons of government are bad managers and inept businessmen.  Everything they touch turns to ashes.  During the first year of their direct rule under the figurehead presidency of Biden, there has been a sharp decline in all economic indicators, and inflation has reached levels not seen since the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter.  The worst thing they have done to the country is the distribution of freebies — massive "stimulus" payments, even to those who don't need them, a form of universal welfare.  To keep the populace on a short leash, the mediocre have turned on the printing press and now are spending money like a drunken sailor.  The national debt is skyrocketing.  Fuel prices have doubled since 2020, everything becoming more expensive, and a situation unseen in history has arisen: millions have dropped out of the labor force and most businesses cannot find workers.  Apparently, people prefer not to work but to live on handouts.  Today, in a country with millions of idle hands there is an acute shortage of labor.  Free cash has destroyed the foundation of Americanism — the incentive to work and strive for personal success.  Why work when your government pays you to stay at home and do nothing?

Bidenomics cost the average worker nearly two paychecks in 2021.  Last year closed out with an annual 7% inflation rate, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finally announced Wednesday.  That price increase, further fueled by a 0.5% increase in December alone, constitutes the highest inflation rate since 1982 when Paul Volcker had to engage in a recession-inducing interest-rate-hike campaign just to crack down on the catastrophic stagflation of the 70s.  To put this into more practical terms, the average U.S. worker earns 26 paychecks a year on a biweekly pay schedule.  Inflation in 2021 effectively wiped out nearly two of those 26 paychecks.  Suffice it to say, the devastation of inflation is not evenly distributed, and as usual, the data demonstrate the damage is regressive.

US Woman Tells PA News 'I feel like I live in the Soviet Union'.  #BareShelvesBiden is trending on Twitter for the 3rd day in a row as more and more American's are beginning to realize that the Biden admin is the one behind the shortages, not China or any other nation.  The overwhelming majority of food American's buy is actually made right here in America according to a variety of studies.  So empty shelves shouldn't happen in regards to food.  But, it is!  And it's happening more and more by the day as regular products are now becoming hard to find.  [Video clip]

Who kills the police?  Put "race of people shooting police" into Google and your will get page after page of the opposite results, the race or ethnicity of people shot by police.  This is obviously no accident.  The media narrative is that police shoot people, mostly minorities, without justification.  The question of who shoots the police is one that the larger society is generally afraid to ask.  To ask that question might shed a different light on who the police shoot because it would put the question into a larger context about criminality.  For the defund the police crowd and the progressive minions of distributive and restorative justice, it would undermine an empowering narrative that has enabled them to shackle the police while letting criminals run free without bail and being rewarded with pleas to lower offenses.  For as long as the police and the "system" can be viewed as victimizing minorities, these minorities can be viewed as victims and not criminals.

The Biden Variant — Not Omicron — Is Behind The Shortages Everywhere.  Just before the holiday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki took to the press room podium to laughably brag about how "we've saved Christmas" because President Joe Biden supposedly fixed the nation's supply chain crisis.  She said that "President Biden recognized this challenge early, acted as an honest broker to bring key stakeholders together, and focused on addressing practical problems across the global supply chain."  That was good enough for the mainstream media, which had turned a blind eye to the supply chain problems once Biden claimed he had a plan to fix it.  Except, less than three weeks later, #BareShelvesBiden is trending on Twitter, shoppers are sharing pictures of empty store shelves, and the media are being forced — however reluctantly — to report that shortages are actually a worsening problem.  Shortages are everywhere.  Whether it's goods, food, people, COVID tests, you name it.  The CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain is warning of meat and egg shortages.  The Daily Beast reports that "shortages of glass and other materials continue, coupled with extensive shipping delays and skyrocketing freight costs."  One site asked readers to send examples of shortages, and cold medicine was in the top five.

Wholesale inflation hits a record 9.7 percent.  Prices at the wholesale level surged by 9.7 percent for all of 2021, setting an annual record and providing further evidence that inflation is still hammering all levels of the U.S. economy.  The producer price index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level, did slow on a monthly basis, rising just 0.2 percent in December compared with 1 percent in November, the Labor Department said Thursday.  Thursday's report came a day after the government reported that consumer inflation jumped 7 percent in December from a year earlier, the highest such inflation rate since 1982.

Producer Price Index Jumps a Full Year Record High 9.7%.  Businesses saw the prices of goods they sell rise a record 9.7 percent in 2021, the fastest full-year increase in prices in records going back to 2010.  The Labor Department reported Thursday [1/13/2022] that its Producer Price Index rose two-tenths of a percentage point in December.  That's a slowdown from November, when prices rose one percent, and October, when prices rose six-tenths of a percentage point.

Bidenflation sends a stumbling, bumbling Biden desperately searching for distractions.  Even as President Joe Biden was spewing deplorable falsehoods about his political opponents in Atlanta, the chickens of his administration's economy were coming home to roost.  Wednesday's Bureau of Labor Statistics report on inflation, revealing last month's 7% inflation rate, sets yet another 40-year record, harkening back to the bad old days of double-digit interest rates and Paul Volcker's bitter medicine for the economy of the early 1980s.  With this week's report, it is clear that the Biden economy is in an inflation crisis.  It is a crisis that neither Biden nor his useless Twitter-addicted senior staff has any clue how to fix.  But they have all kinds of ideas about how to make it even worse.

WaPo, Slate:  The grocery shortage isn't just real, it's expanding.  As Peter Allen once sang, everything old is new again ... including grocery shortages.  Joe Biden and Democrats initially scoffed at the idea that Americans can't find their choices at supermarkets, but the empty shelves have become so numerous as to defy denial.  The media is starting to abandon the Democrats' us-or-your-lyin'-eyes credibility test on the grocery-supply shortages.  It's going to get worse before it gets better, largely because of the CDC guidances on isolation over asymptomatic positives in the Omicron wave, [...]

Bidenflation conflagration:  CPI hits 7% year-on-year, a new 40-year high.  Not since mid-1982 have we seen inflation running this hot in the Consumer Price Index, and not since the late 1970s have we seen an administration less capable of grasping its sources and consequences.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation hit 7% year-on-year, higher than the 6.8% annualized inflation rate from November.  The news casts a lot more cold water on Joe Biden's moribund spending plans in Build Back Better, but may do a lot more damage than that to his political standing: [...]

Dangerous Trucker Problem Coming.  Reports of bare shelves are coming from all over the country.  The supermarkets on Long Island are starting to look bare.  It seems to be a problem throughout the nation.  Joe Biden did nothing to help the supply chain crisis although he claimed he did.  Some of the bare shelves problems are due to COVID and local issues but we have a much worse problem coming and it seems that Democrats want it to take place.  They aren't all mentally challenged as Biden is so this must be what they want.  There are supply chain problems, there's a self-induced energy crisis, we have soaring inflation, rising crime, anonymous millions pouring across our borders, but then there is the imminent and very dangerous vaccine mandate coming our way.  Tens of thousands of truckers plan to quit rather than get vaccinated.

Democrats must abandon endless assault on police.  Today, on National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, we honor the courageous men and women who proudly serve our communities and keep our families safe.  Every day, they put their lives on the line to protect us, despite the rhetoric and policies of anti-police Democrats.  We must stand up against the radical "defund police" movement and show our law enforcement heroes that we have their backs.  We must reject the efforts of the Democrat politicians and liberal city councils who are defunding their police departments and refusing to prosecute violent criminals.  As violent crime surges across the country, most notably in Democrat-run cities, it is disturbing that liberal and progressive lawmakers do not take responsibility for how their extreme policies have crippled police departments and allowed violent criminals to run rampant throughout our streets.

What to Do with Feckless Republicans?  Whether it's a matter of gross incompetence or willful intention, nothing the current Democratic administration is doing is improving the lives of the average American citizen.  Nothing.  Consider:
  •   Inflation is raging out of control.  Gasoline prices [...] are a constant reminder of how far behind everyone feels like they're falling.
  •   Month after month, the new jobs data disappoint, missing the so-called experts' projections by a country mile.
  •   The divisive seeds of racial division are being sown by the Democrats like never before, for the inexcusable reason of political leverage.
  •   Illegal immigration is not merely out of control.  It is being actively encouraged.
  •   American energy production is intentionally curtailed, while we beg our OPEC rivals for greater production to make up for our shortfall.  Try to figure that one out.
  •   Russia and China — our main global adversaries, both economically and militarily — are gaining on us (if not surpassing us) with nary a whimper of opposition from the Brandon administration.
And there's the Big One:  the COVID pandemic.  Despite Biden's risible campaign squawking of "I'm not gonna shut down the economy; I'm gonna shut down the virus!," he's managed to do the exact opposite.

Minnesota Trucking Company CEO Warns About What [a] Vaccine Mandate Will Do to [the] Economy.  Here's a solid reference point for just one of the multitude of aspects related to the mandatory COVID vaccine and overall COVID mitigation rules that will come together to present an unavoidable outcome within the supply chain.  As CEO Eric Lawrence notes, even without the vaccine mandate, the testing mandate itself becomes an issue.  How and where exactly are truckers supposed to get these weekly, and depending on state, perhaps daily, Covid-19 tests.  How are they expected to modify their cross country routes, to avoid running afoul of the law, without having any idea where this testing is supposed to take place?  [Video clip]

The Four Horsemen of the Left's Artificial Apocalypse.  [#3] Supply chain crises, product shortages, sky-high energy prices, and runaway inflation — these are the fruits of increasingly communist government agencies regulating success out of existence and redistributing property in the name of "fairness."  What businesses COVID-1984's stifling edicts haven't yet killed, Green New Deal blunt force will finish off.  Why does government work so hard to impoverish its people?  Because a weak and poor populace lacks the will to fight back.  Government welfare is government enslavement.  Cradle-to-grave dependence is just another name for indentured servitude.

The States With The Highest Percentage of Outbound Moves Have Something In Common.  [Scroll down]  New Jersey, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, and California all have more people moving OUT than moving in.  The CNBC reporter notes that all these states are "expensive" and have "high taxes," and people want "a less hectic lifestyle."  But, as we discussed in yesterday's article, there are plenty of additional reasons to flee these states.  Unreasonable Covid restrictions and surging crime are two other major factors.  Another thing that these states definitely have in common is leadership.  Every single state listed in the top 5 where people are leaving en masse is led by the Democrat Party.

Joe Biden Has Destroyed Another Great American Institution.  I regret to inform you that Joe Biden has destroyed another American institution.  The classic Little Caesars $5 Hot-N-Ready pizza is, and you might want to sit down for this, no longer $5. [...] But I'm assured this is all a coincidence and that the president actually has nothing to do with the current inflation spike that the country is suffering under.  From the debt-busting $2T COVID "rescue plan" to the supply chain crisis that has caused raw materials shortages, we are all supposed to believe that Biden is just an innocent bystander. [... T]his once in a multi-generation inflationary boom just so happened to occur under his presidency, and not because of anything he did.  Of course, we all know that's nonsense, and Little Caesars is hardly the only example.  A few months ago, Dollar Tree, which had priced everything at $1 since its inception, announced that it was going to have to raise prices as well.  Biden is ripping away everything Americans hold dear.

Manhattan's 'progressive' new DA Alvin Bragg just gave a green light for anarchy.  Old:  If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.  New:  If you can't do the time, Alvin Bragg will be there for you.  That much just became clear, as the newly minted Manhattan DA issued marching orders to his hundreds of assistants and support staff. [...] Specifically, Bragg says his office "will not seek a carceral sentence" for anything short of murder or deadly assault ("carceral" being progressive double-speak for prison).  Also, he says minor crime won't be prosecuted at all.  In other words, jail is to be reserved for ax murderers and their ilk; armed robbers and heavyweight drug dealers are to be minimally inconvenienced — and just forget about the quality-of-life law enforcement that was the beating heart of the Giuliani-era rescue of New York City decades ago.

Far-Left District Attorneys Have Unleashed Murder In Cities Like Philadelphia.  We still debate the reasons that crime fell in the 1990s.  Better policing?  Longer jail sentences?  An aging population?  Removal of lead from the atmosphere?  They all may have played a role, along with other factors we are probably missing.  That debate is now academic.  Crime has been rising for several years now.  The new concern is why, and how we can get it to stop.  Again, there are many factors, but the rise of leftist prosecutors who are soft on crime must be at the head of the list.  In my hometown of Philadelphia, crime as a general matter has been getting worse for years, and there are statistics to prove it.  Philadelphia, like many big American cities, is experiencing more violent crime than at any point in its history.

Manhattan DA to stop seeking prison sentences in [a] slew of criminal cases.  Who needs soft-on-crime judges when the district attorney doesn't even want to lock up the bad guys?  Manhattan's new DA has ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public Tuesday [1/4/2022].  In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office "will not seek a carceral sentence" except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

Defunding the Police Has Been a Massive Failure.  It is absolutely stunning that some people thought this would be a good idea and actively pushed it.  Look at where we are now.

How Defund the Police backfired.  Over the last two decades, progressives have established a new consensus on crime.  Nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession should be reclassified as misdemeanours.  Cities should defund the police and spend the money on nurses, psychologists and social workers instead.  Offenders should have minimal involvement with the justice system — and be kept out of jail wherever possible.  But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus.  Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America's largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020.  At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland.  Meanwhile property crimes in California's four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021.  Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November.  Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

The Woke Mob's Destruction of the English Language.  Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a member of the progressive "squad," recently accused those who disagree with student debt cancellation of "policy violence."  That is, to disagree with the left now is "violence."  This kind of linguistic legislation by the left is now common.  Words mean whatever they want them to mean in order to achieve their far-left goals.  Pressley's statement is also an implied threat.  Since violence is justified in response to violence, Pressley is letting American's know what is coming if they do not get their way.  The venomous hatred spewed by the Woke mob in the name of tolerance and inclusivity is indefensible.  That is why they do not defend it.  Instead, they generally try to bully people into submitting to their demands.

U.S. crude oil production fell by 8% in 2020, largest decrease on record.  U.S. crude oil production fell by 8% in 2020, the largest annual decrease on record, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reports.  This plunge occurred one year after the U.S. reached a record annual average high of 12.2 million barrels a day in production in 2019.  In January 2020, U.S. crude oil production reached a peak of 12.8 million b/d.  But with federal and state lockdowns halting travel over coronavirus fears, demand for oil dropped and production became too expensive to maintain.  By March 2020, the oil and gas industry experienced a "bloodbath," and by April, the WTI was negative $40 a barrel for the first time in history.  Prices at the pump also reached historic lows.

Americans are Fed Up with Blue State Democrats, Fleeing their States In Droves!  Lately [the Democrats have] done everything they can to keep us divided.  At times even picking sides against their own groups.  Americans are waking up to that en masse and fleeing the states they control by the hundreds of thousands.  [Video clip]

Millions of Americans Are Getting 'Fresh Starts' in Red States.  There is a quiet revolution happening across America and it could mark the beginning of the biggest spiritual, cultural, and political changes this country has seen since the Civil War.  New data made public earlier this week by the U.S. Census Bureau makes clear that millions of Americans are leaving Blue high-tax, high-crime, high-COVID-mandate Democratic states and moving to Red Republican states where taxes are lower, the police aren't being defunded, and churches still thrive.  Consider the contrast between Texas and Idaho on the one hand and New York and the District of Columbia on the other, as described by the Census Bureau [...]

Study: Forced masking, isolation causes lower IQ in children.  A new study links Covid lockdowns and mask mandates to lowering intelligence in children.  According to clinical psychiatrists at Brown University forced isolation and face masks will create a generation of children with lower IQ's and deficient social skills.  Doctors found children developing during Covid-lockdowns are showing deficient verbal and motor skills as well as reduced cognitive performance.  This compared to childhood development before the lockdowns were in place.

The Ungracious and Their Demonization of the Past.  What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt — much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?  What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities?  What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car-jackings?  Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021?  Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?  Was it actually moral to discard the "content of our character" and "equal opportunity" principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago?  Are their replacement fixations on the "color of our skin" and "equality of result" superior?  Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six Americans in 10 working?  Would our generation have brought all American troops home and quit World War I, in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?

Nobody likes Joe.  Inflation, violent crime, job competition from illegals, and the monstrous Afghanistan pullout are taking their toll on old Joe's president[i]al approval ratings. [...] Joe threw blacks, women, independents, Latinos, suburbanites, and others over the side in his bid to please the AOC crowd.  Gas prices through the roof.  Bye-bye energy independence.  Federal drilling halted in the name of 'going green.'  A major pipeline shut down at the flick of Joe's pen.  No parental input in education.  Critical race theory drummed into the heads of the young.  Schools closed.  What teachers' unions want, teachers' union get.  Coddle and pay illegals with bottomless funding while border towns pay extra for the surge, crime, and spreading of COVID.  Throw the poor out of their jobs with vax mandates.  Reintroduce inflation, brought on by Federal Reserve money-printing to pay for Joe's big government spending.  Whip up whitey-as-bad-guy rhetoric, defund the police, ignore violent crime even as turns every blue city into another Caracas.

Over 110 Defendants Charged with Capital Murder are Let Loose in Houston, Thanks to Democrat Judges.  In Harris County, Tex., where the city of Houston is located, at least 113 defendants charged with capital murder have been freed and let loose on the streets thanks to criminal justice reform.  Fox 26 Houston reported the shocking news, which they claim is part of "more than 50,000 accused felons [benefiting] from the "catch and release" philosophy of "criminal justice" perpetrated by the current crop of democratic "reform" judges."

13 Happenings In 2021 That I Never Would Have Believed 5 Years Ago.  If you'd told me five years ago that men would be treated as women, criminals would not be prosecuted, and censorship would be widespread, I wouldn't have believed you.  What were once considered the most basic, scientific truths (such as that you're born with your sex and can't change it) have broken down.  Governments are no longer serving their primary function of providing security and protecting borders.  There are many more.

Six Political Predictions For 2022.  [Scroll down]  As of early-December there were twelve major U.S. cities — all run by Democrats — which had already set annual records for homicides, at which time there were still over three weeks left in the year.  It's also worth noting that five of those twelve cities "topped records that were set or tied just last year."  The situation is bad, but it's going to get worse.  And Democrats only have themselves to blame.  The left has demonized police by falsely accusing them of wrongdoing; please consider the shootings of Michael Brown and Jacob Blake as examples.  They've promoted the idiotic notion of "defund the police," and in cities like St.  Paul they've accomplished that goal only to end up on the aforementioned list of the dozen cities.  They've implemented bail "reform," which simply puts violent criminals back on the street.  They've decriminalized crimes (federal crimes) such as sex work and dealing drugs.  And, of course, they embraced last year's BLM riots that killed 25 Americans.  Put these actions all together, and we have a total disregard for the rule of law... and we have a recipe for disaster.

Here is what confuses me about San Francisco..  [Thread reader]  We have the most liberal, left-wing government & population in the country.  We have a $13B budget.  And we have 8,000 people sleeping in the rain this week. [...] Progressives tend to blame Republicans for almost everything.  Yet here we are — not a Republican in sight — and I think we may be the most deranged city on the planet.  Nowhere is there such inequality.  I have never seen destitution at this scale.

Heavy Blue Toll:  Law enforcement deaths hit record high in 2021.  More police officers have died in 2021 than any other year in U.S. history, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.  The latest occurred Thursday when a Baltimore officer was ambushed and died. [...] "Ambush-style attacks" were up 126% at the beginning of December from the previous year, the Fraternal Order of Police reported.  Crime rates across the country are skyrocketing as well.  Homicides have risen 30% from 2019 to 2020, according to provisional CDC data.  Murders increased even more in 2021. Twelve cities hit homicide records in December 2021, according to ABC News.  "Nobody's getting arrested anymore," former New York Police Department detective Robert Boyce said.  "People are getting picked up for gun possession, and they're just let out over and over again."  Many officers quit following the 2020 summer of riots associated with Black Lives Matter after the death of George Floyd.  One study over the summer found that "Officers resigned at a 279% increased rate."

These Stores Are Closing Due To Looting And Lost Profits.  As looting continues and lockdowns return, many retail companies have announced recently that they are shuttering some locations that have become simply too expensive to maintain. [...] Some of the country's major pharmacy chains have said that they plan to close a number of stores.  In November, CVS announced that it will close around 900 retail locations over the next three years, which amounts to about 9% of its 10,000 stores.  CVS locations across the country have been affected by looting over the past year and a half, but the company cited more customers shopping online in its decision to close stores.  Rite Aid said just this week that it is closing 63 stores in order to reduce costs and boost profitability.  In October, Walgreens announced that they would close five locations in San Francisco, citing rampant shoplifting across the city.

California's Zero-Bail Policies Have Been A Deadly Failure.  California's state lawmakers recently failed to pass bail reform legislation, creating a case study in how fundamentally poor public policy will self-destruct if it's exposed for what it is.  On the face of it, there is a logic to the continuing argument that cash-based bail is unfair to people who have little or no money.  But that simplistic premise is deeply flawed and has led to a huge increase in violent crime in California, as well as in other places that implemented the policy.  Unfortunately, the grim repercussions are not just statistical.  There is a human face to criminal justice reform gone bad — and ultimately it tripped up the legislators behind the latest attempt at force-feeding bail reform to the Golden State's citizens.

Lefty pols get a lesson in what 'defund the police' means.  It's pretty amazing when leftists have to live with the results of their own decisions.  Deep-blue San Francisco's descent into violent crime and chaos following its voters' choices to elect officials on platforms to "defund the police" is Exhibit A.  But for the political perpetrators of these imposed anti-police agendas, it doesn't usually happen.  They are, after all, a nomenklatura of sorts, and membership has its privileges.  But for two leftist politicos who unleashed 'defund the police' on the public, the result was so big they couldn't escape it.

Census: Americans Flee Left-Wing Lockdown States for Open, Red States.  Blue states that have repeatedly imposed mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and lockdowns over the last year have lost population to red states that have done away with such policies.  Newly released data from the United States Census Bureau reveals that while blue states like California and New York have increasingly lost population from July 2020 to July 2021, red states such as Texas and Florida have seen population increases.

California's Zero-Bail Policies Have Been A Deadly Failure.  In 2020, as an emergency measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, the California Judicial Council, hoping to prevent COVID's spread, had implemented zero-bail schedules to reduce jail populations.  Senate Bill 262 was later introduced in another of a series of attempts to eliminate most monetary bail.  For reasons having nothing to do with protecting health and safety, Senate Bill 262 would have made the schedules permanent.  In effect, if defendants could not afford bail, they would simply be released.  The grim reality of zero-bail policies became increasingly apparent as late summer turned to fall.  Dramatic expansions in crime.  Rampant retail theft.  Law enforcement and prosecutors unified in their complaint that the zero-bail schedule was a problem.  A big problem.  In fact, the Judicial Council had terminated the zero-bail schedule order even before its emergency authority expired, presumably because these policies failed.

White Men Are No Longer the Democrats' Most Pressing Electoral Concern.  Democrats face a mountain of issues.  They have an inflation crisis that voters seem primed to nail them to the wall over.  The supply chain crisis is still ongoing.  The economy is not well despite the endless propaganda peddled by the Biden administration.  Russia and China are flexing their muscles.  The southern border is a mess.  COVID is still not shut down.  And Build Back Better just got killed by Joe Manchin.  Now, moderate Democrats who cast their lot with the progressive wing and voted for the left-wing action items are saddled with this legislative fumble.  Meanwhile, Joe Biden's approval ratings are sinking faster than the Andrea Doria.

'Bail reform' costs 25 Chicagoans their lives, so far this year.  Another day, another dead person, another beneficiary of the George Soros chaos masterplan of "bail reform." [...] The woman killed was one of 25 murder victims who can't speak up about this "bail reform." She's also one of 93 victims who've been victims of such attacks, the non-dead ones likely recovering in hospitals for gunshot wounds or still taking the flashbacks of terror at what might have happened.  Sixty-one of these thugs have been "beneficiaries" of bail reform, which means no or low cash bail, meaning that they were permitted to await their trial dates in complete freedom, giving them the time to even the score with their hate targets ahead of their date with the judge and jury.  This fiend was one of them.  Bail reform has been a plague for years now, enabling violent criminals to walk free ahead of their trials.  The Soros left and its allies have been calling it a matter of economic justice, given that many thugs don't have the same kind of money as people with productive jobs[.]

For Deaf People Like Me, Mask Mandates Impose Never-Ending Isolation.  It's not a huge population in our country who have hearing problems, but to us it is a huge burden.  According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), approximately 2-3 babies born in America out of every 1,000 are born with a hearing disability.  Add those with people who lose hearing due to trauma, illness, and age, and approximately 15 percent, or 37 million Americans, over the age of 18 report at least some trouble hearing. [...] Trying to be "normal" and have a normal life was always my goal.  That has been nearly impossible for nearly two years now.  In spring 2020, the first face mask mandate due to Covid-19 went into effect.  I knew I was in trouble.

Judge Rules Anchorage Women's Shelter Is Allowed To Remain A Women's Shelter.  A federal court ruled on Monday [12/20/2021] that a faith-based women's shelter in Anchorage, Alaska, was allowed to remain open exclusively for women after the city passed an ordinance to mandate otherwise.  The Downtown Hope Center sued the city in 2018 when officials sought legal retribution against the charity over its refusal to allow an inebriated and injured biological man who identified as a woman to sleep at its facility alongside homeless women.  The shelter referred the man to a hospital instead where he was sent in a taxi paid for by the group.  A complaint was later filed with the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission and pursued by the city before a preliminary injunction in the shelter's favor led to a settlement that forced the municipality to pay the charity $100,001 in fees.  The Anchorage Assembly then opted to change a local ordinance to erase gender-exclusive shelters, which provoked the ongoing litigation.

Self-imposed term limits are the best kind.
Two More House Dems Make Mad Dash for the Exits as Joe Biden's BBB Agenda Implodes.  With voter concerns sitting squarely on uncertainties about the U.S. economy on issues like worsening inflation, the ongoing supply chain crisis, and the gloomy jobs outlook, a number of House Democrats have apparently concluded it's best to get out while they can.  As of last week, the number was at 20 with the announcement that five-term Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) would be retiring at the end of his term.  But today, barely 24 hours after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed Joe Biden's hopes and dreams on the BBB bill, two more House Dems said in so many words that they're headed for the exits, too.

Owner of Seattle's Woodland Coffee frustrated by rising crime.  A frustrated Seattle business owner says she's tired of dealing with break-ins and threats to her customers and workers.  She's reaching out to nearby businesses to see if they want to band together to create a safer environment in their community.  Crime statistics from the Seattle Police Department show a rise in burglaries and thefts at businesses in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood.  Businesses in this area have dealt with countless break-ins and say when they call for help police can't always get there.

The Editor says...
And whose fault is that?  The police won't show up because they've been defunded and demoralized by the Democrats.  The criminals know they'll never spend any significant time in jail, because of the Democrats.  And yet you can bet the "Seattle business owner" will vote for Democrats every time.

America Is Much More than Its Government.  [Scroll down]  So here's where the scorecard stands:  Runaway inflation; a collapsing currency set in motion by an unconstitutional central bank that manipulates the dollar and destroys personal savings; a "health emergency" that has been systematically abused to blow up the Bill of Rights; a voting system that nobody trusts because of its inherent and intentional conduciveness for enabling fraud; schoolchildren who have never been dumber yet more indoctrinated by communist claptrap; an unprotected border that has helped destroy communities around the country with crime, division, and drugs; global war against amorphous threats of "terrorism" (which has morphed into a dangerous domestic war against Americans for their political beliefs); and endless attacks on traditional American culture by nasty, self-glamorizing moral poseurs intent on despoiling Western civilization, wrecking Judeo-Christian sanctities, squashing families out of existence, and plundering anything left over to help pay off some Treasury IOUs owed to China.  Let's be clear:  The American people built none of these catastrophes; their worthless government did.

The madness of King Brandon.  In August, Biden began a bizarre, ill-advised, and poorly executed withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which stranded many U.S. civilians and military personnel there and left a reported $85 billion in taxpayer-funded, top-of-the-line, and completely operational military equipment for our Taliban enemies to plunder, which they did.  Biden decided that it was a great idea to evacuate troops first and let the rest of the area and our abandoned facilities fall into chaos afterward.  Images of people running to catch airplanes out of the war-torn cesspool flooded the airwaves, which served to underscore the incredibly bone-headed decision to remove the troops who enforced the rules and prevented the area from descending into chaos for many years.  With one stupid decision, Biden handed Afghanistan back to the savage and repressive regime that held it before.  This will be Joe's legacy.

The Elite's obsession with January 6:  Why do the Elite harbor this fevered obsession with Jan 6? [...] It reflects their habitual projection of their own evil onto the seething mass of deplorables.  Precisely what is this evil they are projecting?  In a word:  treason.  The US Constitution defines treason in Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 this way:  "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."  Are the Elite guilty of treason?  Let me count the ways[:]
  [#1]   In Afghanistan, delivery of $85 billion in military supplies and thousands of hostages to the enemy.
  [#2]   Mass destruction in our cities.  Politicians who protect the mobs are accessories after the fact and accomplices to this treason.
  [#3]   Defunding the police.  The primary responsibility of local government is to protect their constituents and keep the streets safe.  But the local Elites in many cities have sided with the criminal element against the law-abiding citizenry.
  [#4]   Sabotage of the military through wokification, [...]
  [#6]   Giving aid and comfort to China, not least through the attempted Building Back Better legislation that Sen. Manchin just jettisoned.
  [#7]   Destroying the economy with the flood of illegal aliens.
  [#8]   Destroying the economy with the climate hoax.
  [#9]   Destroying the economy with the war on energy:  Shutting down the XL pipeline, bankrupting energy companies, deliberate depletion of our oil reserves, etc.
  [#10]   Destroying the economy with the Covid hoax.

Our political divide is no longer between Democrats and Republicans.  I noticed the uptick in the crime in New York in January 2020 when the "Bail Reform" law went into effect.  Slowly on the local news, you heard about someone coming up the steps from the subway and getting cold-cocked in the face, elderly people getting thrown down and beaten, and other violent street crimes.  It grew from there and, after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, the kerosene was thrown on the previously slow-burning fuse.  The Marxists tried telling us the crime wave was due to the pandemic but I knew — and believe others did too — that it started weeks before the first case of COVID was reported in the United States.  Like a cancer, the effects of these policies took a while to spread and then accelerated quickly.  The same pattern was repeated across America as other cities implemented "Bail Reform" and defunded their police departments.  All the while, George Soros and other Marxist billionaires hell-bent on destroying this country helped install District Attorneys who refuse to prosecute criminals and judges who put repeat violent offenders back on the streets.  Add in governors emptying prisons in the name of Covid and — voila! — instant anarchy.

Here's the Perfect Example of What a Failure 'Defund the Police' Is.  Democrats pushed to defund the police over much of the past year and a half.  You even had people like Kamala Harris applauding the defunding — cutting millions — from the Los Angeles police.  But when some cities caved and started cutting back on the police, it didn't end well.  One of those cities was Burlington, Vermont — not a city that people necessarily think of as a high crime area.  But residents and business owners ended up not feeling safe at night because the police department took such a hit from the defunding movement.

Awash in illegal pot farms, Oregon plans millions for relief.  A Democratic state senator from southern Oregon said his region, awash in illegal marijuana farms that are protected by gunmen, is starting to look more like a failed state.  After hearing him and others testify this week, the Oregon Legislature dedicated $25 million to help police, sheriff's offices and community organizations pay for the ballooning costs of cracking down on the thousands of industrial-scale, illegal pot farms.  Residents said the assistance is welcome but not enough.

California pot companies warn of impending industry collapse.  Leading California cannabis companies warned Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday that the state's legal industry was on the verge of collapse and needed immediate tax cuts and a rapid expansion of retail outlets to steady the shaky marketplace.  The letter signed by more than two dozen executives, industry officials and legalization advocates followed years of complaints that the heavily taxed and regulated industry was unable to compete with the widespread illegal economy, where consumer prices are far lower and sales are double or triple the legal business.

Man Dies Of Heart Attack Because Paramedics Refuses To Enter His Building Due To Commiefornia COVID LAWS.  Paramedics in Southern California refused to enter a post-acute-care facility to treat a man in cardiac arrest last month because of "some COVID-19 law," according to a Rialto Police Department report.  Body camera footage shows an officer arriving at the Rialto Post Acute Care Center on the evening of Nov. 11 and greeting two paramedics from the Rialto Fire Department, who were standing outside with their masks on.  The first 30 seconds of the footage are muted, which is standard for many police body cameras, but the officer wrote in his report that the paramedics were there for an unrelated patient and said the facility was being "problematic."  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
If your fear of germs is that intense, you shouldn't be a paramedic.

Probe launched after medics refuse to care for man in cardiac arrest over dubious COVID rule: police.  A third-party investigation is underway in a California city after two mask-wearing fire department paramedics allegedly refused to enter a rehab facility to render assistance to a man suffering cardiac arrest.  About an hour later, the patient was tragically pronounced dead at a local hospital after being transported there.  An officer responding to the scene in Rialto, California, said on his bodycam, in footage obtained by Fox 11 Los Angeles through a freedom of information request, that the medics wouldn't come inside because of some COVID-19-related rule, and that the patient, who reportedly wasn't breathing pursuant to the 911 call, needed to be brought out to them.

In San Francisco, People Now Leave Their Trunks Open So Thieves Won't Smash Their Windows.  People in California are reportedly leaving their vehicles' trunks open to deter thieves from breaking their vehicles' windows.  Vehicle break-ins are reportedly on the rise in San Francisco and Oakland.  To keep potential thieves from damaging their property, some people are emptying out everything of value from their vehicle, unlocking their doors, and leaving the trunk open while they go about their business.  [Video clip]

Inflation Devastation for the Democrats.  Most of you whippersnappers were not even Planned Parenthood targets back when inflation was last a thing.  It was the late-seventies, which you people associate with funky clothing and disco music.  Most of us who lived through that miserable decade associate it with economic malaise, notably including massive inflation and 18% interest rates.  Yeah, think about 18% interest, all you folks with an adjustable rate loan.  You're spoiled by cheap money and low inflation.  You are about to learn a lesson in economics.  See, when Uncle Sucker prints lots of money and there are fewer things to buy, you get inflation.  Prices rise.  And your standard of living falls.  Despite the economic insights of Joe Biden and his cast of mutants, there's no changing it.  And no, inflation is not evidence that all is well.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's Presser Should Alarm Everyone on Main Street.  The Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made statements today akin to saying the emperor is wearing a beautiful coat.  I can share examples, but to really encapsulate the issues, it's actually easier to start by sharing a chart he presented when discussing inflation.  Do you notice anything missing in this chart? [...] The guy is talking about the issue of 2021 inflation and expressing his empathy that inflation is running "far ahead" of the federal reserve projections.  Yet, the graphic Powell uses doesn't even show the 2021 rate of inflation that he is expressing his concern about.  Why wouldn't the graphic show the rate of inflation for 2021?  Well, take one look at what the graph would look like, and you realize immediately why he would not want to put it in front of people.

America's Unamerican Smash-And-Grab.  [Scroll down]  Within the first section of Proposition 47 lies the primary driver of "smash and grabs."  Shoplifting is defined as "entering a commercial establishment with the intent to commit larceny while that establishment is open during regular business hours" where the value of the property does not exceed $950."  That is, according to the California penal code, if someone enters the store when employees are present (putting them at risk) and loots $950 worth of items (if not more, as seen in many of the smash-and-grab cases), they should be allowed to walk free without punishment.  This reclassification only allows criminals to get away with crimes instead of reducing crime itself.  For instance, on November 19th, 20 to 40 people organized a burglary at a San Francisco Louis Vuitton store.  It was not an act of opportunity but a raid organized to some extent through social media and messaging apps.  With only five officially arrested in the above case, criminals are growing bolder, leading to more smash and grab events, such as when 90 people raided a Nordstrom Rack at the Walnut Creek shopping facility on November 20th.  An estimated $100,000 worth of goods were stolen there.

Now that Build Back Better looks dead in the water, weird things are coming out of the mouths of Delusional Dems.  With the price of gas hitting $7 a gallon and a package of Oscar Meyer bacon hitting $9.59 out in California, you can bet inflation is on consumers' minds, and 80% of them know who did it.  Big government spending, the kind that requires the Fed to print more money than the economy can handle, is behind it.  The U.S. has passed a [...] lot of gargantuan trillion-plus-dollar spending bills for things such as COVID relief, "infrastructure," bailouts of favored industries, stimulus payouts, and more in the last few years and the economy is still struggling to digest it.  Inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has now soared 6.8% this year, the highest rise in nearly forty years, back when the U.S. was crawling out from the rubble of the Carter years.  And today's inflation is far from done, according to the Fed, which expects to initiate three rate hikes in 2022 to fight it.

Someone Finally Points Out The Obvious.  CNBC's Steve Liesman points out what all the financial pundits keep ignoring.  The price of raw material at origination is still climbing, which means the prices of intermediate manufacturing goods will keep climbing, which means the prices of finished goods (to wholesalers) will keep climbing, which means consumer prices will keep climbing.  [Video clip]  Here's the kicker.  The rate of raw material price increases are still higher than the rate of intermediate price increases, which are still higher than the rate of price increases in finished goods, which are still higher than the rate of price increases in consumer goods (retail).  As long as the rate of price increase for raw material, the very first step in the supply chain, remains higher than the rate of the price increase for the next step in the process, then you can guarantee future prices will go up.

Wholesale Prices See Biggest Annual Surge on Record, Adding to Broader Inflation Woes.  Wholesale prices rose at their fastest annual pace on record in November, with the newest inflation-related datapoint adding to broader concerns about the persistence of elevated prices as higher input costs for producers tend to trickle down to consumers.  The Labor Department said in a Dec. 14 statement that, for the 12 months ending in November, the final demand producer price index (PPI) jumped by 9.6 percent, the highest number in the history of the series, which goes back to 2010.  Consensus forecasts predicted a slower 9.2 percent rise in the PPI final demand measure.  On a month-over-month basis, the final demand PPI gauge rose 0.8 percent in November.  While that's lower than the record high 1.2 percent logged in January, it represents an acceleration in wholesale prices from the prior month's reading of 0.6 percent and a sign that inflationary pressures were once again picking up steam.

Former police chief:  America is devolving into a third world, feudal society — and we can thank the left for it.  Most right-thinking Americans, when they watch gangs of hoodlums go into stores and steal property unabated are horrified by the images.  Others — primarily those on the left — see no problem with it.  What recent events have proven is that there are indeed two Americas; one which still believes in the rule of law, the other which does not.  It also shows what happens to a country when secularism or atheism takes over.  No longer does the commandment "Thou shalt not steal" mean anything.  In fact for leftists, a good number of the ten commandments no longer apply.  For those of us who are Christians, we could see this coming.  For when you remove God from everything, when you don't think twice about the taking of a human life through the process of abortion and when you justify killing or stealing to achieve some kind of means, you have truly lost your way.

Even San Fran residents are getting sick of their liberal reforms.  To put it mildly, things haven't been going well in Nancy Pelosi's home stomping grounds of San Francisco.  The homelessness plague is out of control and crime has been on the rise in ways that even the most liberal and forgiving residents can no longer ignore.  The problem was compounded in multiple ways when Chesa Boudin was elected to be the District Attorney after running on a platform of getting rid of the police and promising to not prosecute "smaller crimes."  (Boudin is now facing a recall election.)  The filth and the property crime are driving some people to look for a way out and flee the city.  The Associated Press talked to several such beleaguered residents recently and heard horror stories that are increasingly familiar.

Key Inflation Metric Grows at Fastest Pace Ever Recorded.  The producer price index jumped 9.6 percent in November compared to the same month last year, the highest year-over-year increase since record-keeping began in 2010.  The PPI increased by 0.8 percent during the month of November 2021.  Prices still climbed 6.9 percent when excluding food and energy costs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The PPI tracks changes in the sale price of domestically produced goods, and is a key gauge of inflation.

The Whitewashing of Black Crime.  NYPD has sought the public's help in identifying mob looters caught on security cameras.  Videos and photos unmistakably reveal inconvenient truths to those who ply their trade in racial obfuscations.  From San Francisco to Minneapolis and Chicago to New York City the choreography is the same, rampaging troupes of mostly young black males plundering in blue cities with do-nothing policies towards crime and mayoral diktats that prevent cops from interfering with or investigating retail theft.

Black Lives Clearly Don't Matter to BLM or to Soros-Backed Rogue Prosecutors.  Grim news confronts Americans in the closing days of 2021:  as they prepare to gather with loved ones around the Christmas tree, their fellow citizens are being gunned down in the inner city in ever increasing numbers.  And the news is likely to get worse.  That is because America's leaders and talking heads refuse to deal directly with the ongoing effort to gut law enforcement and the entire criminal justice system.  Nor are they willing to address the political violence that has led to the precipitous rise in homicides since the fateful year of 2020.  And the silence continues even though — just as news outlets were reporting record rises in murders in 12 cities — Black Lives Matter, the organization that led the political violence, released right on cue a new statement doubling down on its call for "the abolition" not just of police, but also prisons and the court system.

Democratic mayors under fire as crime, violence plagues Chicago, New York, Philadelphia.  Democratic mayors are raising eyebrows with their responses to the rising crime plaguing major cities like New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia.  The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI data — the largest annual increase on record, with Chicago topping the list.  At least 12 major cities, including New York, have already set historical murder records in 2021.  Robberies and assaults are also on the rise, and retailers in major cities across the country are reporting an uptick in organized smash-and-grab crimes during the busy holiday shopping season.  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot faced criticism last week after she responded to the recent flood of robberies in her city by blaming retailers for not better protecting their merchandise.

Forty-year inflation high will become key midterm election issue.  Republicans are blasting President Joe Biden for the highest inflation increase in nearly 40 years, setting the stage for rising consumer costs to be a key issue in next year's midterm elections.  On Friday, the Labor Department's Consumer Price Index rose by 6.8% without seasonal adjustments over a 12-month period ending in November, the fastest annual increase since 1982.  Rising inflation has plagued Biden in the first year of his presidency, taking a toll on his approval rating that has dropped across several major polls in recent weeks.  Republicans, seeking to win majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections, blamed rising costs on Biden.

Biden makes shipping crisis worse.  Cargo ships are backing up to Hawaii as they await unloading.  Having Paternity Pete running the Department of Transportation was not bad enough.  Biden just appointed someone with no cargo shipping experience as the U.S. Maritime Administrator.  The job is one of those little known offices that are important in times of crisis.  You never really think of cargo shipping until someone foolishly shuts down the economy to stop a virus.  The aftermath resulted in inflation and supply shortages.  Cargo ships are coming in, but their cargo is not being unloaded and shipped by truck to stores across America. [...] Trump took shipping seriously.  Biden did not.  He appointed Rear Admiral Ann C. Phillips, United States Navy (Retired).  She is a highly accomplished and able sailor.  But her experience is in climate change, not shipping.  Logistics is a complicated but extremely important undertaking, as we all are learning at the store.

The Six Most Disastrous Members Of The Biden Administration.  #1: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain:  If Biden is merely a barely functioning figurehead, which it seems clear that he is, then who is really calling the shots?  Who's the one pulling Biden's marionette strings?  We can't know for sure, but for me the most obvious culprit would be Mr. Klain.  As Chief of Staff, we can safely assume no one interacts more with Biden than Ron Klain.  No matter the topic, no matter the crisis, a Chief of Staff is going to have his fingers in everything the president does.  Biden's ridiculous spending plans?  There is no doubt that Klain weighed in on each one of them; heavily.  The decision to pull the trigger on the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal?  Klain absolutely had input there as well.  And while there's no question that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other authoritarian bureaucrats were pushing Biden to implement vaccine mandates and to acquiesce to teachers' unions with school closings, we can rest assured that it was Ron Klain who advised Biden and orchestrated the policies.  If we also consider the calamitous supply chain crisis, the Administration's insistence on divisive identity politics, the repeated missteps with China and Russia, and the apparent strategy to have Biden become Bernie Sanders' political clone, the Biden Administration is in tatters.  And Ron Klain has his fingerprints everywhere we look.

AP: Huh.  Maybe we shouldn't spend $5 trillion with this much inflation.  We learned yesterday from the CBO that Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" spending boondoggle would actually add three trillion dollars more debt to the country than had been advertised, once all of the budget gimmicks and sleight-of-hand language was stripped out of it.  That news came on the heels of a report that inflation had hit a level not seen in almost forty years.  (I lived through that inflation explosion and I can assure you that it was no fun.)  These events have forced even some of Joe Biden's most ardent cheerleaders in the media to take notice.  Last night the Associated Press was compelled to ask what really should have been an obvious question all along.  Is this really the time to be setting another $5 trillion in magical money on fire?

Where Dems Rule and Police Are Defunded, Blood Coats the Streets.  Philadelphia, the nation's sixth largest city, recorded 523 murders as of Dec. 7, surpassing its formal grim milestone of 500 murders, which was set in 1990, police data showed. [...] Besides the total control of the cities by Democrats for decades, what could possibly be the other factor in these cities that accounts for such high murder rates?

Whose fault is it that America is descending into Third World status?  Store theft is now done openly.  People load their arms or shopping carts with stuff they want and simply walk out the door.  After closing, mobs of them smash the storefront and grab what they want.  I'm reminded of stores in Mexico where padlocked steel curtains cover the glass storefronts each night.  After closing, the store become a little fortress.  The left explains that this isn't looting because ... reasons.  One reason is that it's really a protest for social justice, whatever that is.  Another reason is that stores have insurance, dontcha know, and so stealing from them isn't really stealing.  Another reason is that the looters are jobless due to COVID, and so their theft is excused by their hunger.  In other words, the left contends that stealing a Prada bag to feed their greed is just like Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's children.  Speaking of the jobless, employers are desperately seeking to relieve them of that status while the jobless are desperately seeking to maintain that status.  People have decided they'd rather not work, which is understandable since we told them they don't need to and we even pay them money not to.

Inflation soars as prices spike 6.8 percent, most in 39 years.  The annual US inflation rate hit 6.8 percent last month, the feds said Friday — marking a 39-year high and leaving Americans helpless to do anything but watch as prices surge unabated at a clip not seen since Ronald Reagan was in office.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the Consumer Price Index of food, energy, goods and services rose by 0.8 percent in November, pushing yearly inflation above the 6.2 percent recorded a month earlier.  The new level is the highest since 1982 and it also marked the sixth consecutive month in which annual inflation rates have exceeded 5 percent under President Biden's leadership.  In a statement, the BLS said it saw "broad increases" across "most" of the CPI, which tracks the costs of everything from groceries to gasoline and haircuts to household rent.

We have worse inflation than countries with negative interest rates.  Despite the Fed keeping U.S. interest rates near zero during the longest bull market in history, central bankers across the pond have proven even more dovish.  Even so, in Europe, where the European Central Bank has maintained negative interest rates, nations such as France and Portugal have significantly lower inflation rates than us.  (Note:  Switzerland and Japan are outliers, as they've maintained negative or near-zero inflation and interest rates for over a decade now.)

White House Celebrates Joe Biden Reaching Inflation Milestone Set By Jimmy Carter, 6.8 Percent and Rising.  Joe Biden may be celebrating his historic achievement in reaching an inflationary milestone previously set by Jimmy Carter, but the working class is paying the price for their economic stupidity.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the November inflation rate today showing another rise in the annualized rate of inflation of 6.8 percent.  As you review the data, ask yourself this question:  'Is there anything in the current economic landscape to indicate this is going to stop?'  The honest answer is no.

Inflation soars to highest level in 40 years as 'Bidenflation' sees prices jump 6.8% in biggest rise since Reagan admin.  President Joe Biden acknowledged Friday that inflation was a 'bump in the road' — but predicted that prices would drop from current levels, after a new monthly report showed the highest jump in prices since the early 1980s.  'So I think it's it really is it's a real bump in the road.  It does affect families,' Biden said in response to a question at a democracy summit held virtually at the White House.  'You walk into a grocery store and you're paying more for whatever you're purchasing,' he continued, speaking to public concerns after a new report showed a 6.8 percent jump in prices in November compared to a year ago.

The 'Woke' Got What They Wanted — And Then What?  [Scroll down]  So, academia, corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, the media, the Pentagon, professional sports teams, Silicon Valley and Wall Street in near hysterical fashion all boarded the woke train.  All boasted of ferreting out "white rage," and hiring legions of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" czars.  Critical race theory would be mainstreamed to excise racism and discrimination by embracing racism and discrimination.  "Crime" was to be seen now mostly as a construct created by the elite to protect their own privilege, prerogatives and property.  Shoplifting, looting and street thuggery were just part of living in a normal city.  "Social justice warriors" could replace defunded police.  Gone would be most bail, incarceration, mandatory jail time, stop-and-frisk, and broken-windows deterrent policies.  Green agendas, the Left hoped, would fundamentally transform America in putting an immediate stop to man-made "climate change."  So, lots of oil and gas leases were either canceled or their fees vastly increased.  Pipelines were stopped.  Gas and oil companies were warned that everything from lack of financing to new regulations would soon put them out of business.  The golden age of wind and batteries was already upon us.

New Report Shows Push for Electric Cars Is Actually Killing Rainforests.  It was buried during the Thanksgiving weekend, but CNN managed to commit a random act of journalism, detailing some new climate data that was found to show that the Earth warming actually began many decades earlier than stated.  This revelation manages to both throw off climate modeling, as well as make the claim that mankind's technology was the root cause of... well, everything going wrong.  Joining in the fray now is NBC News, which has also surprised by delivering another inconvenient truth.  A new report shows that the need for more raw nickel ore — driven by the explosive market for lithium batteries — is causing the eradication of pristine rainforests in the Philippines.  This is not a gradual loss of acreage.  Massive swaths of the forests are being shredded as nickel mines are expanding at a rate far greater than the rise in global temperatures.

Breaking the Maritime Shipping Impasse.  Two new laws in California have degraded the air quality in the Los Angeles area.  One is Assembly Bill 5 and a new California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation banning older diesel trucks from operating in the state.  Assembly Bill 5 has basically outlawed independent truckers from hauling freight, thereby reducing the total number of trucks operating in the state.  This, combined with the banning of the older diesel trucks, has created a supply chain backlog. leaving large container vessels either at anchor or steaming in lazy circles off shore because the anchorages are too crowded to safely anchor there.  While at anchor or underway, these ships must run their engines to turn generators to power and maintain vital shipboard systems and doing so these ships emit huge quantities of oxides of Nitrogen (NOx), oxides of Sulfur (SOx), particulate pollution, and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC).  The offshore sea breezes carry this polluted air into the Los Angeles basin, adding to an already significantly polluted air shed.

Democrats don't care about inflation, the poor, the middle class, women, or science.  They care about raw power.  Democrats routinely want a high national minimum wage, require additional costly employer-paid benefits, add taxes, and add regulations that hurt businesses and raise prices...but the solution is more low-paid immigrants?  Democrats are trying to greatly reduce independent contracting, gig jobs, and right-to-work laws as they cater to their political contributors.  All of these things increase costs and inflation.  If Democrats cared about inflation and getting more public projects completed, they would get rid of racist prevailing wage laws, which have oppressed minorities and taxpayers for ninety years.  They clearly care more about catering to unions than the rest of us or inflation.

The Biden gas pump is killing the family budget.  Is President Biden capable of changing course and realizing that he is on the road to a bad election day in 2022?  President Biden could start by reversing the executive orders on the Keystone Pipeline and oil exploration.  It would have a massive impact on producers, who would fill the inventory with oil.  So is Biden capable of doing his version of Palin's "drill, baby, drill"?  We are where we are because of decisions made by this administration.  Therefore, they are the only ones who can undo or cancel their orders.  If they do, then maybe those pump prices could come back.  If they don't, then pity any Democrat running in a competitive election in 2022.

Why Looting Turned San Francisco Into A Ghost Town.  Usually at this time of year, San Francisco's luxury stores are decked with holiday garlands.  Instead, they're boarded up after widespread "flash mob" looting turned Union Square — the city's most fashionable shopping district — into an area resembling a blighted neighborhood in Detroit.  "It's a ghost town," said Michelle Tandler, a San Francisco native and high-tech entrepreneur, whose photos of the stores barricaded in plywood went viral on social media this week.  "Every store has a security guard.  People are going to lose their jobs.  And these things have a ripple effect."  Two weeks ago, San Francisco was the first of several progressive cities hit by smash-and-grab mobs of thieves, sometimes as many as 80 in a group.  Video from the San Francisco looting of Louis Vuitton shows criminals walking casually out of the store, goods in hand.  Other cities hit include Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.

How Much Longer for COVID Scare Tactics?  How much longer will a COVID-weary electorate put up with Vax Now or Else mandates and concurrent elimination of their daily freedoms?  It would be one thing if the Democrats were delivering a positive, successful improvement in the quality of life in America.  But they're not.  Their tenure thus far has been a total disaster, by any measure.  Inflation at 30-year highs.  Supply-chain shortages, with container ships inexplicably lined up off the California coast.  Racial division, characterized by support of BLM violence and rioting.  Unhinged corporate and educational Wokeness, resulting in blaming Caucasians for being born Caucasian.  Disastrous uncontrolled illegal immigration, unchecked for their COVID status, their presence here completely supported at taxpayer expense.  Government-imposed vax mandates, intended to terminate countless first responders and military personnel if they attempt to exercise their legal personal medical prerogatives.  Quite simply, life in America has devolved into something approaching a chaotic, miserable mess, where each day the public holds its collective breath and attempts to steel itself against the next ruinous body blow.

Death by Politics.  The defunding of our cities' police forces and the tragic mayhem it caused have resulted in disorder nationwide and uncountable deaths.  Since the demise of George Floyd, Democrat mayors of our largest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York have left these communities open to the most violent elements of our society.  Leftist prosecutors are also to blame.  They purposely refused to properly process dangerous criminals, allowing even murderers to go free.  Thousands of Americans have died in our streets, while Democrats yell that guns are the problem.  These deaths are the direct result of the Democratic actions.  Travel to any of our largest cities, and you are taking your life into your hands.  Mayors and local officials who participated in movements to defund the police should be charged with malfeasance in office, as these cockeyed actions surely led to Death by Politics in the thousands.

Smoking crack sanctioned at NYC 'safe injection sites,' driving business away.  Smoking crack cocaine is officially sanctioned at the "safe injection sites" Mayor Bill de Blasio brought to Manhattan this week in a move that's infuriated the centers' neighbors — and has at least one business owner packing his bags.  "People are allowed to bring the substance that they prefer to use here and they are permitted to consume the substance in the manner of their choice," East Harlem site director Kailin See confirmed.  "We are there to make sure that no medical emergency occurs and to connect them into care if they need that," she said, adding that many of her clients use drugs laced with fentanyl including heroin, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, amphetamine and K2.  The nonprofit is one of two in Upper Manhattan that became the country's first legal shooting galleries when they opened Tuesday [11/30/2021].

Willie Horton and the Democratic Party's Greatest Fear.  Republicans call for high bail levels for proven violent repeat offenders and bail-jumpers; Democrats call for an end to bail, and for the virtual elimination of holding even dangerous prisoners until trial.  Republicans call for stiff and certain sentences for convicted violent criminals; today's Democrats call for never-ending second chances, and even for the elimination of prisons themselves, as in the meantime, impatient Democrat governors and judges routinely throw open the prison gates on the slightest whim. [...] Republicans warn against the cultural decline that has children more likely to be raised in a single-parent household than in a nuclear family unit; Democrats go so far as to champion single motherhood as an objective good, campaigning for ever more welfare programs to encourage such generational dependence.  Is it any wonder that our nation is suffering a massive crime wave?  Is it any wonder that overwhelmed and unsupported police are resigning and retiring in disgust and despair?

Joe Biden's Dirty Little Secret:  He Wants Higher Gasoline Prices.  When he announced last week that he would release more oil from the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve, President Joe Biden told the American people he is doing everything possible to bring down gas prices at the pump.  That's a lie.  This administration and the climate change crazies have declared war on American energy.  They want high oil and gas prices.  The Biden master plan is for American oil and gas production and consumption to go to zero over the next 15 to 20 years.  How do you achieve that goal?  By making oil and gas so expensive and so unavailable that Americans are forced to use alternatives.  In other words, the fact that gasoline is roughly $1.25 more expensive per gallon today under Biden than it was a year ago under former President Donald Trump didn't happen by accident.  This was not a result of a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, that could knock out our oil facilities.  This was by design.

The Twin Pillars of Biden's Failure.  Everything has gone so terribly wrong for the Biden Administration, and in the ways that were widely predicted, that it is hard to believe Joe Biden could be perceived as a successful or at least potentially successful president if only he had avoided being such a tool of the Democratic extreme Left.  On the afternoon of his inauguration, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline and curtailed fracking and offshore oil and gas exploration, and ordered the end of construction of the southern border wall.  The consequences have been over 200,000 illegal migrants entering the United States across the southern border most months and the rise in the price of gasoline from approximately $2 a gallon to $5 a gallon across the country.

All 81 million of them — living or dead.
Biden voters owe the country an apology.  President Joe Biden's African travel ban went into effect Monday.  Biden's actions here directly contradict what he said when former President Donald Trump instituted similar travel bans to stop the spread of the coronavirus.  In fact, they lay bare an underlying insincerity about Biden's entire handling of the pandemic.  When Trump did this exact same thing, Biden stoked the flames of racial hatred to get elected.  Now, nearly a full year into his first term, Biden is the dog that caught the car.  He duped 81 million people into voting for him, and he has no clue what he is doing.  Biden voters owe the country an apology.  They are responsible for our mess — and every bit the mess that the approval ratings suggest it is.  From foreign policy to immigration to crime to inflation to gas prices, there is absolutely nothing going better right now than on Jan. 19, 2020.

Litany of Examples that Democrats are Siding with Criminals — Encouraging Criminality.  Are Democrats encouraging criminality in order to say the current system doesn't work and therefor it should be replaced by a new one that allows them to crack down with much harsher penalities?  It appears as if Democrats are following the same techniques used by dictators throughout history in order to destroy a current system of government, encourage the criminals to scare people into new laws to give away their own freedom.  [Video clip]

28 Photos Show Just How Horrible Christmas Is in San Francisco This Year.  Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we have now moved into the time of year when Christmas shopping is in full swing for many Americans.  However, holiday-lovers in San Francisco will face a disturbing picture when they set out to buy their Christmas gifts this year.  On Monday [11/29/2021], San Francisco resident and Life School founder Michelle Tandler posted a thread of images on Twitter showing downtown businesses boarding up their glass windows to protect from the rampant crime in the city.

American cities are reverting to primitive, self-destructive behavior.  American cities on the Democrats' watch are drifting away from civilization.  The most obvious problem is the rise in crime — everything from murders to mass retail theft.  Just open any Chicago or New York newspaper to see what I mean. [...] I blame what's happening entirely on the left.  Beginning in 2013, with George Zimmerman's self-defense shooting against Trayvon Martin, leftists have been steadily chipping away at the infrastructure that supports law-abiding middle-class Americans.  The war on police blossomed into Defund the Police, which segued seamlessly into no bail, which resulted in six people dying in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and a sideshow in what was once the quietest and safest middle-class neighborhood in San Francisco.  Many are describing what's happening in America in a top-down revolution — that is, the political class, the billionaires, and the affluent professional class, having been marinated in Marxism in college, are imposing a Cloward-Piven strategy on America.  To implement the socialist revolution that these rich people desire and assume they'll survive, they're systematically destroying all the institutional brakes that keep a society safe and functioning.

Fourth-generation dairy farmer warns economic woes, climate change regulations could end family farms.  A fourth-generation dairy farmer warned that climate change-related regulations and a slew of economic woes could signal the end for her family's way of life after nearly a century.  "We've been attacked in the dairy industry for a while now," Stephanie Nash told Fox News.  "Instead of educating people through the farmer, we're educating them through people that have never farmed and we're killing off our family farmers."  Rising costs, labor and supply shortages and little support — in addition to climate change and conservation regulations — are all major obstacles threatening the Nash family, which has been in the dairy farming business for 92 years.

The Editor says...
Making life more difficult for farmers will inevitably result in food scarcity and higher grocery prices.  And the worst part of this story is that it's all being done in an effort to stop climate change — which is impossible.  There is no climate crisis.  Sure, the climate is changing, but the changes are extremely slow and imperceptible; in fact, if you turn off you television, you'll never worry about climate change again!

Is there a wholly unexpected benefit from the left's COVID madness?  With COVID, leftists got a twofer:  Trump left the White House and they destroyed the benefits of Trump's America, especially for the middle class.  With Fauci leading the charge, large parts of America ground to a halt.  People were locked in their homes, schools were closed, and businesses were shut down.  Trump's wonderful economy vanished with a giant sucking sound, all to a Greek chorus of leftist voices declaiming about Trump's murdering American citizens through his ineptitude.  To stir the pot, the left used the death of a two-bit hoodlum whose diseased heart couldn't withstand all the drugs flooding his system as the starting gun for race riots.  All of this made Trump seem, not like the most effective and beneficial president since Reagan, but like a failure.  Add in the fact that the lockdowns allowed often unconstitutional mail-in voting and secretive vote counts and, suddenly, you've got a popular president losing the race to a corrupt, incompetent puppet who managed to have more ballots counted in his favor.  With Biden in office, the left has been able to strike major blows at the economy, the border, national sovereignty, and the military.  In addition, it keeps hammering away at the culture, especially in K-12 schools.

White House's Border Policies Bring Death and Misery.  After entering the country illegally, [24-year-old Yery Noel Medina] Ulloa was taken in by [46-year-old Francisco Javier] Cuellar, and was given a job at the family business before allegedly murdering Cuellar.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Ulloa on Oct. 13, days after he was found covered in blood following the alleged murder.  On the surface, Cuellar's death seemed to have been entirely preventable.  We don't know how Ulloa got from the Texas border to Florida, but we do know that the Biden administration has been flying illegal aliens to states across the country, including Florida.  State and local officials have warned the Biden administration that its anti-border policies pose a grave danger to the security of their state, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, blamed the administration's secretive flights for Cuellar's tragic death.

Wild Smash-and-Grabs in Dem Cities Now Turn Deadly.  We tend to think of Black Friday as the day that we can pick up some good deals at the stores.  But instead, we've been seeing people thinking they could get more than a good deal — a five-finger discount, in fact.  It's happening at expensive stores in Democratic cities, particularly in California when they know that because of leftist prosecutors there, they will likely not suffer any real consequences even if they are caught in the act.  This is all courtesy of the Democratic policy of being lenient on crime.  When even CNN is recognizing this as a problem in cities like San Francisco and Chicago, then you know Democrats can't hide the hard reality of what their policies are causing.

Biden's economy is very successful by the standards Obama set.  Never say that Biden is incompetent.  His goal is to bring the country down and he is doing exactly what is necessary to succeed.  Still, we can survive and fight back.  Remember when Obama said that his policies would raise the cost of energy substantially and that this would be good for America?  He said this in campaign speeches and was still elected.  Biden has successfully followed thru on these policies.  One way to do this is to write down trillions of dollars of fossil fuels in the ground as stranded assets and kill all the traditional energy companies.  Then there's printing money, flooding the market with cheap, illegal labor, using the vaccine to destroy the middle and working class, etc.  The millions of illegal aliens not only stress the labor market, school systems, and welfare but they are carrying diseases (not just COVID) that will stress our health system beyond its limit.  The CDC's and public health system's silence is criminal.

Bidenflation Surges Again as Prices Rise at [the] Fastest Pace in 31 Years.  The Federal Reserve's go-to barometer of inflation soared in October to the fastest annual pace of price increases in 31-years, data from the Commerce Department showed Wednesday.  The personal consumption expenditure price index rose five percent compared with October 2020, an acceleration from the 4.4 percent annual gain recorded in September.  Compared with the prior month, prices rose 0.6 percent, the biggest monthly jump since 2008.

Report: General Mills Will Raise Prices up to 20 Percent in January.  General Mills informed its retail customers that prices would rise on hundreds of its items throughout dozens of its brands in mid-January, according to a report.  The report from CNN Business indicated that the company sent a letter to at least one major regional wholesale supplier indicating that the company intends on raising its prices and that they "will go up by around 20%" on some brands in mid-January.  The letter was shared with CNN Business "on the condition of anonymity to protect the company's relationship with its suppliers."

In police-defunded Minnesota, thousands of people are now just flat out refusing to pull over for cops.  According to reports, thousands of drivers are refusing to stop when police attempt to pull them over, with data showing that it happened more than 3,100 times in 2020.  New research looks into what is behind the uptick in people not following the law.  [Tweet]  "Super speeding" is way up in Minnesota, with the Minnesota State Patrol regularly clocking speeds of more than 100 miles per hour.  Fatalities are up too and there is something else that is making the roads even more risky.  Col. Matt Langer said in a statement:  "People are fleeing from police at a rate we've never seen before.  This is a huge, huge problem nationwide; it's just not a Minnesota-specific problem."

Pennsylvania electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% next week.  Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.  Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity.  Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh.  Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.

CBO: Democrats' Spending Spree Will Make Inflation Even Worse For Years.  So much for fiscal responsibility.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score of Democrats' "Build Back Bankrupt" spending spree didn't stop the House of Representatives from passing the legislation last Friday.  Ironically, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, did more to delay the vote on the bill, speaking on the House floor for more than eight hours Thursday night and postponing the vote on House passage until Friday morning.  But lawmakers who claim to care about our nation's rapidly growing pile of debt, like Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V. and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona, should review the CBO analysis in detail.

NY Emergency Room Shuts Down After Workers Forced Out By Vaccine Mandate.  An emergency room in Long Beach, New York, closed down on Monday after state law forced all of its unvaccinated medical workers from their jobs.  The Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital closed its freestanding emergency room in Long Beach and redirected staff to its main campus in Oceanside, New York, the hospital said in a statement.  The "temporary" closure could last up to four weeks and potentially longer depending on the availability of staff, the hospital said.  The New York State Department of Health's (NYSDOH) vaccine mandate for medical workers does not allow workers to claim a religious exemption for the vaccine.  The policy was tied up in court due to legal challenges.  A federal court ruled in favor of the state last month, according to The New York Times.

Organized shoplifting exploits 'woke' undermining of law enforcement.  Retail stores already under siege from pandemic restrictions and supply chain hiccups are increasingly facing another threat to their bottom lines:  organized theft.  The problem was on vivid display over the weekend when dozens of looters stormed into a Nordstrom department store outside San Francisco wearing masks and wielding crowbars.  As many as 80 suspects snatched armloads of products and sped away in more than 20 waiting cars on Saturday.  Police have so far arrested just three suspects in connection with the raid.  Thieves smashed the windows and looted the high-end goods of a San Francisco Louis Vuitton store over the weekend as well, creating chaos in a popular area of the city.

A Chipotle general manager and 4 of his employees quit after a surge of to-go orders drove them to their breaking points.  A group of five Chipotle employees, including a general manager and kitchen manager, quit their jobs at the end of their shifts on November 14 after working under "impossible" conditions, they told Insider.  Peter Guerra, a Chipotle veteran of five years and general manager for six months, worked at the Scofield Farms Chipotle location in Austin, Texas.  "My store was severely understaffed, we struggled just to keep our heads above water," with less and less support from management, Guerra said.  He said he was regularly scheduled to work 80 hours a week, but often had to work additional hours to cover for employees who quit and left gaps in staffing.  Chipotle stores operate with two food prep lines:  one for customers who order on-site and another for digital orders.  Some Chipotle workers have previously told Insider that it's hard to keep up with the rapid rate at which digital orders stack up.

The Editor says...
In this article, there is no mention of vaccine mandates making it hard to retain employees.  No mention of Biden's "stimulus" payouts making it easier to stay home than to go to work.  The system is not unbreakable.  Joe Biden (or whoever pulls his strings) is finding ways to break it.

San Francisco's Mayor Has a 'Genius' Idea to Stop Looting Over the Holiday.  Some people still don't believe this, but Prop 47 is a law — deceptively titled 'Safe Schools and Neighborhoods Act' — that reduces many felonies to misdemeanors and provides for the early release of certain violent offenders and sex offenders.  One of the most unbelievable provisions of Prop 47 is one that makes it just a ticketable offense to steal up to $949 worth of goods from any given retailer on any given visit.  That's right — visit.  You can clean out the deodorant section at Walgreens, go back to your drug den, then come back an hour later and hit the diapers and feminine products if that's your jam.  You've seen the videos.  People do this.  They take what they want and casually walk away.  They know the law.  They know law enforcement has no ability to stop any of it.  It's not just San Francisco that is seeing this nonsense growing; it has pretty much permeated every part of the state by this point.  What's worse — the broken windows theory has most definitely applied to the chaos in California.  Criminals have become emboldened by the tacit permission to loot stores at will.  Now they are becoming organized and hitting larger targets.

Best Buy Crashes As Margins Slide Due To "Organized Retail Theft".  Liberal socialist utopias such as California are a blessing for deadbeat klepto hobos from around the world thanks to the state's lack of prosecution of shoplifting, but the same policies are becoming a major headache for nationwide retailers such as Best Buy which this morning reported that despite beating on the top and bottom line (revenues of $11.9 billion vs expectations of $11.7BN, EPS of $2.08, beating est of $1.96), its margins missed, echoing the same margin crunch theme that emerged recently with big box retailers such as Walmart.  Gross margin fell 0.1% to 23.5%, Best Buy said, missing the 23.6% average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg, while the decline in the core U.S. operation was steeper.  The company also reported a 10% drop in domestic online revenue as more shoppers returned to stores.

Dollar Tree hikes prices 25%.  Most items will cost $1.25.  Dollar Tree will soon be $1.25 tree.  The company — one of America's last remaining true dollar stores — said Tuesday [11/23/2021] it will raise prices from $1 to $1.25 on the majority of its products by the first quarter of 2022.  The change is a sign of the pressures low-cost retailers face holding down prices during a period of rising inflation.  Dollar Tree said in a quarterly earnings release Tuesday that its decision to raise prices to $1.25 permanently, however, was "not a reaction to short-term or transitory market conditions."  Selling stuff strictly for $1 hampered Dollar Tree, the company said, and forced it stop selling some "customer favorites."  Raising prices will give Dollar Tree more flexibility to reintroduce those items, expand its selection and bring new products and sizes to its stores.

The Editor says...
Dollar Tree has one thing going for it:  No looters!

US Inflation:  Which Categories Have Been Hit Hardest?  Prices have been going up in a number of segments of the economy in recent months, and, as Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley exposes below, the public is taking notice.  One indicator of this is that search interest for the term "inflation" is higher than at any point in the past decade.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy Wants A State Coalition To Combat Federal Overreach.  Will It Work?  Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy needs allies.  Within 10 months, D.C. Democrats have obstructed logging activity in the Alaska's southeast Tongasss National Forest, stalled progress on a life-saving road for remote residents to reach an all-weather airport in Cold Bay, cancelled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and suspended new drilling activity in a state home to 60 percent of federal land.  "The phone line's untouched," Dunleavy told The Federalist of President Joe Biden's outreach 10 months into an administration obstructing nearly every major development project sought in the nation's largest landmass.  Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who has been implementing Biden's far-left agenda, has also remained mute.  "They view Alaska as their own national park to save for mankind," Dunleavy said in an interview Thursday, frustrated at the relentless intervention of beltway bureaucrats impeding any opportunity for development.  Passage of the Democrats' latest colossal reconciliation bill would make reinstated protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) permanent.

"Trans" inmate rapes mentally disabled female prisoner at Washington prison.  Caroline Downey at National Review brings us yet another horror story delivered by the progressive policymakers in Washington state.  While still not codified in official policy, Washington previously began allowing male prisoners to request transfers to the state's only exclusively women's prison (the Washington Corrections Center for Women) if they claimed that they were transgender.  This resulted in at least six recent cases of transfers, including defendants who had been convicted of sex crimes against female victims.  With that information as a backdrop it's difficult to see how this horrible headline was anything but inevitable.  Present and former guards from the prison have told the media that these transferred prisoners have raped female inmates, including one inmate who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor female.  That prisoner was found to have repeatedly sexually abused a developmentally disabled female prisoner for at least a week before being discovered.

Kyle Rittenhouse and our Liberal Friends.  Now let's review Charles Murray's Coming Apart:  The State of White America 1960-2010.  The top 25 percent, the laptop whites, are doing fine with great careers and merger marriages.  The middle 45 percent, the Rittenhouse kids, are doing so-so, what with all the stepparents and all.  In the bottom 30 percent, including the victims of the drug epidemic, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.  Here's a short history of laptop-white oppression.  Back before there were laptops they told the workers: vote for us and we'll help you screw the evil capitalists.  Result:  white working class is dying of despair.  Then they told women:  we'll give you the vote and you can snub your nose at the patriarchs.  Result:  feminists are today marginalized as "TERFs."  Then they told blacks:  vote for us and we'll lead you to the Promised Land.  Result:  blacks are mired in dysfunction and squalor.  Hey LGBTs.  You're up next.

The New Blue Confederacy.  Why are progressive regions of the country — especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle) — institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through "proportional representation" based on "disparate impact"? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus "safe spaces" by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?  Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear?  What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Survey says more than half NYPD wishes they never joined the force.  More than half of NYPD cops wish they never joined the force in the first place, according to [an] internal department survey of 6,000 uniformed officers obtained by The [New York] Post.  The survey is a sobering snapshot of how the Finest feel in an era of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter riots, the Defund the Police movement, bail-reform laws that keep violent offenders out of jail, and legislative measures that put the burden of liability on officers while emboldening criminals.  "My retirement date is next month," said one 20-year veteran who took the survey.  "I can't wait to run out of here."  The officer, who would only provide his first name, Dan, said the job has hit "rock bottom" — and he's even steered his own son away from a calling that was once proudly passed down from generation to generation.

Build Back Badly.  It's increasingly apparent that the specter of inflation is haunting the pocketbooks of most Americans.  According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 76 percent of Americans reported that the price of gas had "gone up a lot" during the past year.  The survey also found that 65 percent had experienced significant price increases for food.  Moreover, when likely voters are asked about how Build Back Better would affect the nation's economy, it gets a thumbs down.

Don't Ask About Empty Shelves, Our Leaders are Too Busy Saving the World.  Like the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, we have become a nation of moral crusaders and misery where goods shortages are papered over with wars against intangible social problems.  Public officials no longer solve problems, like ivory tower academics they delve into root causes and produce theories explaining why the problems can't be solved without changing society and humanity.  It's as if you invited a plumber to fix your toilet only to lectured about the history of plumbing in ancient Egypt, gender roles, and social expectation while your toilet goes on flooding the floor.  While Democrats go down the rabbit hole of root causes, their cities are overrun with crime and human waste, prices for everything skyrocket, and some goods can no longer be had at any price.  Confronted with this reality, they build walls of words, seizing on talking points to convince the public that the problems don't exist or that they're actually symptoms of deep social problems going back centuries even though they only date back to last week.  Either approach frees them from having to solve them.

Transitory Inflation?  Not With Joe in Charge.  Americans are now facing the highest inflation in 30 years.  People are even starting to talk about the "misery index" again — and I haven't heard that term since the Carter administration.  Unfortunately, inflation hits low and middle-income Americans the hardest.  You can bet that Speaker Antoinette and President Asterisk aren't feeling the pinch.  Maybe that's why they're not acting very interested in the problem.  But the rest of us are sure interested.  Inflation isn't a simple matter to control.  It is a complex issue that is affected by many factors.  Whenever the government lowers the value of our money, inflation goes up.  When our geniuses in Washington put more money into circulation by either borrowing it or printing it, the value (buying power) of the money goes down.  It is simple supply and demand economics.  The more there is of something, the less valuable it becomes.  Venezuela has tons of money — and it takes a ton of it to buy bread.  The Venezuelan currency is the Bolivar, and they're issuing it in 50,000 Bolivar notes now — because that's what it takes to buy anything.  Venezuela proves that you can't print your way out of inflation.

Washington's Newest Parlor Game:  "Joe, Kamala, Nancy, or Chuck?" Who Will Still Be in Office One Year From Now?  In the wake of what can only be characterized as a historic (and perhaps even unprecedented) first-year failure, and with glaring individual shortcomings compounding their mismanagement of the government, Washington has a new parlor game.  It's called "Joe, Kamala, Nancy, or Chuck?"  And the game is to guess which — if any — will still be in office one year from now.  As astonishing as it sounds, the most vulnerable Democratic leader may be the sitting President of the United States who doesn't face reelection for another three years.  Since taking office, Biden has overseen a disastrous American defeat in Afghanistan, record high inflation, a border crisis of unprecedented scope, crime waves in cities throughout the United States, ransomware attacks on the country's most critical infrastructure, and surging numbers of COVID-19 deaths despite being handed three vaccines by the Trump administration, among other crises either caused or directly worsened by his administration's policies.  For a president who campaigned on putting "the adults" back in charge, it's hardly been a rousing success, and Americans are noticing.

Barrasso: Russian Oil Tankers Will Deliver in Boston Harbor This Winter as Result of Biden Policies.  Tuesday [11/16/2021] on Fox Business Network's "Varney & Company," Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) warned that because of President Joe Biden's energy policy, Russian oil tankers would be "making delivery in the Boston Harbor this winter."  According to Barrasso, "the American people are paying the price" for the Biden administration being "wrong" on energy.  "John Kerry and Joe Biden, these two merry men who seem to think the United States can power ourselves on windmills and solar panels are just wrong, and the American people are paying the price," Barrasso lamented.  "That is the real problem we have."

5 reasons why Kamala Harris' presidential dreams probably won't come true.  [#5] America and Kamala Harris will continue to suffer from bad policy decisions in the next 3 years. [...] There are good reasons for those low ratings, including the worsening state of the economy, the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan in August, the out-of-control border crisis, COVID policy dissatisfaction and policies mandated by the heavy hand of an out-of-control federal government.  The problem for the Harris is that there is no end in sight to those policies.  Yes, Afghanistan is fading from view but the poor state of the economy will not.  Rather than deal with inflation, which is getting out of hand, Democrats are pushing another spending bill (which Harris supports) that will only make things worse.  And, rather than working to fix our supply chain problems, the harmful effects green energy regulations and COVID mandates imposed by the Biden administration are only making things worse.

Only the Rich and Powerful Can Thrive in Lawless San Francisco.  In "progressive" San Francisco, safety is for the rich.  That's the reality of what's happening in the San Francisco Bay Area as bad policy and anti-police attitudes have created a haven for criminality.  Like many other urban parts of America, the Bay Area has been hit with a historic surge in violent crime in the last few years.  However, unlike many other parts of the country, the Bay Area has also been hit by a huge uptick in car theft, property crimes, and shoplifting.  One would think that this would necessitate a massive response by city leaders and the police department to counter the crime surge.  Instead, San Francisco attempted to defund the police following the death of George Floyd in May of last year.  Unsurprisingly, it now has a major deficit of police personnel and can't find replacements for a department where over a third of its officers have retired.  I wonder why?  Truly, a mystery.  On top of that, San Francisco has a district attorney, Chesa Boudin, whose plan for "radical change" and equality has been mostly to release criminals and not prosecute repeat offenders of serious crimes.

Joe Biden's big cookbook for inflation.  Joe Biden says we must pass his huge slush-fund social-spending package now in the works in Congress in order to reduce inflation.  Since when does throwing money at anything reduce inflation?  Did Obamacare reduce health care costs?  Did all the cash thrown at higher education, such as federal student loans, reduce college tuition?  If they pass free daycare and pre-K education, then as sure as the sun rises, those prices will skyrocket because the providers will have a captive audience.  Treasury secretary Janet Yellen says inflation will drop magically to 2% next year.  We know that earlier this year, she and others said the current inflation in the system is just transitory.  White House chief of staff Ron Klain and others say that since these slush funds are "paid for," they aren't inflationary.  They claim these slush funds are "paid for" by pretending that the new entitlements will last a few years and then be paid with all the revenues from tax hikes on "the rich" over ten years.  Of course, that's a lie, too.

This Democrat Criminal Prosecution System is Deeply Immoral.  Rachel Rollins is Biden's nominee to be the next U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. while serving as District Attorney for Suffolk County, where she declined to prosecute certain dangerous crimes and pushed for 'reallocating' police funding. [...] We have all seen endless videos of looters barging into stores and walking out with bags full of free stuff.  This will no longer constitute a criminal activity.  It is amazing to see that you can enter a store in America and the cost of every item is zero.  This isn't good for store owners but what does this tell you about a society in which others take off shelves for free and that person is protected by your law officials while you feel like a sucker for paying for them?  What does that tell you about a society gone wrong?  Under Rachel Rollins, larceny is not a crime.  Neither is disorderly conduct, and disturbing the police.  Receiving stolen goods will not be a crime in Massachusetts under Rollins.  So the person who walks into a store, or a home, and walks out with all sorts of stuff and gives them to his fence to sell, all this is not illegal and not punishable because those we consider criminal will not be arrested, charged, or brought to court.  What world are they creating in America?  It is one that favors the criminal and leave the citizen defenseless.

US Marines Go All-In On Diversity-Equity-Inclusion Training.  Last week, the US Marine Corps marked its 246th birthday.  And while there are many reasons to celebrate this milestone, last we also saw a group Iran-backed of Houthi rebels stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital San'a. [...] Also during the week, Chinese military forces held exercises near Taiwan in response to a visit by a US congressional delegation to the island. [...] Given these developments, sensible planners would consider making military preparedness, defense preparation, and troop recruitment and training top priorities.  Instead, the Biden administration's priorities have nothing to do with actual military readiness.  It intends to force march the US Marines toward diversity, equity and inclusion as the solution to make the Marine's "reflect America".

Is Joe Biden the second coming of Herbert Hoover?  Fuel oil prices soared 12.3 percent and are up a staggering 59 percent in a year.  Meat, poultry, fish and eggs rose 1.7 percent for the month and 11.9 percent year over year.  Those are punishing numbers, and a separate report underscored that workers are falling further behind.  After inflation, real wages fell 0.5 percent because, while wages are rising, the cost of nearly everything is rising faster.  But if stemming this destruction is "a top priority," Biden has an odd way of showing it.  In a head-scratcher, he again urged quick passage of his signature legislation, Build Back Better, which is still being written and fought over by his party.  It has an announced price tag of nearly $2 trillion, and a real one that is much higher, leading most economists to argue the bill would almost certainly push prices even higher, especially in the short term.  On what planet is that a solution to inflation?

The real villains in the Rittenhouse trial.  The real villains in this case are the public authorities who allowed rioters to wreak havoc unopposed for three nights in Kenosha in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a police action that was ultimately deemed justifiable.  While watching the video of the destruction, one has to wonder:  why weren't police and firemen there protecting Kenosha?  This pattern of abdicating authority to violent activists has been repeated in cities around the country, including Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Baltimore, Chicago, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and especially Portland, to name just a few.  Out of a fear of creating an incident where rioters incur injuries, police response is limited to lining up across a street and slowly moving forward while the rioters are permitted to bombard them with bricks and Molotov cocktails.  Woke politicians have been enabling chaos through such actions as no bail rules; release of violent felons due to COVID-19; reducing property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors; giving free rein to homeless people to defecate on the street, openly inject drugs, and intimidate passersby; raising bail for violent rioters; and handing the justice system to radical prosecutors who care more about the criminals than the victims.

Are Animal Rights Extremists Transforming Agriculture in America's Heartland?  Cattle ranchers and other meat producers have been under fire by animal rights and environmental groups for years.  It's nothing new.  But under the current Biden administration, the agenda to halt meat production under the premise of a climate crisis has accelerated to a mind-numbing pace.  With food prices already increasing due to high fuel costs, the never-ending nudge by animal rights organizations to increase extraneous animal welfare regulations has taken on a new foothold and strategy to advance animal rights organizations' vegan agenda.  While these regulations may seem reasonable on the surface, the agenda behind them lies within the organizations pushing these deceptive bills, cloaked in emotionally charged propaganda used to advance these proposed regulations into law. [...] People are finally waking up to the deceptive policies driven by animal rights groups mandating extraneous regulatory changes to animal agriculture such as California Proposition 12, which has produced a pork shortage in the Golden State.

US Inflation more horrible than Washington admits.  The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change.  But it's even worse than it looks.  The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation.  That means worse is to come.  Three US companies publish national rent indexes — CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com — and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%.  But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%.  Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index.

Economically incomprehensible Biden regime says printing more fake fiat money will reduce inflation.  In a shocking (but not really) display of economic illiteracy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has stated that the only way to stop runaway inflation is to print more fake fiat "funny money" currency from the Federal Reserve.  Yellen told fake financial news outlet CNBC that passing the Biden regime's new multi-trillion-dollar "infrastructure" package is the only way to lower prices at a time when the impact of previous spending bills is already moving the country towards a hyperinflationary collapse.  "What this package will do is lower some of the most important costs, what they pay for health care, for child care," Yellen stated, "they" referring to the peons below her who are suffering because of she and the regime's existing monetary policies.  "It's anti-inflationary in that sense as well," she added with a straight face.

The Left's Bungled Revolution.  The supply chain debacle has been portrayed by media as one of those inexplicable black swans that come out of nowhere and are beyond human comprehension.  This is nonsense.  The sole cause of this "crisis" is a demented diktat from Gavin Newsom forbidding trucks more than three years old from loading at California ports.  The logic behind this is unknown, but presumably has something to do with Gaia being angry.  The end result is what we see: ships backed up off LA, containers piling up in the ports (or even dumped in hapless LA neighborhoods), and shortages as far as the eye can see.  Lost amid all the uproar are the nation's truckers, who must be boiling over with fury.  (Try to find a single quote from one in the legacy media.)  Florida governor Ron DeSantis has immediately leapt in to offer his state's ports to all comers, and will presumably be followed by other governors, so long-term, the situation will right itself, as tends to happen in capitalist economies.  But the wounds inflicted will last a long time — and California slides ever closer to the precipice.

Americans Want This President Out.  No one should be puzzled by the poll's results.  Americans are weary of Biden's inflation, his border crisis and unforced foreign policy errors, a supply chain and a COVID promise that have both been broken, his failed energy policies, his undermining of policing and law and order across the country, his divisiveness and hard-left swerve, his "woke" military, a shaky economy, and his vaccine mandate, to name but a handful of his more notable failures.  Count us as being among those who wish to see Biden leave the White House as soon as possible.  But his replacement would be no better.  There's a reason Vice President Kamala Harris has an approval rating of 28, 10 points lower than the approval rating of her boss, the man Americans want to be rid of.

Biden's cobra presidency.  Have you noticed how Joe Biden says he wants to lower gas prices, so he cancels the Keystone pipeline?  He wants to lower unemployment, so he pays people not to work?  He wants to beat inflation, so the Fed prints more money?  Biden is President Perverse.  The Cobra Effect is economics slang for "perverse incentives."  If you give your kid money every time the kid misbehaves, that's a perverse incentive. [...] The resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave isn't just failing; he does the opposite of a competent president.  He's perverse.  Most of us are beginning to get that.  The Afghan withdrawal was a classic lesson in how not to conduct a competent military withdrawal.  This is perverse.  You tell Americans you support the military, and you make the military look like bumbling fools.  It's like the fat hippie admiral the left just created.  Look at the photo, and you see perversity, the opposite of honor.

A Deeper Divide.  Don't let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamic gunmen for playing music at a wedding.  No sirree, people over here are shot every day and night, but not for playing music at a wedding.  Give New York credit where it's due.  The city is a bloody horror if you're living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, while the rest of Gotham is experiencing a new story of street savagery not seen in decades.  The rich continue to leave, taking their tax revenue with them down south; the huddled masses arrive with outstretched palms expecting social justice.  Street crime is rampant, Times Square is no longer a tourist trap because one can get killed there, yet the media continue to write and report on the evils of... Donald Trump.  The perpetually offended, however, blame all this on racism by whites, ignoring that black-on-black crime is responsible for 95 percent and more of murders.

Democrats Have Only Themselves to Blame for the Inflation Fiasco.  It's been quite a spectacle watching people who credit Democrats with every job created and every percentage point gained in economic growth suddenly arguing that the White House is completely powerless in the face of our current economic predicament.  Presidents generally get far too much credit and/or blame for our fortunes, but they can certainly exacerbate existing problems.  And our political class has certainly aggravated them with unbridled spending and support for policies that disincentivize work and inhibit energy production.  Wholesale prices rose 8.6% from a year ago in October, another record annual gain and the biggest spike in more than a decade.  Inflation hit 6.2%, the highest rate of annualized inflation since the 1990s.  Whereas once voters were promised "transitory" inflation, today, economists warn that we'll be in this for a while.

Crime-ravaged Seattle is now so dangerous it can no longer protect its own workers.  Seattle has become so dangerous that the city can no longer protect its own employees, with security guards now escorting them after they finish work.  King County's new 'walking bus' will debut on November 15, and see council workers based in Downtown Seattle and nearby Pioneer Square escorted to a nearby train station and ferry terminal each evening before being left to continue their commute home.  An announcement on King County's official website says: 'King County is launching a 'Walking Bus' pilot program where county employees can join their colleagues and a Facilities Management Division (FMD) Security Escort each evening walking to the King Street Station and the Coleman Dock from the downtown campus.'

Your Money Is Now Losing Close to 1 Percent of Its Value Every 30 Days, According to Labor Bureau Data.  The U.S. dollar is now losing close to 1 percent of its value every 30 days, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released on Wednesday [11/10/2021].  Currently, inflation of the U.S. dollar is at its highest level since 1990.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of the average monthly change in the price for goods and services paid by urban consumers, increased 0.9 percent last month, more than doubling September's 0.4 percent increase.  Overall, prices rose 6.2 percent from one year ago, representing the largest year-on-year increase in more than 30 years as inflation persists across sectors, according to the Bureau.  The cost of food also increased by 5.3 percent during the month of October, riding on the back of unprecedented supply chain issues.

Manchin says DC can 'no longer ignore inflation' and Americans' 'economic pain'.  The White House on Wednesday [11/10/2021] was forced to contend with a new report showing a jump in inflation on a range of consumer goods used by ordinary Americans — while Sen. Joe Manchin warned inflation was 'getting worse' at a time when President Joe Biden needs his vote on a key social spending bill.  Biden said in a statement Wednesday morning that 'inflation hurts' as he blamed a sharp increase in October compared to last year on an increase in the cost of energy.  The president made the statement amid a new government figure revealing a 6.2 percent jump in the Consumer Price Index in October compared to a year ago.

The Sissy Generation.  Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed "The Greatest Generation" — the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with miniscule mortality (for the vast majority of population), and which is to a large degree treatable. [...] The word that we heard the most during this time was 'safety'.  Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal.  Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month.  Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody.  Safety is king!  How did we end up here?  As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly.  The worship of safety began long ago and now it's everywhere.  Everything we buy and use, from lawn mowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes the elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation.  And not only is it a legal requirement, but for many people safety became the most important feature of any device.

AMA Becomes a Shill of the Left.  [Scroll down]  As is always the case in any despotic grab for power, language is the first victim.  Thus, the AMA recommends the recently published guidance from the CDC, in its "Health Equity Guiding Principles for Unbiased, Inclusive Communication," which lays out five key principles:  1. Avoid use of adjectives such as 'vulnerable' and 'high-risk.'  2. Avoid dehumanizing language.  Use person-first language instead.  3. Remember that there are many types of subpopulations.  4. Avoid saying 'target,' 'tackle,' 'combat' or other terms with violent connotation when referring to people, groups or communities.  5. Avoid unintentional blaming.  Thus, an overweight individual with Type 2 diabetes is not at high risk when going in for surgery.  In fact, "doctors are being warned not to tell a morbidly obese heart attack patient to eat less."  Ignore personal responsibility.  Don't use empirical knowledge to truly assist a population.  The convolutions and gobbledygook used by the Left are always meant to distract people from seeing through the Left's ulterior motives.

October Prices Jump 6.2 Percent Creating Biggest Inflation Increase In 30 Years.  Consumer prices in October increased by a historic 6.2 percent over the year prior making it the biggest inflation jump in 30 years.  According to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans also paid 0.9 percent more on daily goods and other items than they did in September.  "Along with shelter, used cars and trucks, and new vehicles, the indexes for medical care, for household furnishing and operations, and for recreation all increased in October," the report noted.  These rising prices come on the heels of a massive supply-chain crisis fueled by the Biden administration's lack of action and a nation still recovering from months of shutdowns mandated by politicians who sacrificed economic stability and viability to keep people at home.  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently joked that the supply-chain issues facing a majority of American families are simply "the tragedy of the treadmill that's delayed," and White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain also downplayed the crisis in a retweet mischaracterizing the historic inflation and backup of goods as "high class problems."

Used Vehicle Prices Hyperinflate as Inflation Begins to Spiral Out ff Control All Over America.  It turns out that all of the "doom and gloomers" that were warning that we would eventually experience nightmarish inflation were right after all.  In particular, vehicle prices have become exceedingly painful in recent months.  Due to a crippling global shortage of computer chips, production of new vehicles is way down, and a lot of that demand has shifted into the used vehicle market.  Over the past year, used vehicle prices have escalated at a pace that we have never seen before in our entire history, and things reached a crescendo during the month of October.  If you can believe it, used vehicle prices increased by 9.2 percent last month.  If used vehicle prices rose by 9.2 percent for an entire year, that would be really bad.  For that to happen in just one month is simply breathtaking.

Where is surging inflation hitting Americans the hardest?  American households are coping with the fastest price increases in more than three decades, with the cost of everything from cars to gasoline to food surging in October, the Labor Department reported Wednesday [11/10/2021].  The consumer price index, which measures a bevy of goods ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents, jumped 6.2% from the year-ago period — the highest since December 1990.  It toppled the previous month's high of 5.4%.  From September to October, prices climbed 0.9%.  "I expect lots of eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets when they saw the number come in," said Seema Shah, chief strategist at Principal Global Investors.  "Inflation is clearly getting worse before it gets better, while the significant rise in shelter prices is adding to concerning evidence of a broadening in inflation pressures."

Producer Prices Rose 8.6 Percent in October, Massive Inflation Continues With No Signs of Slowing Down.  This might be somewhat preaching to the choir, but it's the only way I know to help Treepers prepare their families according to very visible economic signals happening just over the horizon.  Back in August, when we discussed the massive inflation that was climbing straight up, I warned everyone to look behind the finished good prices, into the prices of origination and intermediate goods.  The "producer price index" is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate and Final.  The final product inflation rate in July (reported in August) was alarming at 7.8%.  However, we warned of much higher flowing into the supply chain.  Today, The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released stunning price data for October, showing a dramatic 8.6% price increase in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  As expected prices are still going up, and there's no end in sight, because the raw material inflation is still higher than current.

What I Saw At Our Southern Border.  Those in charge of our country are not interested in you or your grievances.  They're interested in one thing: fundamentally transforming this country and all but guaranteeing the demise of western civilization.  The shifting demographic of this nation will ensure that the United States of America as we know it will disappear.  Millions have invaded our country, possessing no allegiance to this nation or its history and as people with little in common are forced to live together, not even speaking the same language, cultural clashes will ensue.  Our government has ceased to perform its most basic function and we have simply been too lazy to notice or even care.  The total stand down at our border is symbolic of what is happening in the rest of the country.  The border, our nation's debt, the fracturing of our culture, and the decline in living standards are all tied together.  One trip to the border and you understand that the defund the police movement is simply an extension of the policy implemented at our borders.

Annual inflation hits 30-year high, 6.2 percent in past year.  Consumer prices grew far faster than expected in October, according to data released Wednesday [11/10/2021] by the Labor Department.  The consumer price index (CPI), which tracks inflation for a range of staple goods and services, rose 0.9 percent last month and 6.2 percent in the 12-month period ending in October, the highest rate in the U.S. in 30 years.  Analysts broadly expected the CPI to rise by 0.5 percent last month, up from a gain of 0.4 percent in August, and 5.8 percent over the past year.  The sharp jump in the inflation rate is a dismal sign for President Biden and Democrats as they face growing pressure over rising prices.  Despite strength across the economy, the president's approval rating has fallen steadily since spring due in part to growing political backlash over higher food and gas prices.

Also posted under The Unexpected.

Inflation Increases At a Record Rate For the Second Month In A Row.  The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures inflation at the wholesale level, rose 8.6% year-over-year as of October, growing at a record rate for a second straight month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced Thursday.  BLS reported Thursday that the PPI, which measures inflation before it hits consumers, grew 0.6% in October, in line with Dow Jones estimates, highlighting that inflationary pressure is still strong.

America is already short 80,000 truck drivers and the industry is warning that Biden's vaccine mandate will only make it worse.  It's bad enough that the Biden administration's vaccine mandate is probably gonna wreak havoc on a huge multitude of industries, exacerbating the already fragile labor market.  But its effects on the trucking industry may very well be catastrophic.

Purposeful Crisis Keeps Unfolding as Biden's Irrelevant Polling Keeps Collapsing.  We are witnessing a very specific type of electoral frustration caused by officials within a system attempting to stop a communist style fundamental change by taking action within the same system simultaneously collapsing through the actions of the communists. [...] The Obama plan to use Biden as a disposable figure was designed for one specific four year term of maximum damage.  The polling is irrelevant.  Evidence of this purpose is found in the White House telling businesses to continue operating as if the vaccine mandate is legally authorized, despite a court ordered injunction against it.  We are in a post-constitutional system now where the traditional checks and balances are ignored.  This is a very Machiavellian approach being deployed against the American people.

How did we get here?  Can this mess be fixed?  Today's polarization, some say, can be solved by compromise.  Beware of solutions that are worse than the problem.  We have reached our woke relativistic condition precisely thanks to compromise.  It's a compromise only if something is surrendered.  When a person who holds a truthful belief compromises with someone who believes a lie, the result is a truth-believer agreeing to recognize partial truth.  The more compromises, the farther one moves away from truth.  This is how truth has been progressively undermined in our land, leading to the approval of baby-murder by the child's own mother in the place the kid should be most safe, and a political "leader" who dictates what people must do "for their own good," whether they want to or not.

Trickle-Down Bidenism.  Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively "cheap" propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.  At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel.  It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago.  I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.  I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man.  He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking — as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.  Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out?  At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves.  But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.

Granholm's 'Shock' Aside, US Energy Dominance Is Exactly Where Biden Wants It — Weakened.  When U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked a direct question about skyrocketing gas prices, her response was as telling as it was disappointing.  Instead of offering middle-class Americans an explanation or an apology or a sliver of hope, she let out a hearty laugh.  "Oh my... that is hilarious!  As you know, oil is a global market.  It is controlled by a cartel, that cartel is called OPEC, and they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase [production] beyond what they were already planning."  How did America fall so far, so fast on the topic of energy?  How, in less than a calendar year, did we go from energy independence to begging foreign cartels like OPEC for more supply?  We went from net-exporting our oil to hoping that someone will help fill gaps in our energy supply.

Incompetent and Ideological Energy Secretary Says You Will Pay Historic Rates For Home Heating, and There is Nothing They Can Do About It.  A comprehensively incompetent U.S. Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, has the audacity to say that Biden's administration has no responsibility for gas prices likely to reach $4/gal, and Americans this year are almost certain to pay historic amounts for home heating oil and natural gas.  Everything in this soundbite from her interview with CNN is stunningly false, manipulative and misleading.  The U.S. has an abundant amount of energy resources, likely more oil than all other OPEC countries combined in Alaska alone.  The issue is a current administration that refuses to extract oil and natural gas because they are purposefully and intentionally intent on destroying the U.S. economy under the guise of climate change.  Granholm admits that gasoline is likely to go beyond $4/gal in the national average, and home heating costs are almost certain to crush Americans this year.  Infuriating to see such willful stupidity go unchallenged.  [Video clip]

Sen. Barrasso:  At Climate Conference Biden 'Pledged Allegiance To The Flag Of The United Nations' Not The United States.  Republican Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso said Sunday [11/7/2021] that President Joe Biden embarrassed Americans at the recent climate conference in Glasgow by pledging "allegiance to the flag of the United Nations," not the United States. [...] The senator claimed that energy prices are increasing because Biden on "day number one killed the Keystone XL pipeline" while inhibiting oil and gas exploration and blocking "leasing opportunities" in the Rocky Mountains.  Barrasso also said that Biden has "shut down" Alaskan energy so much that the U.S. is now buying more oil from Russia.  He said to add insult to injury the Biden administration is composed of "climate hypocrites," creating a carbon footprint at the conference that was "so much larger than Vladimir Putin's or President Xi's of China — because they stayed home."

Ten-dollar gas?  Midwest freeze?  Joe Biden might just bring that to America next.  So what other catastrophes does Joe Biden have in store for us, now that he's shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, halted drilling on federal lands, opened the border, brought back Jimmy Carter-style inflation, and abandoned Afghanistan in shambles?  Looks like a good bet is even higher energy prices. [...] Apparently [Biden] has no idea what shutting a vital energy pipeline down does, how energy gets important was winter approaches, or what a Michigan winter is like.  What's more, he seems to have no recollection of the Texas winter of last year with its heating and electricity emergencies which ought to have been a warning.  His energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, does. [...] Whatever she may have in mind, Biden's scheme to shut down the Michigan pipeline in response to environmental activist demands, is going make it worse.

Food Prices Vault to Highest Level in a Decade.  Food prices across the world have risen to their highest levels in a decade on the back of tightening supply conditions coupled with robust demand, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  The FAO's food price index, which measures world food commodity prices, surged 31.3 percent in the 12 months through October, coming in at a reading of 133.2 points, a level not seen since July 2011.  On a month-over-month basis, the index rose by 3.9 points, or 3.0 percent, with the October rise representing the third consecutive month of increases.  Accounting for the bulk of the rise in the index were higher prices of most cereals and vegetable oils.

Joe Biden Mocks The American People — "They Don't Understand Supply Chains" — The People are Rubes to Be Ruled, Not Listened To.  I'm not sure what is more blood boiling:  that Joe Biden thinks it is okay to mock the American electorate, or that he actually believes the [stuff] that comes out of his twisted, stupid brain.  The question was a perfectly well presented inquiry about the Biden administration's incompetence to put policies in place to streamline the supply chain chaos that he has created.  His response is disconnected, absent of anything even remotely accurate, and entirely disconnected from factual substance.  This guy is a complete and utter failure of staggering and stunning incompetence.  [Video clip] [...] COVID didn't do squat to disrupt supply chains, impact prices or create massive shortages and inflation — people did.  Specifically, the people in the background of this administration who intentionally trashed the U.S. economy, because they are ideologically aligned with that destruction.  The current economic team is devoid of any real world experience that would shape their outlooks on how to solve problems.  Example:  Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg.

GOP betrays its base — again!.  It has been almost a year since Biden occupied the White House, and his record has been a disaster.  Inflation is out of control; gasoline prices have risen; the supply chain crisis means that essential items may not reach shopping centers; the IRS wants to monitor bank transactions; and the border is open, leading to a historic surge of illegal aliens.  They are considering $450,000 payments to illegal migrants separated from their families at the border.  Vaccine mandates are hampering essential services and causing unemployment.  Afghanistan was a total disaster of chaos, defeat, and instability, while China is emboldened.  Hunter Biden brokered shady deals in Ukraine and China that earned him millions when Joe was vice president, and now, when he is president, Hunter's paintings fetch a price higher than works of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas at anonymous art auctions, pointing to likely bribery and influence-peddling.  This merits the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the conflict of interest and to know if Biden is compromised or is susceptible to blackmail.  How do the Republicans react?  A majority remain silent.  The Senate and House minority leaders are missing.

Trucking Groups Could Lose 37% Of Drivers Over Biden Vaccine Mandate, Worsening Supply Chain Crisis.  Dozens of industry groups warned President Biden that his vaccine mandate would intensify rampant supply chain bottlenecks.  On Thursday [11/4/2021], the Biden administration revealed its COVID-19 vaccine and testing mandate for employees at businesses with 100 or more workers.  Noncompliant companies may be fined roughly $14,000 per violation.  In their open letter to President Biden, the industry groups — which included the American Trucking Associations, National Private Truck Council, and Truckload Carriers Association — predicted that trucking companies may lose nearly four in ten drivers due to the mandate.

One Minute Before Midnight.  Democrats know that time favors them and their unending quest for more power and control.  Demographic change, brought on in large part by their open borders policy, is perhaps their biggest trump (and anti-Trump) card.  In addition, their control of academia, the mainstream media, social media, entertainment, professional sports leagues, Big Tech, and Big Business boardrooms grants them a stranglehold on the flow of information with which most people will come in contact.  Leftists have successfully completed their "long march through the institutions" on which they embarked in the late 1960s.  Moreover, Democrats, in control of all branches of the federal government, have enacted new laws with the sole intention of enhancing their power.

In 2022, the Democrats Biggest Enemy is Voter Revulsion.  Democrats haven't grasped this yet, but it's too late for them.  The die is cast.  An electoral bloodbath awaits next year, akin to or surpassing what happened to their party in 2010.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's and the Squad's anti-American leftist politics drive their party, and that's beginning to register at a gut-level with voters.  What voters — critically, that big, pivotal segment known as independents — now feel is revulsion for Democrats in not just one way but many.  The intensity of that revulsion is bound to grow in the coming months.  How do we know that?  In the first 10 months of the Biden presidency, we went from a functioning country recovering from needless Covid lockdowns to a nation suddenly skidding downhill.

The Great Biden Slowdown — here's how he stifled growth, discouraged consumers in just 9 month.  Joe Biden has pulled off the incredible: inherit a booming economy and bring it to a near-standstill in just nine months.  When the president took office, the country was enjoying a robust V-shaped recovery, growing at better than 6%. The Federal Reserve was puffing up the money supply by $120 billion per month, consumers were sitting atop $2.5 trillion in excess savings, prices were stable and unemployment was falling fast. [...] In the last quarter, notwithstanding continued monetary largesse (some would say recklessness) from the Fed and an ongoing gusher of aid money flowing from the government, growth slowed to an anemic 2%, while the "price deflator," a.k.a. inflation, rose to 5.7%.  More worrisome, Americans are discouraged.

San Francisco grocery store closing earlier due to shoplifting.  A 24-hour San Francisco grocery store will now be closing early due to excessive thefts at night, joining other retailers that have been forced to alter their hours due to rampant stealing.  The Safeway grocery in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco has moved from operating 24 hours a day to closing from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., KPIX reported.  The news station reported that customers were surprised by this decision. [...] This decision by the Castro Safeway comes less than a month after pharmacy retail giant Walgreens announced it would be closing some locations in San Francisco due to organized retail theft.  One San Francisco Walgreens that was closed last year was reportedly losing $1,000 to theft a day.

Trash Piles Up, and Fire Stations Shut Down in NYC As De Blasio's Vaccine Mandate Goes into Effect.  Trash is piling up, and fire stations are shutting down in New York City, as thousands of municipal workers defy Mayor Bill de Blasio's unconstitutional vaccine mandate.  After the mandate went into effect on Monday [11/1/2021], massive piles of garbage appeared in numerous spots around the city, as 17 percent of sanitation workers refuse to get the experimental injections.  [Tweet]  On Saturday, the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) reportedly shuttered 26 fire companies due to staff shortages caused by the COVID-19 vaccination mandate.

The Great Resignation [is] Due to Biden.  Americans have long been among the hardest-working in the world.  But Biden's mishandling of Covid has caused millions of our best workers to quit their jobs each month.  The "Great Resignation," as it's being called, should be by the occupant of the White House who lacks the mental capacity to do his job.  Instead, top workers in every field are the ones resigning, which leaves America without the manpower necessary to keep our great country running.  Americans expect good service, and do not tolerate long waiting lines and shortages that are familiar to people in many other countries.  When hundreds of thousands are stranded at our airports, as happened when pilots did not show up for work, millions of Americans were outraged by the disruption.  More than pilots are deciding not to show up at their jobs.  Amid a substantial loss in uniformed officers in Los Angeles county, homicides are up by 44% and aggravated assaults have increased by 23%.

Blame Public Schools for Transgender Bathroom Rapes.  In Loudoun County in Virginia, Scott Smith was dragged out of a school board meeting and arrested because he claimed that his daughter had been sodomized in the girls' restroom by a male wearing a skirt.  He was angry because the school had tried to conceal it, despite there being medical tests as proof.  Nearly two months after Smith's arrest, the school board voted to approve its transgender rights policy, which requires that teachers use students' preferred pronouns.  From six states in 2019, today, only four have laws that forbid instruction of LGBT propaganda in public schools:  Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  Alabama repealed its law, and South Carolina's was overturned.  Despite Texas law, schools actively promote transgenderism.  The library at the elementary Blackshear Fine Arts Academy in Austin hosted a drag queen convicted of prostitution charges.  A few weeks later, the Austin ISD School Board of Trustees adopted a radical sex curriculum.  Despite heavy parent opposition, the Austin school district continues to promote a radical sex curriculum.

This Can't Be True.  Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, that they can't be serious, that it seems as if the "Biden" administration's sole goal is to make each person's life as wretchedly painful as possible, BAM! — another incredible misery warhead detonates on our reality.  With their excessive government spending and totally-over-the-top COVID unemployment assistance (to the point that far too many people are completely disincentivized from going back to work), inflation has roared back with a vengeance not seen in decades.  The economy is reeling, household budgets are upside-down, and everyone's purchasing power is melting away before our eyes.  The government stutters and yammers about it being "transitory," but everyone can see that's simply not true.

Portland Travel Group Says City Is Too Scary For Tourists.  Travel Portland is the name of group that promotes tourism to the city.  It describes itself as "a promoter and steward of this evolving city and its progressive values, which have the power to transform the travelers who visit us."  But Wednesday [10/27/2021] the group presented a report to the Portland City Council with some bad news.  The evolving city and its progressive values have become a big turn off to tourists.

Biden and his nitwit advisors urge foreign producers to pump more oil.  Joe Biden, his spokeswoman Jen Psaki[,] and others in their orbit want foreign producers to drill more fossil fuels because for some reason we don't have enough energy over here. [...] It's as if Biden didn't shut down drilling and pipelines over here.  That couldn't have caused the problems.  It is probably Trump's fault.  That is who they always blame.  It's as if Democrats aren't shooting for carbon zero by 2030 and trying to destroy anyone who produces and uses oil, natural gas, and coal.  It's as if the Democrats didn't have a theatrical hearing to destroy and bankrupt the oil producers, with no evidence, that they cause temperatures to rise and climate change.

Rep Donalds Explains Why Biden's Energy Policies will Drive CO2 Emissions Up.  Rep Donalds (R-FL) ripping into Congressional attempts to intimidate energy producers and violate their First Amendment rights, and explaining that China and Russia are not attending COP26 because they want to "build an economy".  [Video clip]  Rep Donalds demonstrates an impressive grasp of the issues, explaining that if Democrats punish gas production, energy producers will go back to burning coal, and emissions will rise — because gas or coal are the only options.  A lot of power plants these days which burn coal actually turn the coal into a gas before burning it, so it is surprisingly straightforward to flip a modern gas generator back to burning coal, or vice versa, once the appropriate gassifier equipment is installed.  No doubt utility companies are already preparing for the switch.  If Biden's democrats shut down the US gas industry, because of the climate methane scare or continued harassment of fracking, coal use will surge almost overnight.

Border crisis hits classrooms as unaccompanied minors flood NY schools.  America's crisis at the border is now a crisis in New York public schools.  The Biden Administration is flooding New York City and Long Island communities with thousands of unaccompanied immigrant minors captured crossing the Mexico-US border, often arriving here, as The Post recently reported, via clandestine flights in the middle of the night.  The arrival of these children, mostly teenage boys, in local schools is creating a classroom crisis that is strapping educational resources, costing taxpayers millions in un-budgeted dollars, and aiding gang-recruiting efforts, argue parents, teachers and immigration experts.  "We're at maxed capacity for kids with special needs, but they'll keep sending them," lamented one high school teacher in Queens, among the communities hardest hit by the illegal-immigrant student dump.

Los Angeles County sheriff blasts vaccine mandate causing 'mass exodus'.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is warning of an "imminent threat to public safety" and a "pandemic of chaos" because of staffing shortages caused by the city's vaccine mandate.  Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who has said he won't enforce the county's order that took effect Oct. 1, said Thursday that up to 30 percent of the department's 18,000 employees are "no longer available" to provide service following the Board of Supervisors mandate for all 110,000 employees.  "We are experiencing an increase in unscheduled retirements, worker compensation claims, employees quitting, and a reduction in qualified applicants," Villanueva said in a statement obtained by The [New York] Post.  "As a result, homicide rates will continue to rise, response times will increase, solve rates will diminish, arrests will decline, patrol services will significantly decline, and patrol stations will close."

Anarchy Reigns in Portland.  Anarchy reigns in the City of Roses.  Over the weekend, police were called to 19 shootings.  One of which is likely to be ruled a double homicide, bringing the total number of murders in Portland this year to 71, surpassing the 1987 record of 70.  Homicides are only part of a larger problem in Portland.  Earlier in October, a mob of around 100 anarchists tore up the downtown part of the city while police looked on.  They went on a rampage, spraying slogans like "kill cops" on the buildings they vandalized, and did at least $500,000 worth of damage, according to Fox Business.  The Portland Police Bureau said that no arrests were made because of the destruction.  But that wasn't the fault of the police.  Instead, the problem is the politicians who govern the state and local officials, who have intentionally tied the hands of law enforcement.  They are the reason why it is impossible to stop criminals and mobs from doing what they wish to the city.

The deadly word games that brought us 'Gain of Function'.  Washington, D.C. is the biggest home of lies and word games in the known cosmos.  In D.C., a seven-trillion-dollar punch in your wallet costs you absolutely nothing, according to the president of the United States himself.  In Washington, D.C. a fat, aging hippie man becomes the first "female" four-star admiral of the United States, and nobody is allowed to laugh.  In fairytale D.C., a tricked out flu virus is the biggest, scariest pandemic since the Black Death, and they will cancel you if you deny it.  In Washington, D.C., Dr. Fauci is a hometown hero, because he is the slickest liar of them all, ever since he rocketed to fame on the tail of the AIDS disaster.

Will Governments Survive the Coming Peasant Revolt?  Let's talk big picture here.  Why has the world been turned on its head these last few years?  Why does it seem as if everything true is labeled false and everything false is labeled true? [...] If post-WWII Western governance had a creed, it is this:  increased taxation and increased regulation increases both asset wealth and inequality.  By taxing labor, the value of hard work has plummeted.  By regulating anything and everything, the entry costs for any new entrepreneur have skyrocketed.  And because the Industrial Revolution's trends toward producing more and varied innovations at cheaper costs have hit the roadblock of government interference, fewer innovations, less competition, and increased monopoly ownership have logically resulted.  Instead of assets going down in value over time as more are produced, they actually increase in value as it becomes harder to produce them.  While people with assets see gains in wealth, people depending on income to survive have experienced more difficulty affording what is produced.  This is why inequality has surged in the United States, when America was not long ago the nation with the greatest intragenerational social mobility in the world.

On Campuses, Secularism Breeds Suicide.  It's no coincidence that mental illness among America's younger generation is at an all-time high, while their religious practice is at an all-time low.  Last month (Oct. 12), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cancelled classes for a day for its 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, who were urged to consider it a "wellness day" in the wake of two on-campus suicides and an attempted suicide.  Colleges and universities are in the midst of a full-blown mental health crisis.  UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said as much during his announcement.  In a 2019 survey, an unbelievable 45 percent of undergraduate and graduate students "felt so depressed that it was difficult to function" at least once during the previous 12 months, according to the American College Health Association.

Biden Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy Pours Gasoline on Rising Gas Prices With Ridiculous Announcement.  Amid soaring gas prices, White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy on Thursday [10/28/2021] announced that the Biden administration is going to increase regulations on the oil industry:  "There's a place for" regulation and "We're going to use it," McCarthy said during an appearance on MSNBC's "Hallie Jackson Reports."

Scandal-hit Loudoun County rocked by another sexual assault case.  The embattled school district in Virginia's Loudoun County has another problem on its hands to add to the notorious 'boy in a skirt' rape case.  Cops in the county are now investigating 'multiple' incidents of a middle school boy groping other boys, the county's sheriff's office confirmed exclusively to DailyMail.com.  The alleged assaults all happened at Harmony Middle School in Hamilton, Virginia, sheriff's spokesman Kraig Troxell revealed.

Loudoun County Sheriff Investigating Multiple Incidents of 'Inappropriate Touching' in Middle School.  An investigation is underway in Loudoun County by the sheriff's office after multiple reported incidents of a male student touching other students inappropriately at a district middle school.  The Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) reported Thursday its school resource office learned from school personnel that on Wednesday a male student had been inappropriately touched over his clothing by another male student in a hallway of Harmony Middle School.

America Gone Mad.  After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, "We're back."  As one eminent elected British government official put it, "They are not back in any conventional sense of that word.  We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months.  We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it.  This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason."

Former Soros Activist Explains How Progressive Policies Ruined San Francisco.  There's a crisis in San Francisco.  Homelessness has skyrocketed and drug use is rampant.  Michael Shellenberger moved to San Francisco in 1993 to work on liberal causes, and even spent time working for George Soros' foundation.  He advocated the decriminalization of drugs and promoted drug treatment programs.  But, Shellenberger says, he began to worry when he saw the number of drug overdose deaths in America rise from 17,000 in 2000 to more than 70,000 by 2017.  "Clearly, we are in the midst of a massive drug crisis," Shellenberger says, "and it felt like nobody was offering a particularly clear explanation of it or offering very good solutions."  Out of frustration over the problems he was seeing in San Francisco and other liberal cities, Shellenberger became determined to diagnose the problems driving the homeless crisis and find solutions.  He presents the result of his research and investigation in his new book "San Fransicko:  Why Progressives Ruin Cities."

Loudoun County Father Who Was Slandered, Beaten, and Arrested Speaks Out.  The horror that has occurred in Loudoun County, VA has gone mainstream over the last several months, and the area is now ground zero in the nation's fight against far-left, degenerate school boards.  Multiple scandals have transpired, with the biggest being the attempted cover-up of multiple sexual assaults, one of which appears to have happened as a result of the school board's "transgender bathroom" policy.

Ilhan Omar blames 'dysfunctional' police for Minneapolis violent crime spike.  Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., blamed police for the recent rise in crime in Minneapolis, accusing the city's officers of not fulfilling their oath of office.  "What we must also recognize is that the reduction in policing currently in our city and the lawlessness that is happening is due to two things," Omar said during a town hall event Saturday in Minneapolis.  One of them, she said, is that "the police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office and to provide the public safety they are owed to the citizens they serve."  The lawmaker's comments come as violent crime has surged in Minnesota over the last year, rising 17% in total while setting records for murders.  Omar's approach to crime includes backing a Nov. 2 ballot measure to replace the entire Minneapolis police department with a "Department of Public Safety."  The measure would remove the requirement that the city have a minimum number of officers based on the city's population.

California Drove Truckers Out of Business.  Now Store Shelves Are Empty.  2019 was described as a "bloodbath" for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year.  Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed.  Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon.  But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.  Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority's Assembly Bill 5 into law.  While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat l freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law.  (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)  AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions.  The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism.  One of the fields was trucking.

The California Version of The Green New Deal is What's Creating The Container Shipping Backlog.  Hundreds of requests for details on the specifics of the container shipping backlog.  So, I spent 3 days calling sources, digging for details and gathering information on the substantive issue at hand.  The epicenter of the problem is not what is being outlined by financial media, corporate media and politicians who have a specific interest in distracting from the issues at hand.  This has nothing to do with COVID-19.  The issues being discussed today relate to events that happened a long time ago.  As a matter of fact, it was so predictable that Amazon, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Samsung, The Home Depot and Target all had taken actions years ago — long before COVID — because they knew this day would come.  It was not accidental that those companies showed up at the White House to discuss the issue, because there's now a full court press to hide it.

Another man in dress and wig arrested filming young girls in bathrooms.  Are we seeing more of this type of horrific behavior these days, or was it always out there but the press didn't pay as much attention to it?  The subject is once again the periodic arrests of perverse pedophiles who violate the privacy of women and young girls in public spaces and even in their homes.  The alleged cretin in today's story allegedly managed to pull off both types of activity over a lengthy period of time before finally being apprehended.  Jacob M. Guerrero of Woonsocket, Rhode Island was arrested on Tuesday for activities he allegedly undertook in the women's restrooms at a mall in Wrentham, Massachusetts.  Guerrero was seen (and photographed) by the mother of a young girl who became suspicious when she saw him dressed in a dress and a wig and hanging around outside the ladies' room at the mall, following a group of girls inside.

The Editor says...
Whose idea was it to allow transvestites to use the women's restrooms?  It was the left-wing push-the-envelope Democrats.  And now we see the inevitable results.

Higher prices are the cost of Biden's war on fossil fuels.  On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden promised to create for America a green economy.  And he specifically mentioned that the way to do this is to denigrate fossil fuels.  And now that this mentally addled man has been installed as president, he and his like-minded administration of leftists have been focused towards this objective.  And behold what they've accomplished just on the energy front in just nine short months.  In January of this year until the end of September, the price of crude oil has jumped from $49.73/bbl to $70.15.  This is a 41 percent increase, and this trend is not stopping.  The current price of oil as of this writing is more than $80 a barrel.  Oil is, of course, the main driver of gasoline prices.  Accordingly the average retail price of gasoline year-to-date has risen from $2.42 to $3.27 — a 35 percent rise.  It's a simple calculation to figure out how much extra that costs you based on how many vehicles your household drives, their fuel efficiencies (mpg), and the number of miles driven.

Our Purgatory Is Their Nirvana.  Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border?  Afghanistan — the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history?  A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out?  The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?  Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring?  Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences?  Joe Biden's policies and Biden himself diving in the polls?  Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months.

Voters [are] already blaming government spending for rising prices.  We're still a long ways away from the double-digit inflation of the early 1980s.  However, while prices of specific things like healthcare, college, or gas have been political hot-buttons from time to time, the issue of inflation writ-large has barely registered as a major issue during my lifetime.  This makes it notable that inflation is emerging as a key worry for voters and that many are tying the inflation specifically to Democratic policies.  The Biden administration is struggling with voters as of late, and disappointment in the state of the economy is a major piece of this dynamic.

The California Supply Crisis Was Entirely Predictable:  Just Ask Hayek.  In short, [Friedrich] Hayek and the "Chicago school" argue no central planning is adequate in anticipating and distributing economic resources in a society.  No individual despot or group of central planners have enough knowledge to act prudently and with foresight.  It will, instead, always result in inefficiencies, supply and demand distortions, and lowered economic growth.  In addition, because central planners, by definition, must take control away from individuals, it reduces the people to a form of "serfdom."  The people in a socialist system are coerced to comply.  We do not yet have a socialist political system in this country, though California may be as close as we've come with its governmental overreach in economic, employment, educational and social matters.

United Airlines CEO says airfare prices are set to soar by Christmas as jet fuel prices rise.  Air fares are set to soar just in time for the holiday season, as jet fuel pries rise to pre-pandemic levels, the United Airlines CEO warned on Wednesday [10/20/2021].  Jet fuel prices are already up more than 100 percent compared to just one year ago, CNBC reports, with the price per gallon set at $2.3282 on Tuesday.  But Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, said that the prices may go up even further.  He forecasted an average fuel cost of $2.39 a gallon in the fourth quarter of the year, as United expects a surge in bookings for the holiday season.

The California Version of The Green New Deal is What's Creating The Container Shipping Backlog.  Hundreds of requests for details on the specifics of the container shipping backlog.  So, I spent 3 days calling sources, digging for details and gathering information on the substantive issue at hand.  The epicenter of the problem is not what is being outlined by financial media, corporate media and politicians who have a specific interest in distracting from the issues at hand.  This has nothing to do with COVID-19.  The issues being discussed today relate to events that happened a long time ago.  As a matter of fact, it was so predictable that Amazon, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Samsung, The Home Depot and Target all had taken actions years ago -long before COVID- because they knew this day would come.  It was not accidental that those companies showed up at the White House to discuss the issue, because there's now a full court press to hide it.  There is one very specific regional issue driving the problem. [...]

Reports: California crackdown on truckers hurts supply chains.  New reports revealed a supply glut in the Port of Los Angeles is a direct result of regulatory crackdown on the trucking industry by California's ruling Democrats.  According to Forbes, a shortage of truckers and trucks in California is contributing to supply chain disruptions.  Truckers say a new California law mandates that all trucks must be made in 2011 or newer, eroding competitiveness of independent truckers.  California also plans to retire all diesel trucks by 2035, which makes trucking companies reluctant to invest in their fleets.  Another law, AB5, effectively outlaws truck owners operators to preserve union monopoly on land deliveries.

Biden's Supply Chain Crisis Is Short 80,000 Truck Drivers.  President Biden's supply chain crisis is short 80,000 truck drivers, President and CEO of the American Trucking Association told CNN on Tuesday [10/19/2021].  Before the pandemic, the trucking industry was reportedly in need of 61,500 drivers, 30 percent less than in October.  "That's a pretty big spike," Chris Spear said, noting that some drivers are leaving the industry and retiring while shipping ports remain filled to capacity with containers.  The buildup of freight at the ports is likely due to a labor shortage spurred on by far-left policies of paying people not to work via large unemployment benefits.

After trashing supply chain, White House official mocks consumers.  After wrecking the supply chain, the White House should be begging for mercy from consumers.  After all, it was Democrats, including some in the White House who created the supply chain mess, leaving mass numbers of ships stranded at ports.  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went on extended family leave without appointing a deputy or telling much of anyone.  California's ruling Democrats put into place laws that prohibit independent truckers or trucks more than three years old from collecting containerized merchandise from port offloads.  California Democrat union allies kept port labor at banker's hours, unlike their globally competitive rivals.  Joe Biden's Fed printed money to stimulate demand.  Joe himself drove up energy and transport prices by halting drilling.  All of this, and more, add up to a supply chain breakdown, courtesy of Democrats.

Under Biden, We've Gone From 'Make America Great' To 'Lower Your Expectations'.  As the economy falters in the wake of rising inflation, chronic worker shortages, and a deepening supply chain crisis, the rhetoric from the Biden administration and its defenders has shifted from "we've got this" to "stop your whining."  Is this what Americans bargained for when they ditched Mr. Mean Tweets for Joe "Nexnelsrent" Biden?  A perfect example of this shift is an op-ed by a contributing columnist to the Washington Post — Micheline Maynard — who says that the real problem we face today isn't skyrocketing prices, bottlenecks at the ports, and empty shelves.  It is us spoiled brats.  "American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience," she writes.  "Time for some new, more realistic expectations."  Maynard's op-ed, and the Washington Post, took plenty of flak for blaming the victim.  But the truth is that it is increasingly the way the White House is talking as well.

Why I'm Betting Biden Goes the 4-Year Distance.  There is not one single aspect of daily life in America that is better under "President" Biden than it was under President Trump.  In every meaningful, measurable, tangible way, the quality of life in this country has deteriorated precipitously.  Consider:  Inflation is out of control, we've gone from energy independent to begging OPEC for oil, crime is running rampant, the country is up in arms over the arbitrary un-Constitutional mask and vaccine mandates, the Afghanistan exit was a tragic debacle (and Americans are still trapped there, in spite of the liberal media trying to cover that up), illegal immigration is actually being welcomed by the administration in order to change the country's voting demographics and scores of container ships are unable to offload in California, so store shelves are becoming empty.

Chicago's Magnificent Mile is dying from an increasingly familiar cause.  The "Magnificent Mile" in downtown Chicago has long been a popular tourist destination and a prime source of revenue for the city, featuring nearly all of the major chain outlets as well as exclusive boutiques.  Or at least it used to be, anyway.  By the time the BLM protests/riots were finished, the places that weren't burned down and/or looted were boarded up.  The problem is that the famed shopping district still hasn't made a comeback more than a year later.  As CBS Chicago reports this week, many of the biggest, high-profile stores like Disney and Macy's have left permanently and no new employers have attempted to move in and replace them.  The reason is the same that we've seen in other cities since the riots began.  Decriminalization of "smaller" crimes like theft, lax enforcement, and bail reform laws have led to an endless series of organized shoplifting and robbery sprees.

Biden Touts Police Reform While Mobs Run Wild in Portland.  Joe Biden commemorated police officers who had lost their lives in the line of duty in 2019 and 2020 in a speech at the Capitol building on Saturday.  "There's too much pain.  There's too much loss.  There's too much at stake for your safety and the safety of those you serve," Biden said at the National Peace Officers' annual memorial service.  There's also too much interference by politicians for the police to do an effective job.  And there's too little support by Democratic politicians of the police forces that keep their cities from blowing up.  There's a clear disconnect between what Biden was saying about the heroism of police and the fact that he and other politicians have abandoned them.

Portland police don't stop chaos.  A crowd of 100 people wreaked havoc in downtown Portland, Oregon, this week — smashing storefront windows, lighting dumpsters on fire and causing at least $500,000 in damage — but police officers didn't stop them.  Portland Police Bureau officials say that's because of legislation passed by Oregon lawmakers this year, which restricts the tools they can use to confront people vandalizing buildings and causing mayhem.  "The reason that we did not intervene goes back to what we talked about last month with House Bill 2928 and the restrictions placed on us in a crowd control environment," KOIN reports that Portland Police Lt. Jake Jensen said in a neighborhood meeting Thursday.  Residents frustrated by the latest round of destructive demonstrations Tuesday questioned whether that meant anything goes now in Portland.

Food prices will go up 'tremendously': Billionaire supermarket owner.  Americans will see food costs rise "tremendously" in the coming weeks, according to billionaire supermarket owner John Catsimatidis.  Catsimatidis, who is the president of Gristedes and D'Agostino Foods, discussed his concerns about inflation and supply chain issues on FOX Business' "Mornings with Maria," and warned companies like Nabisco, Pepsi and Coke will begin to prioritize products and raise prices in order to get ahead.  "I see food prices going up tremendously," he told Maria Bartiromo.  "[CEOs] want to be ahead of the curve and the way they're doing it is they're dropping all promotions.  They are dropping low-moving items."

Where is the outrage?  Where is our outrage?  A duly elected president has been illegally surveilled, slandered, libeled, and undermined.  False witness has been brought against him, yet the guilty remain free, in power, and unapologetically above the laws to which their constituents are beholden.  Where is our outrage?  A Presidential election has been stolen.  Incontrovertible proof of massive, organized, election fraud has been uncovered and put before legislative bodies, most of which have responded by vilifying the investigators and threatening them with prosecution.  Where is our outrage?  An unremarkable pathogen with a 99.7% survivability rate has been fashioned into a cudgel with which overreaching federal and state governments have beaten down freedom, imprisoned Americans in their homes and forced a demonstrably dangerous drug upon them — a drug that has killed thousands, harmed millions, and earned pharmaceutical companies and their investors billions.

You will never guess what's topping iTune's hip-hop chart.  In just a few months in office, this utterly incompetent man [Joe Biden] has already managed to harm America very badly.  He has opened the southern border to millions of immigrants, instituted "green" policies that have sent the price of gas skyrocketing, and presided over policies boosting inflation is at levels not seen in decades (and promising to rise higher).  Worse even than these practical steps towards damaging America, Biden is in the process of outlawing half the nation over both factual and ideological ideology about vaccines.  He is effectively overseeing America's balkanization.  Then, to top this all off, he has presided over the destruction of the supply chain so that shelves will probably be bare for Christmas.  Moreover, given that the supply chain is an immensely complicated, interconnected entity that stretches around the world and across the length and breadth of America, there's no reason to believe that shelves will be any fuller after Christmas.

Democrats Call Gov. Larry Hogan's Plan To 'Refund' Police 'Divisive Rhetoric' Amid Baltimore Crime Spike.  Democrats criticized Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan's plan for "refunding police" Friday, calling it "misguided" and "divisive rhetoric."  Hogan announced a $150 million plan to provide additional support to Maryland's law enforcement agencies and victims of violent crime across the state at a press conference Friday.  The initiative directs tens of millions of dollars to local police aid, neighborhood safety grants, body camera and other accountability measures for officers and other programs.  "Our $150 million refund the police initiative will provide a desperately needed shot in the arm to our state and local police agencies.  But there is far more work to be done," Hogan said from a news conference in Annapolis.  "Trying to reduce crime by defunding police is dangerous, radical, far-left lunacy.  Thinking that you can improve law enforcement by defunding the police is like saying you want to improve education by defunding the schools."

Gov. Hochul's drug-war surrender will be the death of NY neighborhoods.  Oct. 7, 2021, will go down in history as the day that New York surrendered in the war on drugs.  Not a shot was fired, except for the heroin or meth shot into the vein of a drug addict on the streets of Midtown, the South Bronx or Harlem.  Gov. Hochul last week signed into law a bill pushed by state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) and backed overwhelmingly by the city's Democratic delegation to the Legislature.  It decriminalizes the possession or sale of hypodermic needles and syringes by addicts to inject drugs.  Touted as a move to reduce overdose deaths, it will instead be the death of downtowns and residential neighborhoods across the Empire State.

NYPD orders cops to stand down, allow junkies to shoot up in streets after decriminalization measure passes.  NYPD officials have ordered patrol and beat officers to stop rolling up suspects who are seen shooting drugs on the streets after legislation in the state legislature passed decriminalizing the purchase and sale of hypodermic needles commonly used to inject heroin and other hard drugs.  "Effective immediately, members of the service should not take any enforcement action against any individual who possesses a hypodermic needle, even when it contains residue of a controlled substance," says a directive to New York Police Department commanders issued last Friday and obtained by the New York Post.  The order to NYPD officers referenced Senate Bill 2523 which outlines the decriminalization.

Father is suing woke Loudoun County after his 15-year-old daughter was 'raped' in 'gender-fluid' girls' bathroom.  The furious parents of a 15-year-old high schooler are suing Loudon County in Virginia after their daughter was allegedly raped by a 'skirt-wearing male student' in a 'gender fluid' school bathroom.  Jess and Scott Smith allege that the district attempted to cover up the alleged assault.  They claim that Superintendent Scott Ziegler alleged there was no record of the May 28 incident at Stonebridge High School in Leesburg, Virginia, despite Loudoun County Sheriff's office conducting a two-month long investigation into the allegations.  On June 22, Scott Smith was filmed exploding with anger about the assault at a school board meeting, and was later convicted over the disturbance.  He only revealed the alleged sex attack that had sparked his fury earlier this week.

Virginia Democrats Voted to Allow Schools to Refrain from Reporting Sexual Battery in 2020.  Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly voted for — and Governor Ralph Northam signed — a law allowing schools to refrain from reporting instances of sexual battery, stalking, violation of a protective order, and violent threats occurring on school property in 2020.  § 22.1-279.3:1 of Virginia code had required that these, among a number of other major crimes, be reported to law enforcement if they occurred on campus.  Democrats insisted that misdemeanors be extirpated from reporting requirements in House Bill 257, replacing the word "criminal" with "felony" in the code.

Portland and other 'defund' cities are destroying their own livability.  Portland, Oregon, chose to jump on the politically correct bandwagon in 2020 and defund its police force.  A rash of murders has since swept over the Rose City, which was once a pleasant place to live.  Until recently, Portland only had a quirky reputation reflected in the comedy show Portlandia.  It was amusingly wacky and liberal — a place where the dream of the 1990s was still alive.  Today, Portland is looking a lot more like it did in the late 1980s, at the height of the crack epidemic.  The city is about to set a new annual record for murders, and it's only October.  By the time this editorial is published, it may have already hit its highest annual homicide total since 1987.  Between the violent insurrection that leftist protesters waged against its federal courthouse, which lasted for weeks last summer, and the violence that petty criminals are inflicting on innocent citizens, the Rose City just isn't a nice place to be anymore.

Theft-plagued Walgreens shuts down five more stores in San Francisco:  At least 17 have already closed due to 'legalized shoplifting'.  Walgreens is shuttering another five of its stores in crime-ridden San Francisco because of rampant shoplifting by thieves who waltz past security guards and sell the items outside the drugstore chain's doors.  The national chain has closed 17 of its 70 San Francisco locations in the past two years because of the shelf raiders, who have swiped everything not behind lock and key.  Thefts in the chain's 53 remaining stores are five times the average for their stores elsewhere in the country, according to company officials.

Bidenflation Shock:  Kids Shoe Prices Up 11.9%.  It's not just getting more expensive to feed your family in the U.S.  It's getting more expensive to keep shoes on your children's feet.  The price of boys' and girls' footwear jumped 3.3 percent in September from August, a huge one-month increase.  Compared with a year ago, the prices of kids shoes are up 11.9 percent, the Department of Labor's Consumer Price Index showed Wednesday [10/13/2021].

Vaccine Mandates Aren't Biden's Only Job-Killing Scheme.  Despite $9 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus from the federal government, America has an employment problem.  The Labor Department estimates that 10.4 million jobs remained unfilled in August, the most recent month for which figures are available, including 1.5 million in health care and social services.  That same month, a record-high 4.3 million people quit their jobs. [...] The good news is that President Joe Biden has a plan.  The bad news is that his plan could result in the loss of millions of additional workers.  Start with vaccine mandates.  The president announced in August that he planned to impose a vaccine mandate on nursing home staffs.  Nursing homes lost nearly 38,000 staffers in September alone, among the steepest one-month drops since the pandemic began.  The Washington Post reported late last month that vaccine mandates imposed by hospitals have led many unvaccinated workers to leave or be terminated, exacerbating a shortage in skilled nursing and bedside care.  The potential employment effect of vaccine mandates is not confined to the health care sector.  Other professions where vaccine requirements are common also reported job losses.  In August alone, 25,000 state and local education workers quit their jobs.

The average new car price hit a record $45,000 in September.  A new study from Kelly Blue Book found that the average price paid for a vehicle in September it an all-time record of $45,031 as discounts dwindle and buyers in the market gravitate toward high-end models.  "The record-high prices in September are mostly a result of the mix of vehicles sold," Cox Automotive analyst Kayla Reynolds said.  "Midsize SUV sales jumped in September compared to August and full-size pickup share moved up as well.  Sales of lower-priced compact and midsize cars, which had been commanding more share during the summer, faded in September.  As long as new-vehicle inventory remains tight, we believe prices will remain elevated."  It was the sixth-straight record month, according to KBB's data.

Biden White House Spreads Lie that Inflation Is 'High Class Problem'.  White House chief of staff Ron Klain is spreading the lie that inflation and the supply chain snarl are "high class problems," which means we're lucky to have them.  On Wednesday [10/13/2021], some Harvard idiot (excuse me for repeating myself) named Jason Furman tweeted, "Most of the economic problems we're facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.  We wouldn't have had them if the unemployment rate was still 10 percent."

Thanks to Biden's policies, prepare for a cold, expensive winter.  Upon entering the Oval Office, Biden immediately shut down the Keystone Pipeline and ended new drilling on federal lands.  While Trump had brought America to energy independence and affordable energy, Biden reduced America to a vassal of oil-producing countries.  Thanks to this policy, gasoline prices keep climbing.  In my neighborhood, they've increased by almost 78% in just nine months.  The same is true everywhere.  Like all Biden policies, this is devastating for the middle and working classes, for it doesn't just make commuting more expensive; it increases the price of every single item in America.  Fuel is needed for farming, manufacturing, shipping, wholesaling, and retailing.  Every aspect of life becomes more expensive when fuel prices rise, with the middle and working classes bearing the ultimate burden.  All of this is in the name of fighting alleged climate change.  That is a faith, not a science.  We humans can pollute, and I believe we have a moral obligation to keep our environment clean and healthy, but the whole climate change theory is a joke and a bad one at that.

For Consumers, 'Build Back Better' Is Going to Start Getting Replaced by These Three Words Soon.  Consumers were promised "build back better" under Biden, and all they see is high inflation, gas prices through the roof, and 'out of stock' signs everywhere.  Stop blaming COVID as well.  Grocery stores are open.  Big box retailers have never closed.  We have three vaccines readily available.  As for the labor shortages, I mean, how can you be shocked given Biden's unemployment benefits extravaganza.  Crises are everywhere, and Joe is taking naps.

Inflation up 5.4% from year ago, matching 13-year high, Labor Department.  Consumer prices in September increased U.S. inflation to 5.4% compared to a year ago, according to the Labor Department monthly consumer price index report, released Wednesday [10/13/2021].  The number matches the highest such rate since 2008, amid global supply chain issues.  The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4% in September from August, with the costs of new cars, food, gas, and restaurant meals all increasing.  The annual increase in the consumer price index matched readings in June and July as the highest in 13 years, the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported.  The costs of food and shelter in September together together contributed to more than half of the monthly, seasonally adjusted increase, the bureau also reported.

Gas prices at 7-year high and rising as Biden wages offensive against domestic energy producers.  [Scroll down]  There isn't enough oil and gas supply to meet U.S. demand, due to a combination of factors, including the Biden administration halting new leases on federal land, halting the Keystone Pipeline, increasing regulatory burdens, and other measures that will take years to correct, those in the industry argue.  In one of his first acts in office, President Joe Biden, through executive order, halted the issuance of new oil and gas leases on federal lands, effectively stopping much production for existing operations.  He also eliminated low-cost Canadian crude from being processed by mid-continent and Gulf Coast and U.S. refiners by prohibiting the Keystone pipeline from opening.  If Biden had not severely hampered domestic production, the U.S. would have an ample supply of oil and gas and commensurately lower costs at the pump, industry experts argue.  The $6 billion in additional costs imposed on the industry included in the budget reconciliation bill include new methane fees, inspection fees, severance fees, and bonding requirements, as well as additional requirements for operating on federal lands.

Very likely because of media-induced fear of Covid-19...
BLS Report: 4.3 Million US Workers Voluntarily Quit Their Jobs in August.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the job openings and labor report for August today [10/12/2021].  The data shows that 4.3 million U.S. workers voluntarily quit their jobs in the month of August.  This is a significant jump from prior.

Looks Like Stagflation Is Already Here.  On the same day the International Monetary Fund cut its growth forecast for the U.S. economy, Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic warned that the "transitory" bout of inflation "won't be brief." How do you spell stagflation?  B-i-d-e-n-o-m-i-c-s.  The IMF report, released Tuesday, has the international organization lowering growth globally by a 10th of a percentage point and for the U.S. by a full percentage point.

More Bad Policies and Government Spending Will Worsen Labor Shortage.  The September employment report released on Oct. 8 showed a modest employment gain, with 194,000 new jobs added, and a drop in unemployment from 5.2% in August to 4.8%.  What appears to be good news in the report — a 0.4 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 4.8% — is not all positive news.  The decline is due in part to 183,000 people dropping out of the labor force as opposed to unemployed workers finding new jobs.  This is also the second month in a row of lackluster job gains that have fallen about 700,000 below expectations.  Normally, these last two subpar job reports would be bad news for unemployed workers.  But with a record high 10.9 million job openings in the U.S., the poor job gains are perhaps most troubling for employers and consumers.  Without enough willing workers, employers are struggling to get the workers they need to recover from the pandemic and to meet customers' demands.  Americans across the country also continue to experience long waits, shortages of goods and services, and rising prices.

The Green Agenda or How This Energy Crisis is Different from All Others.  The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally.  Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures.  What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy.  What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months.  Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide.

Heating costs in NY expected to spike for many customers this winter.  A new forecast on energy costs for heating in New York state calls for a spike in those expenses this coming winter.  During an annual presentation by the state of the NY State Public Service Commission last week, staffers said that on average, statewide, consumers will be hit with about a 21% increase in heating costs over the entire winter compared to last year.  Rochester Gas and Electric is forecasting about a 33% average increase over the winter for natural gas customers.

The Editor says...
Which political party opposes fracking, pipelines, offshore exploration, internal combustion engines, nuclear power, and the use of coal?  Those are the people to blame when energy prices inflate overnight.

Food Prices Hit Highest Level in a Decade.  Food prices across the world have risen to their highest levels in a decade on the back of tightening supply conditions coupled with robust demand, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  The FAO's food price index, which measures world food commodity prices, has surged by 32.8 percent in the 12 months through September, coming in at a reading of 130 points, a level not seen since 2011.  On a month-over-month basis, the index rose 1.2 percent.  Accounting for the bulk of the rise in the index were higher prices of most cereals and vegetable oils.  The FAO vegetable oil price index was up 60 percent in September from a year earlier, and 1.7 percent higher than in August.  The cereal price measure was up 27.3 percent over the year last month, and 2 percent from August.

British Airways tells pilots and cabin crew not to refer to passengers as 'ladies and gentlemen' in favour of gender-neutral terms.  British Airways has instructed pilots and cabin crew not to refer to passengers as 'ladies and gentlemen' in an effort to celebrate 'diversity and inclusion'.  Britain's flagship carrier has abandoned the greeting in favour of more gender-neutral terms, reportedly to respect wider social norms and make children feel included.  Other major airlines, including Lufthansa, easyJet and Air Canada, have already adopted gender-neutral language.

The Editor says...
Air Canada did the same thing two years ago.

The Left Got What It Wanted — So Now What?  [Scroll down]  What did all that madness achieve?  Mostly, the first election in U.S. history in which over 100 million ballots were not cast on Election Day.  Strangely, with such an avalanche of ballots, the usual error rate of absentee balloting dived from around 2-4 percent to 0.2-0.4 percent.  You see, when we suddenly must count tens of millions more paper ballots then it becomes easier, not harder, to spot errors.  So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory.  The nation was done with the demonized Trump and now the Left controlled the presidency, and both houses of Congress. [...] What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record:  the greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation's history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts.  China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms.  Inflation was low, growth was good.  "Stagflation" was still a rarely remembered word from the past.

Life in Seattle is about to get very interesting (and that's not good).  Seattle, more than many American cities, vigorously embraced the "Defund the Police" movement.  Last year, the Seattle City Council began the process of defunding the police and it's been continuing ever since, relentlessly slicing away at the city's police budget.  Crime has risen accordingly and people are making noises about getting the police back.  However, the radicals have a new arrow in their quiver to reduce the number of police in their city.  An October 18 deadline is looming to fire those police who have refused the vaccination and, with only a week to go, roughly 40% of the police force is still unvaccinated.  Since George Floyd's diseased heart gave out thanks to overdosing on meds and fighting the police, Seattle has been one of those cities that has most enthusiastically sought to rid itself of its police force.  Even the fact that the little autonomous zone known as CHAZ instantly turned into warlord hell didn't deter the council from its mission.

Lumber Prices Rose 50 Percent Since August and May Climb Higher.  The price tag on lumber, after declining since its all-time high in May, could climb higher through the early months of the coming year, experts recently told Insider. [...] In addition, global food prices have hit a decade high and grew for the second month in a row in September, according to a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  A reason behind the price growth regarding lumber was a small increase in renovation demand once "price-sensitive" buyers moved forward with home improvement projects since wood prices experienced a substantial correction, according to Justin Jalbert, a senior economist for Fastmarkets.

The Editor says...
I don't often buy lumber, but I do know that the price of Diet Coke (at Wal-Mart) has gone up 60 percent since Biden took over.

"Shortages" Aren't Causing Inflation.  Money Creation Is.  For central bankers and mainstream analysts the recent inflation outburst is only a transitory phenomenon which has nothing or very little to do with the massive monetary and fiscal stimuli unleashed during the pandemic.  Although the Fed has recently conceded that price pressures are persisting longer than expected, the surge of inflation is allegedly due to supply bottlenecks caused by the pandemic.  This superficial diagnosis serves as a convenient excuse for politicians to keep in place damaging growth stimuli and draconian public health measures.  Mainstream economists define inflation as an increase in consumer prices which occurs when the growth of money supply outpaces economic growth.  In other words, too much money is chasing too few goods.  If the recent surge in inflation were driven by a shortage of goods rather than an increase in the money supply, then aggregate output would be shrinking.  But this is not the case, because global economic output is projected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to grow by 5.7 percent in 2021 after having dropped by 3.4 percent in 2020.

Who is Really Running the Destroy-America Biden Regime?  In less time than a normal human pregnancy, putative president Biden managed to accomplish the following:
  •   Crashed our booming economy,
  •   Destroyed our energy independence,
  •   Opened our southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegals — many of them diseased, drug- and sex-traffickers, career criminals, jihadists, et al,
  •   Accelerated Iran's production of nukes,
  •   Promised the disaster of hyperinflation,
  •   Expressed "great confidence in" the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, after the General [...] conspired with China against President Trump and told military officials not to take orders from him.
  •   Orchestrated the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan — another Milley debacle — leaving behind, to this day, hundreds of stranded Americans and Afghan allies, billions of dollars of U.S. armaments and Black Hawk helicopters and airplanes, massive troves of the rare-earth mineral lithium ("the new oil," as Dave Hodges reports), as well as Taliban-Isis-Al Qaeda terrorists in charge, and 13 heroic but dead U.S. service members.
[...] We also have:
  •   Draconian mandates in cities like New York and other blue states that prevent people from entering restaurants, theaters, gyms, et al, without proof of having had a Covid jab,
  •   Dire threats that all benefits to Marines (and other military, including Navy SEALS, will be revoked if they decline the Covid jabs.
  •   Actual life-threatening shortages of nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel — as well as first responders — who refuse the experimental vaccine.
  •   Threats to police forces that guarantee a horrific rise in crime.
  •   Mandatory Covid jabs for travelers on all domestic airline flights in the U.S., already enacted by several major U.S. airlines.
  •   And here's the kicker:  NO requirements for illegal immigrants to get tested or receive the vaccine!
  •   Then there are the parents who revile the toxic, far-left, so-called "woke" propaganda being crammed down their children's throats being labeled "domestic terrorists" — the idea of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who forgot to mention that his son-in-law makes millions selling those toxic materials.

Smaller Products, Rising Prices:  Shrinkflation Hitting Grocery Store Shelves.  Shrinking products and rising prices.  From cereal to soap, paper towels to pretzels, you might have noticed you're not getting as much as you used to at the grocery store.  Consumer blogs pointed WCCO to products like oatmeal packets of 10 cut to eight for some varieties, tuna cans from seven to five ounces, and some family size cereals slimming down from 19.3 ounces to 18.8 ounces, all evidence of what's known as shrinkflation.

Real cost of inflation to average American household:  An extra $175 a month.  Over the past couple of months, Allison, a wife and mother of a toddler and teenager in Chicago, says she's been spending about $50 more each week on groceries to feed her family — and that's at a discount supermarket chain, Aldi's.  "I used to spend $70 a week, but all of sudden this summer, I noticed that I couldn't leave the store without spending at least $120," said Allison, who works in education.  Like millions of Americans whose income has not kept pace with inflation — up 5.3 percent in August compared with a year ago — Allison and her family are feeling the pinch of the rising cost of living and giving up some things just to make ends meet.

Trump Is Not the Cause of the Crimes Threatening America.  The Biden Administration is crumbling the more the Bidenization of America advances.  The country is plunging into disillusioned alarm amid rising rates of inflation and violent crime, an oceanic tide of illegal and unskilled immigration, incomprehensible flailing over COVID, and horrifying foreign policy disasters. [...] The Democratic leaders in the Congress today are also reckless and often unethical, and the senior officer corps is politicized, incompetent, and routinely take liberties for which they should be court martialed. [...] As the full horror of Bidenization sinks in — the open southern border, skyrocketing rates of inflation and violent crime, and a foreign policy of cap-in-hand submission to America's enemies becomes clearer — there will be a resurrection of American national self-confidence.

Magnet! Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion bill hands cash to illegals worth more than per capita income of 74 countries.  Imagine you are a Honduran.  If you make the average Honduran per capita income of $2,405.70 a year, and suddenly learn from a relative up in el norte that Joe Biden is handing out $3,600 a year to anyone in the U.S., legally present or not, for nothing more than having kids, what would you do? [...] You'd weigh your options, and decide what your best ones were.  One, you could be breaking your back to earn the $2,405.70 a year back in Tegucigalpa, assuming you were earning the average (and at least half the country earns less).  Or two, you could go to the states illegally, get a federal tax I.D. and the $3,600 would be yours.  And as a bonus, you'd qualify it the minute you broke into the country illegally, and you wouldn't have to lift a finger to work for it.  All you'd have to do is bring the kids.  You'd also be get free health care, free education, other cash benefits for the kids, and this doesn't even include the benefits handed out by states such as California, such as free housing and cash transfers.  You'd also free to earn more if you wanted, legally or illegally, since under Biden, there'd be no possibility of deportation once you break in.  What would you do?

Consumers facing high energy costs as winter quickly approaches.  Homeowners in the United States might be in for a costly winter.  Oil and natural gas prices continue to climb higher as supply struggles to keep up with demand, which will only increase as the temperatures begin to drop across the country and heaters begin to be switched on in houses.  The price of natural gas used to heat homes across the country and produce electricity has skyrocketed over the past year, growing by about 180%.  The oil price has also significantly risen, with the cost of crude more than doubling since this time last year.  As September comes to a close and fall gets into full swing, many consumers will start to feel the pinch.

The Editor says...
Shutting off pipelines to appease the environmentalists is a short-sighted action with real-world consequences.

Defunding Disaster:  Austin Police no longer to responding to 'non-life threatening' 911 calls.  Starting Friday [10/1/2021], Austin's sworn police officers will no longer be responding in person to non-emergency calls because of severe staffing shortages, APD announced.  The announcement comes after the Harris County Sheriff's Deputies Organization in Houston warned residents that if they were "robbed, raped or shot" to "hold their breath and pray" because they might not have the personnel to respond.  The Austin no-response announcement includes vehicle collisions with no injuries and burglaries no longer in progress or where the suspect has fled the scene.  Instead of calling 911, residents are being told to call 311 to file a non-emergency police report.

Key Inflation Measure Soars to 30-Year High.  The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy costs, soared to a 30-year high in August.  The measure increased 0.3 percent for the month and was up 3.6 percent from last year in its steepest climb since May 1991, a trend suggesting that the pandemic's inflationary pressures, catalyzed by massive government spending, supply chain bottlenecks and surging demand, are not correcting as quickly as some economists anticipated.

Austin City Council member sounds alarm on 'disastrous consequences' of defunding police.  The Austin Police Department announced it will no longer respond to calls for "non-emergencies" after a cut to the police budget in 2020 led to staffing shortages.  Mackenzie Kelly, an Austin City Council member, said the decision to defund the police has led to "disastrous consequences" in the city.  The Austin City Council voted in August 2020 to cut up to $150 million — roughly 34% — from the police budget.  By the end of July, Austin reported that the number of homicides in 2021 had already matched the total homicides in all of 2020.  "A lot of what we're seeing happening starting today is coming home to roost from that decision," Kelly said.  "And it's disastrous."

More Evidence That Defunding Police Wasn't a Good Idea.  The surge in violent crime over the past year — murders in particular — has been astounding and historic.  The numbers back this up and paint a grim picture.  Property crime is generally down, but violent crime is way, way up.  The murder rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020, more than any other time in the last half-century.  This is according to recently released statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its annual report on crime.  The report shows that there were 4,901 more murders committed in 2020 than in 2019.  It's the largest single-year increase — by a wide margin — in murder rate since the FBI began compiling these statistics in 1960.

Biden Democrats have declared war on American small businesses.  Thousands of America's small businesses are teetering on the edge of permanent closure, and Democrats in Washington are about to give them one final shove.  The result will be the further fraying of our social fabric and the permanent loss of working-class jobs.  Over the last several months, small businesses persevered the best they could, holding on until "temporary" welfare programs driving people away from work expired.  But if there were any doubt left that Dems' ultimate goal wasn't a temporary boost to Americans most impacted by lockdowns, but rather a calculated step toward government control and socialism, their proposed $4.3 trillion tax-and-spend bill removes it all.  Walk down any main street or city avenue in America today, and you will see sign after sign with help-wanted pleas, hiring incentives or apologies in advance for shortened hours and delayed service due to staff shortages.  There are nearly 11 million job openings nationwide, and our small businesses are trying to get back on their feet after the crushing lockdowns.

Brazen Shoplifters Rob Chicago Department Store In Broad Daylight.  This is the new trend in all progressive cities now.  Cities that have decriminalized most 'soft' crimes such as shoplifting.  Watch as these two shoplifters fill bags with expensive perfumes in broad daylight and leave while people film.  This was at the Ulta in Norridge at 4115 N Harlem near the 16th district in Chicago.  [Video clip]

Shoplifters casually rob California Marshalls as people watch, employees do not report crime.  Multiple shoplifters in California were seen brazenly stealing from a Marshalls location as the crime continues in the state.  "People shopping there were just kind of standing there watching.  The only thing I figured I could do was get their identities and their license plates and give them to somebody who will do something with them," witness Lindsey Rodriguez, a resident of Hemet who recorded the suspects, told NBC4.  Rodriguez said she saw one man stroll out of the store with his arms full of clothing on Saturday evening [9/25/2021] in Hemet, and said one woman used wire cutters to sever security tags on expensive purses.

Liberal Parents Raise Young Child Without A Gender, Make HIM Wear Girl Clothes, Play With Girl Toys.  This is Zoomer.  Zoomer was born a boy.  How do we know?  Because he was born a boy, that's how.  Zoomer was also born with two liberal leeches attached to him.  These liberals were Zoomer's parents and refused to acknowledge Zoomer's born gender identity and instead called HIM they and them.  They also made Zoomer play with both boy and girl toys as well as wear dresses and male clothing, just in case Zoomer was a born drag queen or something.  At age 4, Zoomer figured out he was a boy and this was a big moment for his not-so-bright parents.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Luke 17:2

Stolen Elections Have Consequences.  Progressives seem completely committed to the Cloward-Piven strategy, even those who have no idea what it is.  So here we are, stuck in the midst of a government induced labor shortage.  A completely man-made crisis either by design or stupidity or a lethal combination of the two.  Fast food joints can't hire burger flippers and fry droppers even at $16/hour, never mind the truly vital jobs of dock workers and long-haul truckers.  And still, Joey is "losing patience" with you dolts who refuse to get jabbed so he's going to mandate that you do if you want to keep your job.  That should help everything.  The evil geniuses in charge are starting to look less genius and a great deal more evil.  They have no idea how to turn things around much less fix what they broke.

Climate change panic is the next big thing (again).  Biden's woke trail of destruction is difficult to dismiss.  Our nation has strived for energy independence for decades.  We finally accomplished that goal during the Trump years only to watch it all be flushed away in Biden's first month in office, along with tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs.  Biden then moved on to the border where he reversed most Trump-era policies, threw out American laws, and started the open border crisis we're witnessing today.  Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have already been relocated to various places around the country. [...] Next, there is COVID, which sees the left whipping the American people into submission for a disease that is highly lethal only to the very elderly with multiple comorbidities.  The rest of the population suffers, to various degrees, on a par with the seasonal flu. [...] They've now initiated a new form of illegal, despicable, and useless discrimination based on vaccination status.  All of it is unconstitutional.

We're coming up on the bad part of the 'cycle of democracy'.  As we witness tens of thousands of illegal aliens bum-rushing our southern border, we should be acutely aware that a quid pro quo is in the making — aliens expect the grab-bag of goodies (largess), and Democrats expect future support for their electoral endeavors.  Leftism is vile.  It is premised on power and control, disguised as compassion.  Leftists' ideas always bring decline and despair.  Their path to utopia is through your dystopia.  We see it with climate change; inflation; immigration; foreign affairs; voting rights; abortion; race, sex, and class division; and ultimately Marxism.  Their ideas range from bad to horrible.

Disturbing photos show rampant drug use in broad daylight among the homeless around Penn Station as crime spikes 41%.  Disturbing photos show homeless people in New York City's storied Garment District near Penn Station shooting up and dealing drugs in broad daylight as the crime in the area has spiked 41 percent since last year.  Homelessness in the area has been a years-long issue but has become more rampant in recent months, with people not even trying to hide their drug use.  Photos taken by DailyMail.com show one man with what appears to be drug paraphernalia in his hand, and another slumped over in a wheelchair.

Every Tragedy Caused by Government Is Done with the Best of Intentions.  President Johnson's "war on poverty" caused more poverty, deepened the dependence upon government welfare of those most economically vulnerable, and initiated a collapse in marriage rates and two-parent families that continues to this day.

What a lovely city.
'City of the Walking Dead:' Junkies shoot up in broad daylight in Midtown.  The outgoing de Blasio administration appears unwilling or unable to address the crisis, as the quality-of-life disaster unfolds just steps from high-profile Midtown landmarks such as Macy's, Madison Square Garden and the sparkling new Moynihan Train Hall.  The block bordered by 35th and 36th streets, and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is "littered with used needles, broken glass crack pipes, trash, urine, and feces" as junkies shoot up and dealers brazenly sell drugs, lamented one neighbor on social media.  "I've personally seen dozens of deals go down.  I've seen a person OD and nearly die."  During a single walk around the block last week, The Post witnessed three different people injecting needles in their wrists or fingers in the middle of the afternoon.  Each addict sat on the sidewalk or in empty storefronts.  Dozens of other junkies sat or lay nearly comatose, many of the men shirtless, on the same block.

Leftists force mass Third World immigration by deceiving us into feeling guilty.  Instead of a "melting pot" culture based on careful assimilation, we are deliberately creating a "tribal pot" of diverse and warring identity groups.  And to get the majority to go along with such a scheme, those constructing their own reality just invent history out of whole cloth — and teach it to the non-thinking — that creates guilt trips in the majority.  This begins in preschool so that, by the end of the day, the self-loathing is so elevated that the white majority is thankful they have been replaced.

Civilization requires deterrence.  The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society's rather than the criminal's fault.  As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction.  They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison.  So, they see little risk in hurting people.  And innocents suffer.

National Sabotage by Immigration.  Beneath the surface of Biden's genial Uncle Joe schtick is an executive branch controlled by some of the most dogmatic left-wing apparatchiks ever seen in American politics.  Among their witch's brew of radical ideas, they have seized upon immigration as one of the quickest and most effective ways to transform the country to their vision.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to give this administration the benefit of the doubt on anything.  That became nearly impossible after independent journalist John Solomon broke the news of a letter from recently departed Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott to Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and its homeland security and governmental affairs committee.  In his letter, Scott described a culture in the current administration where inexperienced political appointees routinely ignore or reject common-sense recommendations from career immigration enforcement professionals.

'Wrong Way' Biden Flies The Nation Into Yet Another Crisis.  If President Joe Biden's navigating skills were any good, the southern border would be calm, inflation under control, every American safely out of Afghanistan, and COVID defeated.  Instead, we are left to wonder how it is that his sense of direction can be so fabulously wrong. [...] In May, he said that the "experts" he talked to "do not see signs of persistent dislocation or long-term inflation."  In July, he said that "our experts believe and the data show that most of the price increases we've seen were expected and are expected to be temporary.  The reality is you can't flip the global economics light back and not expect this to happen."  Look at the chart [at left] and see just how wrong Biden's heading has been.  Inflation has remained unusually high, even as the months stretch on and the alleged transitory effects should have long since passed.

The Looming Economic Bubble.  There has been considerable discussion in the past couple of months about the rate of inflation in the United States, and polls now show that 85 percent of Americans are concerned about inflation.  This is a demonstration once again of the wisdom of the average person.  While the United States, and to a lesser extent the West generally, is being subjected to a variety of threats and disappointments, and there is a natural aversion to highlighting additional negative developments that could be looming, it would be comforting if we heard anything from the secretary of the Treasury or the chairman of the Federal Reserve about the current apparition of a gigantic financial bubble over the United States.  In the past year, the United States has had a money supply increase of 25 percent, an unprecedented event.  What was originally billed as slight and self-correcting inflation increases are now gathering into a continuing and growing storm cloud, only thinly disguised by the unrepresentative composition of the official consumer price index.  Year over year, hourly pay scales have risen by 7.5 percent, new cars cost 10 percent more, used cars and new homes are 20 percent more expensive, and rental accommodations are 12 percent more costly.  These increases all fall short of the money supply increase, and they all appear to be stoking up rather than settling down.

What's Behind Runaway Inflation?  The Federal Reserve and Congress both created this excess aggregate demand situation.  Fed leaders have poured over $4 trillion into the U.S. economy since February 2020.  Congress has been busy shoveling over $5 trillion dollars out the U.S. Treasury door to nearly all households and many businesses since the March 2020 shutdown.  The result is a hot U.S. economy, and the out-of-control Fed continues their QE purchases of $120 billion of securities each month into an already pricey equity market amid widespread inflation pressures.  Apparently "woke" Fed leaders think a faster rate of inflation will draw more lower-skilled people into the labor force.  That nonsensical concept was pushed into the ditch in the 1960s and 1970s.

Biden Administration Warns States Federal Debt Crisis Could Trigger Recession.  The Biden administration has issued a warning that the pending federal debt crisis might trigger an economic recession that would affect economic growth and trigger job losses across the United States.  "Hitting the debt ceiling could cause a recession.  Economic growth would falter, unemployment would rise, and the labor market could lose millions of jobs," the White House said in a letter to state and local governments that was released Sept. 17.  Arguing that Congress needs to raise or suspend the U.S. debt ceiling, the administration said the debt crisis may affect the country's recovery after the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic.  In July, Congress missed its deadline to suspend or raise the debt limit, prompting several recent warnings from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that her agency will exhaust its cash reserves.

The Left seeks to remove any and all controls on asylum.  One might assume that even the most radical fringes of the American Left would be fairly content about the state of things in this country today, particularly on immigration.  After all, the Biden administration has given them pretty much everything they wanted to erode our borders and the rule of law.  Any such assumption would be incorrect, as anti-borders forces are pushing like never before for even more extremist policies to transform this country into a place most people would not recognize or desire to live.  The most recent example of this is took place in the U.S. District Court of Southern California.  An Obama-appointed judge ruled that the government's "metering" policy of turning back asylum-seekers to points of entry in Mexico to be unconstitutional.  While this may sound like another garden-variety immigration case in federal court, it represents a sharp detour from both policy and the government's approach to immigration.

A pandemic of the incompetent, not the unvaccinated.  First, the CDC and NIH watched the virus ravage China and did nothing.  Next, they told President Trump that it was xenophobic to stop travel from China.  Next, they told us the virus was not transmitting human to human.  Next, they changed, without reasoning, the reporting requirements for potential deaths associated with the virus to guarantee a higher death total in the U.S.  Next, they misrepresented the data for the projected death toll in America with a completely incorrect model.  Next, they told us to shut down the country for two weeks to slow the spread.  Next, they told us a vaccine in less than a year was impossible.  Next, they pushed mask mandates with no science to back them up. [...] Next, they supported crazy items like mandatory masking outdoors, no swimming in public pools, and wearing a mask in your own home.  Next, they continued to keep businesses closed past the two-month mark, and they fail to provide evidence that closing any business helped slow the spread.  Next, they started paying people extra unemployment benefits while removing all incentives to look for work.

The Greatest Existential Threat to America.  Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin — a leader who presided over the worst, most incompetent, most [humiliating] military defeat in the history of our nation — is black.  Of course, he's black.  He was appointed by Biden to display the wonderful diversity of the most progressive president in history.  He wasn't chosen because he was a brilliant military leader (obviously).  He was chosen because he was a political hack ready and willing to embrace even the most suicidal left-wing policies.  (Note:  Left-wing policies are by their very nature suicidal because the defining characteristic of the left is that it hates America and wants to "dismantle" it and replace it with the left-wing fantasy of a socially just future.)  In February 2021 — with the deadline for withdrawal in Afghanistan a bare three months away — General Austin was not ordering a military alert to prepare for what was going to be a major humanitarian and military reckoning.  Instead, he was ordering a military "stand down" to indoctrinate all America's troops in Black Lives Matter hate white people and hate America propaganda.

Crime soars in Minneapolis as cops fear being unfairly targeted in woke viral videos.  Proactive policing in Minneapolis plunged dramatically following the murder of George Floyd last year, even as violent crime soared, a new analysis reveals as the city prepares to vote on a ballot initiative to abolish the police department.  In the year following Floyd's death, traffic stops in Minneapolis plunged 74 percent, patrols of known problem areas were down 76 percent, and stops of suspicious people plunged 75 percent, according to a Reuters investigation.  Confidential police sources said that part of the slowdown was due to a staffing shortage amid an exodus from the department, but that much of the reduction in policing was due to a fear of being caught up in an incident that could go viral in a climate of anti-cop sentiment.

American Consumers Believe Inflation Is Here to Stay, NY Fed Survey Finds.  A survey by the New York Federal Reserve released on Monday shows that American households expect the recent spike in inflation won't go away anytime soon, despite the Biden administration's continued insistence that the surge in consumer prices will be fleeting.  The median expectation for the inflation rate over the next year increased to 5.2 percent in August, the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations found.  That level is the highest median expected inflation rate recorded since surveys began in 2013.  Respondents also said they expected inflation to be up by 4 percent in three years.

Hospital to stop delivering babies as maternity workers resign over vaccine mandate.  Lewis County General Hospital will stop delivering babies after September 24 because too many maternity unit workers have resigned over COVID vaccination mandates.  That's according to Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer, who held a news conference Friday in Lowville.  He said 6 employees in the maternity unit resigned rather than get a COVID shot and another 7 are undecided.

Grocery prices could rise another 3% before the end of year, Kroger warns.  Grocery prices will rise by another three percent before the end of the year, according to one of America's biggest supermarkets.  Cincinnati-based Kroger generated $132 billion in sales last year, but the company said inflation is running longer than management previously anticipated, altering their expectations for prices.  Bosses now say they predict prices will rise 2 to 3 percent over the second half of this year.

The Years We Wasted.  The war is lost, at home and abroad.  On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam's strictures on freedom of expression and the like. [...] In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies.  The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the Chi-Com-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.  As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 — and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.  The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago.  Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere.

An ENTIRE police department in Missouri just resigned.  The Hill reports the entire police department of Kimberling, Missouri, has resigned "without immediate authority" to replace them.  Police Chief Craig Alexander resigned on Aug. 23.  After that, the floodgates opened.  The rest of the officers started resigning until there were none left.

US producer prices jump an unprecedented 8.3% in August.  Inflation at the wholesale level climbed 8.3% last month from August 2020, the biggest annual gain since the Labor Department started calculating the 12-month number in 2010.  The Labor Department reported Friday that its producer price index — which measures inflationary pressures before they reach consumers — rose 0.7% last month from July after increasing 1% in both June and July.

Producer inflation accelerated in August, as wholesale prices rose record 8.3% from a year ago.  Prices that producers get for final demand goods and services surged in August at their highest annual rate since at least 2010, the Labor Department reported Friday [9/10/2021].  The producer price index rose 0.7% for the month, above the 0.6% Dow Jones estimate, though below the 1% increase in July.  On a year-over-year basis, the gauge rose 8.3%, which is the biggest annual increase since records have been kept going back to November 2010.  That came following a 7.8% move higher in July, which also set a record.  The data comes amid heightened inflation fears fed by supply chain issues, a shortage of various consumer and producer goods and heightened demand related to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Federal Reserve officials expect inflationary pressures to ease through the year, but they have remained stubbornly persistent, with Friday's numbers indicating that the trend likely will continue.

Republicans tear into Biden administration's plans to crack down on beef, poultry and pork to combat rising grocery prices.  Republicans are ripping the Biden administration on Thursday [9/9/2021] over its plan to crack down on big meatpacking companies and for blaming a sharp increase in grocery prices under President Biden's watch on beef, pork and poultry.  It comes after the Biden administration announced plans to take a tougher stance toward meatpacking companies it says are causing sticker shock at grocery stores.  Four companies control much of the US meat processing market, and White House officials blamed those companies for rising food prices.

Joe Biden Is a Total Failure.  The shortfall of 500,000 in the expected net new job figures for August shows that stagflation is upon us: employers are afraid to hire employees as they normally would coming out of the COVID recession because they don't know if they will be able to afford them.  Hourly pay scales are increasing at 7.5 percent, new car prices at 10 percent, rental accommodation at 12 percent, and new homes at 20 percent, all well ahead of the official rate of inflation, contrary to the smug assurances of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and even some Federal Reserve spokespeople, that inflation was a mere bubble.  Historically, the only sustainable way of fighting stagflation has been to counter inflation with increased supply and achieve that goal and the corresponding non-inflationary increase in demand through the encouragement of demand in the tax system.  The present administration is committed to raising taxes and to colossal spending increases, which will exacerbate both stagnation and inflation.

The glaring truth about Biden and his masters.  Joe Biden, the so-called president, is nothing more than a marionette controlled by a gaggle of career bureaucrats and academics, none of whom has ever contributed anything substantial to our once vibrant society.  Indeed, they are nothing more than destroyers, power-mad ideologues who use a demented old grifter as a mouthpiece while they dismantle, piece by piece, our once great Republic.  Globalism is their ultimate goal, and the nightmare we're experiencing brings us ever closer to that frightening reality.  Biden is a figurehead for the Marxist madness that's corrupting our schools, destroying small business, and slowly but surely eliminating our nation's sovereignty.  The current push to force Americans to "register" their firearms under a United Nations gun-grabbing scheme is just one example of the ongoing attack on our cherished freedoms.  Another glaring example is the fascist collaboration between the ruling elites and Big Tech to silence dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment.  If the Marxist drive continues, it will go on and on until the Bill of Rights is little more than a footnote in a long forgotten history.

Kamala Harris has blood on her hands.  Not in connection with Afghanistan — I doubt that she has had any influence on events there — but as a result of her support for violent crime in Minnesota.  In the wake of the George Floyd riots, Harris contributed to the Minnesota Freedom Fund and encouraged others to do so as well.  She did so on the pretext that the Freedom Fund was bailing out "demonstrators" arrested in Minnesota, but of course no one was arrested for demonstrating.  Those bailed out were arsonists, aggravated assaulters and other serious criminals.  Moreover, the Minnesota Freedom Fund didn't restrict itself to bailing out those arrested in the summer of 2020.  Rather, its efforts to inflict violent crime on Minnesotans have continued to the present day.  Last Sunday, an innocent man was murdered by a criminal who had been charged with domestic assault but was sprung by Kamala Harris's Minnesota Freedom Fund just days earlier.

As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World's STEM Leader.  The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s.  Because mathematics is the basis of science — as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics — US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage.  But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.  First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system.  Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India.  In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals.  In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.  That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn't even be maintained without international students.

The Masked Ball of Cowardice.  [Scroll down]  Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO's peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19's overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%.  John Ioannidis, the world's most-cited physician, believes the IFR (infection fatality rate) to be lower and published his own peer-reviewed study showing the overall IFR to be about 0.15%.  But in a poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021 Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.  For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible.  Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government's decision to employ drastic lockdown measures.  "We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown — in other words, they thought, 'it must be bad if government's taking such drastic measures.'  We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown."  The policies thus create a feedback loop in which the measures themselves sow the fear that makes citizens to believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 is hundreds of times greater than it really is, which in turn causes them to support more lockdown measures.

The Federal Reserve Is the Monetary Equivalent of the Kabul Airport.  Speaking to the virtual Jackson Hole conference of the Federal Reserve System, Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that inflation will go away soon. [...] The Fed is the monetary equivalent of the Kabul airport.  After dumping $5 trillion of helicopter money into the U.S. economy and overstretching supply chains in almost every industry, the Fed is faced with the worst inflation since the Carter era.  And the worst is yet to come, [...].  The rent on a new lease has jumped 10% year-on-year according to the search site Zillow, but rent inflation according to the government is just 2%.  That's because it takes a year or two for leases to expire and the new, higher rents to kick in.  A huge jump in inflation driven by higher rents is baked into the cake for 2022.  That's the elephant in the parlor, and Powell didn't mention it.

US rent hikes will explode consumer inflation in 2022.  How come the shelter component of the US Consumer Price Index is rising at just 2% a year while all the private-sector gauges of rent inflation show rent hikes of close to 10%?  Shown in the Chart of the Day [left] is a comparison of the Zillow Rent Index with the Consumer Price Index rent component.  Shelter is two-fifths of the total index, so the question of whether inflation is "transitory" or not depends on rents.  This question has a simple answer:  It takes the Bureau of Labor Statistics about a year to catch up with rent inflation.  What the government reported as rent inflation in July reflects the economy of a year ago and more.  That's because renters' leases take a year or two to expire.  The Zillow, Apartmentlist.com and CoreLogic reports reflect the average rent on a new lease, not the rent on leases signed in the past.  As old leases expire and renters have to pay the higher market rate, rent inflation will surge.

Key Inflation Gauge Posts Fastest Annual Price Gain in 30 Years.  The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the so-called core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, vaulted in the 12 months through July to levels not seen in 30 years.  The Commerce Department said in a release Friday that core PCE rose 3.6 percent over the year in July, matching last month's level, which was an increase from 3.5 percent in May and 3.1 percent in April.  The last time the core PCE inflation gauge saw a similar year-over-year vault was in July 1991, while the highest level the measure has hit is 10.2 percent in February 1975, when the economy was gripped in a troubling upwards wage-price spiral fueled by rising inflation expectations on the part of consumers.  The Fed looks to core PCE as a key inflation measure that informs its monetary policy, which has an inflation target of a longer-run average of 2 percent.

America Is Now Actually the Mess Dems Pretended It Was Under Trump.  Long before Donald Trump even had the chance to take office, we were constantly assured by Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media that the United States as we knew it was pretty much toast.  It began on election night 2016.  I stayed up until about six in the morning on the west coast watching both CNN and MSNBC (one on my television and one on my phone) melting down over Trump's victory.  In no uncertain terms, the talking heads at each network repeated the dire warning that a Trump victory meant certain doom for the American stock market.  It was the first of about a million things they got wrong.  Trump's economy was humming along in overdrive until the Wuhan lab let the bat go free.  Objectively, the first three years of the Trump era were [very] good ones for the republic.  Unfortunately, American Democrats all live on a subjective moon that orbits a navel-gazing planet.  Rather than just sit back and enjoy all of the peace and prosperity that President Trump helped bring about, all they could do was rend their garments over the fact that he had dared to defeat the least likable presidential candidate in history fairly and squarely.

The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden.  Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross.  None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth. [...] In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink.  Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for "infrastructure," and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?  At the same time, he has alarmed employers with braggadocio threats that higher capital gains, income, payroll, and estate taxes are all on the way.  More lockdowns only further eroded small businesses.  The result was price inflation of all the stuff of life — homes, lumber, gas, food, appliances — as well as historic shortages of everything from cars and houses to the work of contractors and electricians.

Everything Is Not All Right.  Currently, the situation at our southern border is a nightmare with record numbers of migrants overwhelming infrastructure and bringing new variants of COVID along with cartels smuggling drugs and human capital across.  The current administration seems to have no response, and what's more, no concern.  The swift deterioration of conditions and withdrawal in Afghanistan has enabled U.S. persons, weapons, and intelligence to fall into the hands of the Taliban, undoing 20 years of stalemate in a month's time.  The push for COVID vaccines and rejection of natural immunity is driving a record silent super-spreader event across the country.  Inflation is running rampant as supply shortages are met with an overabundance of stimulus dollars injected into the bank accounts of American taxpayers.  Just eighteen months ago we touted energy independence, and now the Biden Administration is begging OPEC to make up for artificial shortfalls in supply that are driving exorbitant fuel prices.  Meanwhile, local school boards, government agencies, and corporations continue to double down on racist and divisive social policy designed to drive a wedge down the spine of society.  This is not business as usual.

A Call to Action.  [Scroll down]  Independents and moderates don't like this any more than we do.  They understand that Democrats destabilize our democracy when they flout the law, disregard the Constitution, or defund the police.  They see the hypocrisy in opening the border with no restrictions for COVID, criminality, or skills, yet closing it to Cubans or Afghans escaping real persecution.  They fear being silenced by the Army of the Woke or petty authoritarians using COVID to curtail their freedoms.  They're revolted by demands to end racism with racism and nullify all of education and history, achievement and progress in the name of white supremacy and privilege.  They justifiably recoil when activists co-opt their children's mental health with fanciful notions that something humankind has always taken for granted, is a choice along an ever-changing gender continuum.

We've come a long way baby.  From the Obama-Biden Peter Principle presidential ticket which delivered a commie leader and his feckless sidekick, determined to fundamentally transform America.  That woke enough people up to give us President Trump for 4 years.  But as he was too dangerous to the deep state's agenda he had to go.  So *censor me if you can find me* they rigged the election and fraudulently delivered the election to the selected team of Biden/Harris, arguably the two stupidest American leaders ever "elected." [...] So now come the consequences of the fraudulent election:
  •   Out of control inflation
  •   Out of control spending
  •   Out of control crime
  •   Out of control illegal alien invasion/child trafficking
  •   Crippled American energy independence
  •   Iran is back!
  •   The pandemic is back!
  •   Our foreign policy is a shambles.

Are We in a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?  The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite.  And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. [...] Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it.  Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt.  Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an "infrastructure" bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash.

The Dystopia Of Progressivism.  Welcome to the new America — the United States of Dystopia:  open borders, massive increases in government, reckless spending, crushing debt, demonized and defunded police, coddled criminals, cancel culture, identity politics, censorship, and socialism.  America is becoming unhinged.  Who should we blame?  One immediate candidate is the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, which now controls the beltway bureaucracy, the White House, most of Congress, and the mayors and councils of our urban ghettos. [...] And now the progressives want to change America by opening borders, defunding police, emptying jails, increasing debt, suppressing speech, and revising history.  Already, too many potential Democrats are crossing the border, irrespective of COVID, trafficking and, the fentanyl accompanying them.  But Cubans, unlike Central Americans, are not welcome since they tend to vote Republican.  Our cities burn and innocent citizens are shot, but the police who serve and protect must be demonized and jails emptied, because disorder is preferable to order whose maintenance is the first duty of sound government.  Suppressing speech is not progress.  Yet Leftists routinely defame their opponents as 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'misogynistic,' 'homophobic,' 'xenophobic,' 'fascist,' or 'deplorable,' using demagoguery reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy to drown out speech with which they disagree.

How Did We Go From Energy Dominance To Energy Begging In Just 8 Months?  [U]nlike Jimmy Carter, who blundered his way into gasoline shortages, Biden is intentionally creating the current situation to pay homage to climate "crisis" environmentalists.  During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to "get rid of fossil fuels."  Since taking office, he's been busy trying to carry out that pledge.  One of the first things he did in office was to call a halt on oil and gas leases on federal lands and off our coastlines, and has yet to resume allowing them even after a federal judge ordered the administration to do so.  He shut down construction of the Keystone Pipeline.  He blocked energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  He directed federal agencies to "eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law."  He's promised to add some $90 billion to the industry's tax burden by eliminating what he calls tax "subsidies."

Our Military Is A Woke Joke.  Ignore those pictures of the Afghan army that our military senior leader geniuses spent 20 years and zillions of dollars on disintegrating in the face of a pack of glorified mountain banditos from the Seventh Century — the real story is that, finally, America's fighting men and women are fully aware of the urgency of accepting and validating the trans experience.  And it's even better if said trans people are BIPOC.  Plus differently abled. [...] Yes, it is a joke, a sick one.  Fire all the generals.  Invite a few back, maybe a dozen.  Clean out the Pentagon.  Can all the "Diversity Consultants," "Equal Opportunity Officers," "Climate Change Mitigation Specialists," and every other strap-hanging oxygen thief who doesn't contribute to the only thing the military should be focusing on right now — putting Chi Coms in graves.  Yeah, there's been a strategic failure of epic proportions by our civilian establishment.  We need to fix that at the ballot box by tossing out every Democrat and every Liz Cheney-esque combat tourist who delights in sending our young people overseas to get ground up in idiotic wars designed to enrich their cronies.  Hardest hit at the end of Afghanistan:  Haliburton, Raytheon, KBR, and a hundred other contractors you never heard of.

Is there anything less green than the left's beloved cannabis?  Marijuana is one of the least "green," most energy-intensive crops there is.  That is the dirty little secret that no "woke" groups or climate terrorists wish to acknowledge.  The recent surge in its acceptance, legality, and use, is, therefore, making it a rapidly growing source of greenhouse gases.  Since pot is grown mostly indoors and requires special lighting and environmental controls that consume up to 2,000 watts of electricity per square meter, it is responsible for inordinately high levels of energy consumption... like 40 times that needed to produce leafy greens such as lettuce. [...] A research report titled, "Energy Use by the Indoor Cannabis Industry:  Inconvenient Truths for Producers, Consumers, and Policymakers," introduces readers to the fact that the ever-growing pot-growing industry is already responsible for over 1% of all electricity consumption in the United States.  If true, that is a mind-blowing statistic.  Think about it.  Of all the myriad energy uses in existence, from air-conditioning and heating to televisions and refrigerators, to massive sports stadiums and concert halls, to 24-hour-a-day big-box grocery stores and downtown skyscrapers, to the military-industrial complex, etc., etc., growing pot uses one one-hundredth of all the electricity consumption in the U.S.?!!

An American apocalypse — why people of all classes, races are filled with fear.  [Scroll down]  The crime wave likewise is not accidental.  It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.  In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.  Race relations have regressed 50 years.  Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.  Most Americans still integrate, assimilate, and intermarry.  But the current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear a self-critical and always improving nation, as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole.

Inflation keeps growing, but Dems won't stop spending.  President Joe Biden and Democrats keep telling Americans not to worry about inflation, that it's only temporary.  Yet the record price hikes keep getting worse.  On Thursday [8/12/2021], the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yet another jump, a full 1 percent, in the producer price index (which measures prices before they reach consumers) for the month of July.  Wholesale prices are now up 7.8 percent over the past year, the fastest annual surge since such record-keeping began in 2010.  On Wednesday, the BLS reported consumer prices rose 0.5 percent in July, or 5.4 percent over the past year — maintaining June's yearly pace, the largest in 13 years.  Biden actually bragged that it wasn't even higher, yet wages are up only 4 percent from a year ago, so Americans have lost ground.

Dear Media:  You got what you wanted and what you worked for.  Happy now?  Our despicable mainstream media did everything in its vast and coercive power to see Joe Biden elected president. [...] In seven months, Biden has pretty much destroyed America!  The open border has welcomed what will be a million migrants from around the world by the end of the year, many of them sick with a panoply of diseases long ago eradicated in America, and bringing in new variants of COVID.  While Americans are ordered to mask up and be vaxxed, these people arriving at our southern border, welcomed by the Biden regime that has tied the hands of ICE and the Border Patrol, are mask- and vax-free.  Eleven Democrat senators just voted against mandating that they be screened, tested, masked and vaxxed before being allowed in to roam about the country.  How's that for hypocrisy?  Biden is purposefully altering the demographics of the U.S. with the single-minded goal of making the Democrat party the ruling party in perpetuity.  He and his partners in crime care not a bit about the American people.  They care only about cementing their control over the 330 million citizens who call his nation our home.

Storm Clouds For Biden.  For the first time in quite a few years, prices for staple items are rising rapidly, and with the federal government borrowing and spending at a record pace that trend can only accelerate.  People aren't happy about it: this Fox News poll finds that 70 percent of respondents consider grocery and gasoline prices to be a hardship for their families, with 29 percent considering them a serious hardship.  Further, 79% say "the federal government's economic policies" are responsible for rising prices, with 49 percent considering them "very responsible."  To be fair, respondents also blame the coronavirus — not sure how that works — and "the regular ups and downs of the economy."  But as prices continue to rise over the next year, more and more fingers will be pointed at Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Reality Bites Biden's Policies.  The Democrats' idiotic anti-fossil fuel campaign took a hit this week when Biden begged the Saudis to up production after shutting down as much of domestic production as he could.  (Apparently, he believes that oil from the Middle East doesn't affect the climate as much as fossil fuel from Canada and the U.S. Or, if it does affect the climate by warming it, that's now a good thing.) Dane Bjorn Lomborg who, unlike AOC and Greta, knows what he's talking about, explains that more people (166,000 of them) each year die from cold than die from heat.  In like manner to Biden's begging OPEC for more oil, California's loony decarbonization program hit a snag as it is forced to rely on carbon fuels to prevent widespread blackouts.

Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine suggests 'chestfeeding,' 'father's milk' in new guidelines.  The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine has issued guidelines that suggest employing such terms as "chestfeeding," "human milk feeding," and "parent's milk" to promote what it calls "gender-inclusive language."  The ABM position statement on "infant feeding and lactation-related language and gender," co-authored by eight doctors and the academy, said that "the use of de-sexed or gender-inclusive language is appropriate in many settings."  "ABM recognizes that not all people who give birth and lactate identify as female, and that some of these individuals identify as neither female nor male," said the four-page document posted July 29.

The Editor says...
Do you really want to live in a world where there are no facts?

The Four Horsemen of the Biden Apocalypse.  Across America, our cities are on fire as crime is exploding.  An increasing number of innocent Americans are being victimized each day.  Incredibly, liberal politicians have used the opportunity to demand the defunding of police departments.  This has only increased the number of police officers resigning and retiring.  As a result, police departments are understaffed, and recruitment is becoming extremely difficult in urban areas that are viewed as being anti-police.  The answer, according to Biden and the Democrats, is always more gun control and never more criminal control.  Citizens are unsafe on the streets of our cities, and our children are unsafe in our public-school classrooms.

Producer Price Index Records Highest Inflation Rate in History Since Tracking Began.  The "producer price index" is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages:  Origination (commodity), Intermediate and Final.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released stunning price data showing a dramatic 7.8% price increase in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.  When you see the wholesale level of prices almost double the increase in consumer level inflation rate, you can predict that consumer prices will likely go even higher.  The future finished goods at a retail level will carry the current wholesale price increase.  Stuff costs a lot now, and stuff is about to cost even more pretty soon.  Food products are fast-turn consumable goods, and the inflation in the food sector is jaw-dropping already.  However, fresh and processed foods turn at different inventory levels.

American Armageddon.  Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.  The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives.  For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families' safety and the American way of life.  The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past.  It is nonexistent.  Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year — with complete impunity.  There is zero effort to stop them.  Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID.  But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.  Have we ever had a president who made no pretense about destroying federal immigration law and asking of Americans what he does not of illegal aliens?

Inflation Continues to Crush Middle Class, July Inflation 5.4 Percent, Milk 8 Percent, Energy 23 Percent, Gasoline 43 Percent.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) releases the inflation numbers for July showing massive U.S. inflation continues to crush the working class.  Massive increases in domestic food staples (+10%), energy (+23%) and regular unleaded gasoline (+43%) are hitting the middle-class exceptionally hard.  No middle-class Americans are having their wages increase even close to the scale of price increases for basic purchases.  This outcome results in massive drops in "real wages" (wages minus inflation), and eliminates disposable income entirely.  These outcomes are not due to COVID-19 or any recovery therein.  These outcomes are a direct result of Joe Biden economic and monetary policy.  The White House responds to inflation by saying the Biden administration is attempting to directly subsidize the middle-class inflation they are creating by giving Americans money to pay for higher prices through COVID bailouts.  Yes, the administration admits they are exploding the dependency state.

Inflation remains at 13-year high at 5.4%, despite Biden insisting soaring prices are temporary.  A key measure of inflation remained unchanged in July from its June level, spurring fears that price increases will continue to hit Americans in the wallet.  Federal data released on Wednesday showed that for the 12 months through July, the consumer price index rose 5.4 percent, unchanged from June and at the highest level since the Great Recession in 2008.  On a monthly basis, consumer prices jumped 0.5 percent from June to July, down from the previous monthly increase of 0.9 percent.

For Six Months Biden Has Shut Down U.S. Oil Production, Today Biden Asks OPEC to Pump More Oil.  There's hypocrisy, there's double speak, there's stupid decisions based on politics, and then there's this level of Biden hypocrisy and stupidity that cannot be adequately encapsulated.  President Trump's energy production policy made the U.S.A. energy independent.  We were actually exporting oil and gas to other nations.  However, in the previous six months Joe Biden has:  (1) Shut down oil and energy development in ANWAR which would increase use of the Alaska pipeline[,]  (2) Blocked the Keystone Pipeline from completion[,]  (3) Banned energy development on federal lands[,]  (4) Shut down the sale of energy leases in the Gulf of Mexico[,] and (5) Blocked energy development in Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Alabama.  As a direct and immediate consequence, gas and fuel prices have skyrocketed.  The price of Unleaded Regular Gasoline is now up over 60% from 2020.

Too bad about those worker wage gains, Biden's inflation has already wolfed them down.  Joe Biden, who plays Mr. Everyman on TV, in real life has an amazing history of stiffing the little guy.  He touts a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage and raves about wage gains during his administration: [...] Biden's inflation ate them.  How exactly does that happen?  Simple:  It's government spending, with all the government debt that comes of it.  With Biden's monster $1.2-trillion infrastructure stimulus package in the works, and its even bigger $3.5-trillion "Bernie" budget resolution now in the pipeline, it's set to get even worse.  And Biden has spent [...] a lot already. [...] Where does the money come from?  It's certainly not in some bank account now.  It's coming the Hugo Chávez way, which is to say through the money-printing press.

American Express tells its workers capitalism is racist.  American Express, which made a $2.3 billion profit last quarter, invited the great-grandson of the Nation of Islam's founder to tell its employees that capitalism is evil.  It was part of the credit card giant's critical race theory training program, which asks workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves on a hierarchy of "privilege."  According to a trove of documents I've reviewed, AmEx executives created an internal "Anti-Racism Initiative" after George Floyd's death last year, subjecting employees to a training program based on the core CRT tenets, including intersectionality, which reduces individuals to a tangle of racial, gender and sexual identities that determine whether he is an "oppressor" or "oppressed" in a given situation.

Impeach Joe Biden.  In just about seven months in office, Biden is surpassing what it took James Buchanan and Jimmy Carter — two of the most wretched presidents in U.S. history — to achieve in four years. [...] Biden is dissolving our southern border.  Isn't that grounds for impeachment?  Isn't it a president's duty to "protect and defend" the nation by preventing hordes of illegals from entering the country?  But dereliction is Biden's lesser offense.  His southern border policy flouts his duty as chief executive.  Biden's defiance isn't the result of misplaced compassion or incompetence.  Very naïve Americans persist in characterizing the border crisis as due to the Biden administration's bungling mismanagement.  That's simply not true.  As Tucker Carlson repeatedly points out, the southern border breakdown is premeditated.  The White House and congressional Democrats know what they're doing and why.

The Rage Orchestrating the Transformation of America.  The unfortunate events of Jan. 6 were immediately pounced upon by the Left and transmogrified into the worst attack on the Capitol ever — conveniently forgetting that the British burned Washington in 1812, Puerto Rican terrorists (later pardoned by Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama) shot up the House in 1954, and the Weather Underground (led in part by Obama buddy Bill Ayers) bombed the Capitol and other federal buildings in the 1970s. [...] The various COVID vaccines, whose readiness was concealed by the drug companies until after the election, are now being used as yet another crowd-control measure, restricting international travel (and, soon enough, domestic travel as well) as well as entry into shops, restaurants, and other public spaces — all in the name of "health" and "safety," of course.  Political disagreement settled peaceably, good will, personal autonomy, bodily integrity — these are now all things of the past.  Meanwhile, our economy is in tatters, welfare is a way of life, our constitutional freedoms have been willingly surrendered, our language has been mangled, and we are all at each other's throats.

Biden's Six Months In Office Have Us On The Road To Communism.  America's southern border is open.  According to the US Customs and Border Patrol, close to 190,000 people crossed into the United States in June alone, and that number has been accelerating in the six months since the Biden administration reversed all the Trump-era policies and refused to enforce existing immigration law.  At this rate, it's not inconceivable that we'll have absorbed another 30 million illegal immigrants, or about 10 percent of the current U.S. population if Joe Biden serves two terms.  That is an invasion.  The US military should be lined up virtually shoulder to shoulder along the entire length of the southern border.  But then who would vote for Democrats?  The only immigrants crossing into this country from the south who would not eventually vote for Democrats in large numbers are Cuban refugees.  They are also, by and large, the only group with legitimate asylum claims — and they are the only group Biden's government is turning away.  Their fate is something you probably don't want to think about, but it serves the purposes of the Biden administration, whose goal is to import as many future Democrat voters as humanly possible.  The Canadian border is now closed due to COVID but illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border with their ten percent covid infection rate are being transported at taxpayer expense into the U.S. interior.  If this doesn't qualify as senseless, pointless, lunacy, I don't know what would.

The Bad Path of Relativizing the Rule of Law.  Progressive leaders have tacitly permitted criminals to run life off the tracks and ruin it by relativizing the rule of law and behaving as if it applies to everyone else but them.  Conceptually, enforcing the law is the solution, but progressives don't see it that way.  America's cities are testaments to the abject failures of these policies because violent crime has escalated, especially murder.  Yet progressive district attorneys adamantly refuse to prosecute them.  Moreover, the movement to eliminate cash bail steadily gained traction as it has in New York, which attenuates accountability.  It is incumbent upon district attorneys to prosecute all those who commit violent crimes.  But district attorneys Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Cyrus Vance, Jr. in New York don't see it that way.  According to Niall McCarthy, a data journalist for Statista, the world's leading statistical database, murder rates have risen 52% and 32%, respectively, in those jurisdictions during the first half of 2020 when compared to the same period in 2019.

A grandiose Rep. Cori Bush says the quiet part out loud.  We've all known about this quiet part:  It's the one that says that high-level leftists, the ones who want to take our cars, air conditioners, heating, health care, travel rights, and money, do not have to abide by their own rules.  Rules are for the little people and, when it comes to Bush's need for personal security guards while she's defunding your police, Bush is happy to explain why she's special. [...] Cori Bush is the first-term congresswoman from Missouri's first congressional district (St. Louis, mostly). She is an RN, a pastor and, most importantly, a hard-left activist who came to political prominence following the Ferguson riots that followed after Michael Brown robbed a store, tried to steal a police officer's weapon, and was killed in the resulting struggle.  The BLM lie was that he had his hands up and said, "Don't shoot."  Bush rode that lie into Congress and has been one of the loudest advocates for defunding police all over America.  Thanks to the effects of this policy, poor and middle-class people have been slaughtered in Democrat-run American cities in unprecedented numbers.  Many parts of cities such as Chicago and New York are like war zones, only scarier.

When Life Imitates A Terrifying Science Fiction Thriller.  [Scroll down]  Our Skynet is called Silicon Valley and it is comrade to the American left.  Unlike Skynet, which gained self-awareness, Silicon Valley is full of people who seem to have no self-awareness at all.  They proffer ideas that normal people recognize as ludicrous — e.g., men can give birth, America is systemically racist, and defunding police leads to safer streets — yet they think they are correct about everything.  Just look at the world they exist in.  The Bay Area is overrun with homelessness, with drug addicts literally sprawled out on the sidewalks; the streets are covered with human feces and hypodermic needles; violence is raging out of control; and so many criminals shoplift with impunity in full view of employees and cameras that national chains and Mom & Pop shops alike are having to close their doors because they're losing so much money.  What's more, their calls for defunding the police persist, despite extraordinary spikes in violence.

If You Can Figure Out What This Crazy Person With Animal Pronouns Is Saying, You May Be Insane As Well.  From the great Liberals Of TikTok on Instagram.  Something went very wrong with this girl's life.  [Video clip]

Large Democrat-Run Cities Lag Nation In Job Recovery.  A new report reveals that large, Democrat-run cities are lagging the nation — including other municipalities — in labor market recovery.  Personal finance company WalletHub combined three statistics — change in unemployment in June 2021 versus June 2019, June 2021 versus January 2020, and June 2021 versus June 2020 — to evaluate the cities with the fastest rebounds from high unemployment rates caused by COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession. [...] The ten worst cities for labor market recovery include the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States — New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, led by Democratic mayors Bill de Blasio, Eric Garcetti, and Lori Lightfoot.

You've made your bed, now lie in it.
Portland wants to walk back defunding the police but officers don't want the jobs.  Last June Portland's Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, decided to put an end to the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) as part of an effort to reimagine policing.  The $6 million that would have gone to the team was redirected " toward communities of color."  Even at the time the assistant chief of police warned their could be serious consequences. [...][ Daryl Turner, the head of Portland's Police Union issued a similar warning.  "That is going to cripple us in our ability to be able to stop violence in the streets of the city of Portland," he said.  After the GVRT was cut, the number of shootings and murders in Portland skyrocketed.  Last September there were 110 shootings in Portland, a 243% jump compared to a year earlier.  At the end of the year, Portland had more than 900 shootings, double the previous year.  The spike in violence continued into 2021.

Joe Biden's failing first crisis.  It's difficult to find many Americans who aren't frustrated with Biden.  A solid majority, 55 percent, told pollsters from ABC News they are pessimistic about the direction of the country in the next 12 months, with only 45 percent saying they are optimistic.  The survey represented a dramatic swing of 20 points since May, when two-thirds said they were optimistic.  The findings are stunning given that much of the media, especially the Times, has treated Biden with kid gloves for the first six months of his presidency.  But the protection racket can't hide what people see with their own eyes.  The inflation tax at the checkout line and gas station is inescapable, as is the two-year crime and murder surge around the nation.  On those two bedrock issues and so many others, the White House seems either incompetent or impotent.

Our Nation's Theme Parks Are The Real Dystopian American Vision.  From Disney World and Universal Studios to Cedar Point and Six Flags, America's theme parks may offer charm and exciting thrill rides, but they also offer a stark dystopian vision of how far America is from the great country it once was. [...] As any miserable member of the decaying American middle class knows, everything of real importance in their overcrowded, declining country costs more.  Single-family homes, university degrees, childcare, and health insurance have all surged in price.  Often, as the price has exploded, quality has fallen.  A college degree is essential for most career paths, yet actual colleges teach less than ever, and entire fields like English and anthropology have become embarrassing jokes.  In cities like San Francisco, enormously expensive housing is paired with the need to pay for a private school to avoid a calamitous public system.  For millions of Americans, the struggle to maintain the middle class trappings they grew up with has become a path to financial destruction.

Bacon in California May Soon Be More Hard to Find as Pig Rules Take Effect.  Thanks to a reworked menu and long hours, Jeannie Kim managed to keep her San Francisco restaurant alive during the coronavirus pandemic.  That makes it all the more frustrating that she fears her breakfast-focused diner could be ruined within months by new rules that could make one of her top menu items — bacon — hard to get in California. [...] Animal welfare organizations for years have been pushing for more humane treatment of farm animals but the California rules could be a rare case of consumers clearly paying a price for their beliefs.

Whitlock: Simone Biles and the celebration of quitting are latest signs America has been hacked.  The pace of change in American culture is too rapid.  A contemplative and reflective nation has turned rash and emotional.  Feelings drive the mood and attention span of the citizenry.  Fear fuels our decision-making.  With irrational children punching in the data and interpreting the printouts, America is being forced to operate at the speed and with the precision of a computer.  Silicon Valley social media companies download information into our smartphones, and we instantly spit out conclusions and solutions.  It's unsustainable.  Societies can't process information at warp speed.  Plagued by malware and viruses, we're malfunctioning.  George Floyd is more revered than George Washington.  "Three Men and a Baby" is no longer a Hollywood movie featuring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg.  It's the ideal family, according to the BLMLGBTQIA+ Alphabet Mafia.  The same group says "gay is the new black."  Jesus and Christianity are more polarizing than Allah and Islam.  But nothing has changed more rapidly than our position on quitting.  In 48 hours, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles transformed the felonious act of quitting into a deed of breathtaking heroism.

Joe Biden Moves to Bankrupt More Americans and You Can Thank Brett Kavanaugh.  The economic illiteracy of the left never ceases to amaze, and that's certainly true regarding Joe Biden's latest push.  The president is now moving to pressure Congress into extending the so-called "eviction moratorium" that has crippled the housing market and crushed landlords across the country.  This comes after some property owners have not gotten paid rent in over a year while they still have to pay their mortgages.  As you can see, this is really caring and compassionate stuff coming from Joe Biden.  [Tweet]  The absurdity isn't just that this is coming under the guise of an "emergency," but that it's been allowed to happen at all.  On what planet does the CDC or Congress have the constitutional authority to literally steal people's property with no reimbursement?  Yet, that's exactly what's been happening.  In fact, you can find multitudes of left-wing ideologues willing to defend it as a right and just move, citing the supposed evils of landlords.

Do We Have to Watch Their Wretched Movie All Over Again?  The consumer price index for June rose on an annual basis before seasonal adjustment by 5.4%.  That's higher than May, which suggests that inflation is accelerating.  And it's far above the 2% annual rate, which is the professed goal of the Federal Reserve.  Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen insisted that the jumps in prices are just temporary adjustments to the COVID-19 economy, although she's extended the period for adjustments.  Current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said he's not worried and will keep interest rates low.  They've got the bond market on their side.  But those expressing alarm include not only the Wall Street Journal editorial page but also Harvard economist and Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.  He's been arguing for months that President Joe Biden's administration is pumping too much money into the economy.

Biden's 'Accomplishments' So Far:  A Troubling Tale In 8 Charts.  Months after President Joe Biden supposedly "rescued" the country from the COVID-19 pandemic and promised that he'd bring the country together, how is the nation doing?  Well, there are several indicators on the rise.  Unfortunately, they are all indicators of trouble.  The news Thursday [7/29/2021] that the GDP gained 6.5% in the second quarter (the first full quarter since Biden signed his American Rescue Plan) is good.  But it is well below economists' forecasts.  The Blue Chip Consensus forecast was above 9%, and other surveys pegged Q2 growth at 8.5%.  It was also just barely above the gain in Q1 — which was before any of Biden's policies had taken effect.  Still, other things are on the rise under Biden, too, many of them well above expectations.  The misery index is up, for example, so is inflation, pessimism, and financial stress.  Illegal border crossings are up and murders are way up.  Oh, and cases of COVID-19 — the disease Biden said he would slay — are increasing again.  Naturally, while taking credit for the good GDP number, the Biden administration is trying to pin the blame for all these other things on President Donald Trump.  But how convincing can that be, when Biden ostentatiously broke with just about every one of Trump's policies and did so in ways that had an immediate effect?

Irony, Absurdity, and Dishonesty — The Democrat Party's Playbook.  Amid the turmoil and trauma in the aftermath of George Floyd dying in police custody (for which Officer Derrick Chauvin was convicted and sentenced for murder), the outpouring of emotion and outrage became a call to "Defund the Police." [...] Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature is just the same.  It is a sad fact that we live in a fallen world and when lawful authority exits or is diminished, criminals will enter and increase.  It was entirely predictable and has happened as predicted.  There is a crime wave sweeping the nation in those cities and municipalities run by liberal, "woke" Democrat politicians.  Minorities and the poor have suffered the most.  This has not helped but has added immeasurable suffering, misery, and devastation.  Do these elected Democrats display any sense of accountability or responsibility for such a poorly conceived policy?  NO!  They trot out talking points and try to blame Republicans for the mess they made.

Killer Biden Inflation Is His Main 'Gift' To America.  Excessive taxes, spending, and government regulation have once again gripped America thanks to the policies of Biden, Harris, and the progressives.  The predictable result is higher prices for everything and a repeat of the Carter Misery Index from which President Reagan rescued us beginning in 1981.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and as confirmed by Americans for Tax Reform, since January 2021:
  •   Gasoline prices have increased by 45% and other energy prices by 24.5%
  •   The price of bacon has increased by 8.4% and seafood prices by more than 6%
  •   The price of fresh milk has increased by 7.5% and fresh fruits by 8.4%
  •   Prices for major appliances are up 14% and furniture and bedding have increased 8.5%
  •   Airfares have increased by nearly 25%
The root of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, as our economist friend Milton Friedman frequently observed.  The New York Times warns that inflation also results in long-lasting damage if wages don't keep up.

The closest you can get to mind control is speech control.  Why has the United States been transmogrified in little more than half a century from a Christian nation that joyously displayed Christmas trees and crèches in public spaces into a secular nation that bans prayers at public school graduation ceremonies, allows men who "identify" as women to invade female dressing rooms, and even celebrates a woman's constitutional "right" to snuff out the life in her womb?  These are a few of the transformations in American society that Michael Knowles analyzes in his recent work Speechless:  Controlling Words, Controlling Minds — transformations broadly attributed to "political correctness" and Marxism.

Furious restaurant owners vent at Biden for telling them to raise wages which they say will lead to MORE inflation.  Restaurant owners are lashing out at President Biden for telling them they have to raise wages in order to attract staff, a move they say will drive inflation, put them out of business and shows how little he understands about the country's labor crisis.  There are still more than 12 million people in America claiming some kind of unemployment (5.9 percent) and first-time claims rose to 419,000 last week, the highest in nearly two months.  At the end of 2019, the number of unemployed was 5.8 million (3.5 percent).  The states with the highest unemployment rates (over 7 percent, 2 percent more than the national average), are California, Connecticut, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York, all of which are Democrat states.

Inflation [is] Something to Be Concerned About Now.  Inflation has been accelerating this year, and it isn't hard to see why.  Government spending has been so overwhelming that even former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a Democrat, said recently:  ["]We are printing money.  We are creating government bonds.  We are borrowing on unprecedented scales.  Those are things that surely create more of a risk of a sharp dollar decline than we had before.  And sharp dollar declines are much more likely to translate themselves into inflation than they were historically.["]  Summers foresees the rise in inflation harming the poor the most.  Others at risk include savers and people on fixed incomes.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of inflation, reported July 13 that inflation was 5.4% in June, the highest percentage jump since 2008.

'Their Hands Are Tied': San Francisco Locals Demand Change To Stop Brazen Crime.  San Francisco local businesses and employees are calling for change as they describe increasingly brazen shoplifting and car break-ins.  Many residents told Fox News they believe changing California law Proposition 47 is the solution.  "The police are actually wonderful, their hands are tied, that's what's going on out here."  Gianni, a local who works in Fisherman's Wharf, told Fox News.  San Francisco Police Department's Public Information Officer, Robert Rueca explained "There's a threshold of 950 dollars that needs to be met in order for a misdemeanor to turn into a felony when it comes to theft."

License to shoplift:  Two thieves brazenly stroll out of TJ Maxx with armfuls of clothes.  Two men casually walked out of a Los Angeles area TJ Maxx with their arms full of what appears to be stolen goods as brazen shoplifters continue to rampage through California retail stores.  Viral video posted earlier this week shows two men carrying armfuls of jeans, jackets and other apparel as they casually saunter out of a TJ Maxx in the Granada Hills section of the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.  'That looks great,' one man is heard saying in the video as the two men head toward the door with the stolen loot, making no haste as they leave.

Here's Joe Biden's report card after six months in the White House.  The first marking period is over and President Biden's grades are coming in. [...] Government spending to ease the impact of the pandemic, coupled with mass vaccinations, led the country's gross domestic product to surge 6.4 percent during the first quarter of 2021, with some economists saying the growth is likely to continue throughout the year.  But last week's unemployment figures showed 3.2 million workers remained out of work even as new claims for jobless benefits dipped to a new pandemic low.  And a poll last week showed that more than 1.8 million jobless people turned down work during the pandemic due to hefty unemployment benefits.

This Shocking Video Shows Just How Brazen Crime In California Has Become.  California's slide into chaos has not been an accident.  A huge reason for the striking rise in homelessness and both petty and violent crime is Prop 47, a bill deceptively titled the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.  The actual bill couldn't be further from the title.  It reduces the penalties for felony crimes, allows for early release of violent criminals, changes some violent felonies to misdemeanors, and allows criminals to steal up to $950 dollars per day in property without prosecution.  As a result, police officers are less and less likely to respond to calls reporting petty theft, as there isn't much they can do with a suspect.

Radical Travis County DA Garza Drops Indictment Against Cop, Claims 'New Evidence'.  There may be a movie's worth of drama going on inside the Travis County (Texas) District Attorney's Office.  Jose Garza won that office on a platform of, basically, letting criminals go free and indicting cops.  Voters should pay more attention to what local office-seekers are saying.  Sometimes they actually mean it, and Garza did.  If Austin had a dashboard, all the lights would be blinking red.  Austin, the capital of Texas and the heart and seat of Travis County, has suffered at least 47 homicides in 2021.  Violent crime is spiking.  Police officers are leaving in droves, leaving the streets much less defended from crime than before.  That wasn't Garza's doing, Austin Mayor Steve Adler led the defunding of APD in August 2020 (and has proceeded to gaslight the city that he didn't), but that together with Garza's pro-release priorities are putting convicted felons back on the streets, where they are emboldened, while police officers face hostility from the Austin government, forced critical race theory indoctrination (more on that in due time), and the demoralizing prospect of facing an indictment from Garza, even if their cases have already been adjudicated.

The American Descent into Madness.  [Scroll down]  We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it.  The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius.  The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money — the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden's entitlement machine — but that we are constructing pseudoeconomics to justify the nihilism.  Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build "infrastructure," a word that has been expanded to include mostly anything but roads and bridges.  What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet, or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home? [...] America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021.  It went not so much hard-Left, as stark-raving mad.

The American Descent into Madness.  Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months.  The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.  Mao's China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.  In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America.  Madness, not politics, defines it.  There are three characteristics of all these upheavals.  One, the events are unsustainable.  They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it.  Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless.  Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Democrats and the Tyranny of the Mob.  If Target or Facebook or Coke or Nike or Disney want to beclown themselves by genuflecting at the altar of wokeness that's their business and citizens have the option of shunning their products or services.  With government, however, there is no such freedom.  Government, by its very nature, applies to all citizens equally, or at least that's the theory.  As such, when government bows to the mob and acquiesces to its demands, the rule of law suffers.  The last few years have been a virtual tour de force of government acquiescence to the mob.  One of the early examples of this was Baltimore's mayor and its previous mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.  As the chaos erupted across the city, the mayor not only acquiesced to the mob, she literally gave them permission to wreak havoc:  "We also gave those wished to destroy space as well."  That is literally the definition of mob rule, and the mayor of a major American city let it happen.  As is usual with Democrat treachery, little thought was given to the rights of innocent citizens whose property was destroyed, whose lives were put in jeopardy, or whose freedoms were quashed as they hunkered down in their homes hoping to survive the chaos and violence.

NYC sex workers rampant in open-air prostitution market amid lax enforcement.  [Scroll down]  When the police ride through — in both marked and unmarked cars — business mostly carries on without interruption.  While cruising down the block one night, a cop flashed the lights of their unmarked car in an apparent attempt at deterrence but took no other action.  Current and former vice cops told The [New York] Post that there's little incentive to make arrests, with the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez moving away from prosecuting prostitution cases, a shift that began in mid-2019.  In January, Gonzalez's office moved to vacate some 262 warrants stemming from prostitution cases dating back to 2012.

Leftists can't connect the dots.  What do they think the end scenario will be from teaching racist CRT doctrine to children from pre-school through high school?  What about the outcome of canceling fossil fuels to rely mainly on renewable energy?  Are they connecting any dots to see the outcome of passing trillion-dollar budgets when the economy is already facing inflation?  Are they following the sequence to see the endgame of allowing seemingly endless numbers of illegal aliens into our country?

The Dreaded Misery Index Is On The Rise Under Biden.  The misery index spiked at the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns, jumping from 5.94 to over 15 in one month with the surge in unemployment.  But then it quickly dissipated, as the economy under Trump rebounded faster than the so-called experts had predicted.  By the time Trump left office, the misery index was back down to 7.7.  A funny thing has happened since.  The misery index has climbed each and every month that Joe Biden has been president.  In February, it ticked up to 7.9, then rose to 8.6 in March.  Last month, the misery index hit 11.3, as the monthly inflation rate climbed to 5.4% while the unemployment rate edged up to 5.9%.

Inflation Nation:  Biden Admin "There Will Be Several More Months Of Rapid Inflation".  The Biden administration announced there will be "several more months of rapid inflation" as inflation levels have repeatedly broken long-held records.  "We will have several more months of rapid inflation," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.  "So I'm not saying that this is a one-month phenomenon.  But I think over the medium term, we'll see inflation decline back toward normal levels.  But, of course, we have to keep a careful eye on it."  However, many economists are predicting the high levels of inflation will persist for multiple years.  "Americans should brace themselves for several years of higher inflation than they've seen in decades, according to economists who expect the robust post-pandemic economic recovery to fuel brisk price increases for a while," The Wall Street Journal reported.  "The respondents on average now expect a widely followed measure of inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy components, to be up 3.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021 from a year before.  They forecast the annual rise to recede to slightly less than 2.3% a year in 2022 and 2023.  That would mean an average annual increase of 2.58% from 2021 through 2023, putting inflation at levels last seen in 1993."

Media Narrative Wrecked!  Poll Shows 1.8 Million Turned Down Jobs Because of Government Handouts.  A new poll delivers a devastating blow to the latest lie from the mainstream media about unemployment.  According to a poll from Morning Consult, a whopping 1.8 million Americans turned down jobs because the government extended unemployment benefits and it discouraged work.  The outlet stated that 14.1 million Americans who were receiving unemployment insurance for the week ending June 19 that "benefits reduced the number of accepted job offers by an estimated 1.84 million over the course of the pandemic."  The 1.84 million Americans turned down jobs likely because of government handouts.  Morning Consult's survey found that "most workers receiving unemployment insurance know that their benefits are about to expire, signaling that job acceptance and search practices are likely to change even before benefits actually expire."

Bidenflation: Cost of Gas, Used Cars Up 45%, Car Rentals 88%.  Nearly all Americans expect the inflation under Joe Biden's presidency will worsen still, even as the cost of gas and used cars is already up by 45 percent, and bacon up by 8.4 percent, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday [7/15/2021].  "The hashtag #Bidenflation has been trending recently," wrote Washington Secrets columnist Paul Bedard, noting a new survey from Skynova, an online invoicing firm that found 88 percent of people in the United States believe the current inflation is "here to stay and will soar more."

Explosive Inflation Leads To Record Collapse In Home, Car Purchase Plans.  For the past several months we have warned about the pernicious effects soaring prices are having on both corporations ("Buckle Up!  Inflation Is Here!") and consumers ("This Is Not Transitory: Hyperinflation Fears Are Soaring Across America"), prompting even otherwise boring sellside research to get (hyper) exciting, with Deutsche Bank (which warned this week that "Inflation Is About To Explode "Leaving Global Economies Sitting On A Time Bomb") and Bank of America (which "Just Threw Up All Over The Fed's 'Transitory' Argument") now openly claiming that the Fed is wrong, and the US is facing an unprecedented period of far higher, non-transitory inflation, with DB going so far as to warn "policymakers will face the most challenging years since the Volcker/Reagan period in the 1980s."  But none of this has spooked the Fed into conceding — or believing — that inflation is anything more than transitory.  And maybe just this once, the Fed has a point because all else equal, by which we mean lack of rising wages, the best cure to higher prices is, well, higher prices.

The Democrats' Topsy-Turvy Spin Machine.  The oceanic influx of unskilled labor at the southern border cannot fail to aggravate unemployment and depress the incomes for the vulnerable sectors of what, under President Trump, was a fully employed workforce.  The administration has reduced domestic oil production and squandered the country's status as an energy self-sufficient state. [...] This regime has embraced the most hair-raising, unproven, terroristic versions of the climate change issue, and it's only answer to surging increases in violent crime is the tired Democratic mantra about gun control.  The firearms don't discharge themselves and are now mainly used for self-defense and deterrence.  It is legally and politically impossible to reduce significantly the immense number of firearms in the country and the sophistry about what constitutes an "assault weapon" will not achieve anything.

Bidenflation is so bad, even Wolf Blitzer noticed.  Inflation can be curbed.  Under President Donald John Trump, the USA was a net producer of oil and natural gas for the first time in 50 years.  Unemployment fell to 3.5%.  Biden reversed that by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and blocking drilling.  Unemployment is now 5.9% and inflation 5.4% for a misery index of 11.3.  The Federal Reserve has kept the interest rates at ridiculous lows for decades.  It is time to raise those interest rates to reduce inflation.  Finally, the USA needs to make its own computer chips.  Red China's shortage of these chips has led to a shutdown of the auto industry, which has pushed prices higher as people turn to buying used cars, pushing those prices higher.

Once Beautiful Portland is Now A Progressive Nightmare.  After years of progressive rule, Portland has fallen!  Antifa rules the streets, the homeless rule the parks and criminals rule everything in between.  After more than a year of allowing most homeless camps to remain intact so as not to displace people during the pandemic, cities across the country are now beginning to confront another public health crisis unfolding on their streets.  The number of Americans who are homeless has increased in each of the past five years, according to government data, and for the first time more than half of homeless adults are living not in shelters but in tents or sleeping bags outside.  There has yet to be a nationwide homelessness count since the start of the pandemic, but a quarter of Americans now report being at "imminent risk" of losing their homes, and cities up and down the West Coast say they are overwhelmed by an unprecedented rise in homeless people, hazardous encampments and related trash.  [Video clip]

In Many Cities In America, The Criminals Are Starting To Gain Firm Control Of The Streets.  Every week the horrendous crime wave that is sweeping across America seems to get even worse.  In some of our largest cities, looting, murder and violence are becoming a way of life, and authorities seem powerless to do anything about it.  Is this what we can expect life in the United States to look like moving forward?  All over the globe, people are watching us, and they are stunned by what they have been witnessing.  Criminals are wildly out of control, and many of our largest cities are being transformed into extremely violent war zones.

North Dakota Gov.: Biden Oil and Gas Lease Halt Has Already Cost over $100 Million in Lost Revenue, Could Cost Billions if It Continues.  On Friday's [7/9/2021] broadcast of the Fox Business Network's "Varney & Co.," North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) discussed his state's lawsuit against the Biden administration's halt on oil and gas leases on public lands and said the suspension of the leases has already cost state, county, and local governments over $100 million in lost revenue, and "going forward, the cost could easily run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and if it went on permanently, it could be billions of dollars."

The Nation That Wouldn't Get Out Of Bed And Go To Work.  A country of roughly 330 million has more than 9 million job openings, and 9.5 million unemployed.  This is a disgrace, a clear indication that our American character and work ethic are slipping, a rolling tragedy that's been authored by the Democrats. [...] According to the Labor Department, there was a record high of 9.2 million job openings in May, and 9.5 million jobless in June.  ZipRecruiter reckons as many as 15 million jobs need to be filled.  Either way, millions are ignoring what MarketWatch describes "an insatiable demand for labor as the economy fully reopens and businesses scramble to keep up with soaring sales for their goods and services."  We have arrived at this point in history because the Democrats have made sitting at home collecting a government check a better financial decision than working.  We covered this in May, when we said "as part of Biden's 'American Rescue Plan,' the Democrats included a $300 weekly bonus to those on unemployment that runs until September.  The plan included various other handouts that are letting the jobless live comfortable lives at the moment."  In some cases, taxpayer-funded benefits are higher than the wages recipients would receive in return for their labor.

The 'Minneapolis Effect' Caused Last Year's Spike in Violent Crime.  The spike in violent crime last year was a serious departure from recent crime patterns over the last several decades.  In fact, 2020 was likely the deadliest year for gun-related homicides since 1999.  According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 19,000 people died of gun violence in 2020.  This spike was particularly acute in major cities across the country.  For example, Minneapolis saw a 95% year-over-year increase in homicides between May and Aug. 1.  In Chicago, homicides more than doubled in July 2020, compared to 2019.  And New York experienced a 50% increase in homicides and a 112% increase in shootings.  Sadly, that is only the tip of the iceberg of cities that experienced this surge.  What caused that sudden spike?  Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, persuasively answers that question in a recent law review article.

The Unlivable City.  People are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular, in droves.  As to San Francisco, the fundamental problem is lawlessness.  Which means not just violent crime, which the city has in abundance, but a breakdown in the fundamental norms of civilization that make urban living possible.  The main problem is that San Francisco's far-left city administration has decided not to prosecute theft.  The result, naturally, is an epidemic of theft.  Thus Target, for example, is now closing its San Francisco stores at 6 p.m. [...] How low has San Francisco sunk?  Check out this video of thieves openly stealing handbags and similar products from a Neiman Marcus store:  [Video clip]

Colorado: America's Leftist Laboratory.  In just a few brief years, Colorado has been transformed from a symbol of independence and self-determination into the liberal Left's laboratory for social experimentation.  Its citizens have become caged lab rats made to endure unrelenting torturous socialist/Marxist research procedures that are subsequently exported to and replicated by fellow travelers in other liberal states.  Put simply, Colorado is the nation's leftist-lab for social engineering.  This state is now the political equivalent of the Nevada and Marshall Islands nuclear testing sites of the 1940s.  Colorado is now politically radioactive.

The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown.  Within the space of about 6 months in 2021, the costs of the essentials of life have skyrocketed — food, gasoline, housing, appliances, cars and trucks, and building materials.  Non-ending streams of stimulus money, huge deficits, and pent-up demand so far have ensured that Americans would pay such spiking prices.  And soon radical inflation may trigger 1970s stagflation and then recession, as the "why-go-to-work?" checks and consumer zeal finally cease, but the government printing machine keeps going.  What good is free government money if spiraling prices eat away the entitlement?

It's Independence, not In Dependence, Day.  Two hundred and forty-five years ago, the brave Founders of this nation declared their independence from the rule of George III, the monarch of Great Britain.  In so doing they declared — and put at risk — their lives, liberty, and fortunes — to stand for freedom and self-determination.  Looking at the week's news it's easy to see why many of us feel the liberty they fought for and enshrined in the Constitution that followed is slipping away at the hands of vocal minorities who have captured the media, Big Tech, the education establishment, the federal executive branch, and even the military.  By way of example, we learned that in San Diego one unit of the Navy — a military branch in recent years rife with incompetence just as it looks that we will most need it — was forced to take a mandatory diversity hike for Pride Month waving LGBT flags.  This is not the first time members of this unit were forced to support this stuff against their free speech rights.

On A Collision Course With National Disaster.  If I were leading President Joe Biden's central committee and my goal were to destroy America as founded and ensure that it lose its distinction as the world's freest and most powerful nation, I doubt I could concoct a superior strategy than adopting the Biden administration's message and policy agenda.  The administration is creating total societal chaos, fomenting disorder and undermining the rule of law at every turn.  As the first duty of government is to protect and defend its citizens, we might be alarmed to consider that the administration is engaged in a multipronged strategy to do the opposite.  It is shrinking our military, which defends against foreign threats.  It is at war with law enforcement, which ensures domestic tranquility, and it is destroying our southern border.  It is systematically destroying our liberty and prosperity.

Target Will Close San Francisco Stores Early Due To Rising Thefts.  Retail chain Target will be closing its stores in San Francisco, California, early due to increases in shoplifting in the city.  ABC 7 reported that Target acknowledged San Francisco's high retail crime by closing its stores earlier in the day in an attempt to cut down on shoplifting.  "For more than a month, we've been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area," a Target spokesperson told NBC Bay Area in a statement Friday night.  "Target is engaging local law enforcement, elected officials and community partners to address our concerns.  With the safety of our guests, team members and communities as our top priority, we've temporarily reduced our operating hours in six San Francisco stores."

The Woke Learn What Consequences Are.  After years of unpunished retail theft, Target has decided to close six of its area stores early.  [Tweet]  Of course, the outcry is that this is racist — because these stores are in predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods.  So, while the woke are learning what consequences are, they certainly aren't willing to accept and learn from them.  The reality is that Target, no matter how much money they give to Black Lives Matter or how many rainbow stripes they put on their logo during the month of June, is still a business.  They can act as woke as they want in their advertisements, but if they can't make money doing something, they aren't going to keep doing it.  When local DAs and city councils bless the idea that petty theft is not a crime, allowing people to walk in and steal hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise without even being arrested, this is what you get.

Biden polls horribly on his handling of rising crime.  Americans are giving President Biden dismal ratings on his handling of rising crime, a new poll found.  The ABC News/Washington Post poll released Friday morning revealed that just 38 percent of Americans approve of the 46th commander-in-chief's response to recent crime spikes nationwide.  On the other side, 48 percent said they disapproved.  As crime rates have continued to surge, lawmakers have been quick to point fingers to avoid their party taking blame.  Republicans have largely argued that Democrats' efforts to defund the police, remove qualified immunity for police officers and introduce cashless bail have all contributed to the budding crisis.

The Real Reason They Blame Heat Deaths, Blackouts, and Forest Fires on Climate Change Is Because They're Causing Them.  [Scroll down]  [W]hat determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient "baseload," reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners.  The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.  The main reason there aren't enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them. [...] Hundreds of people have died in North America over the last few days from lack of air conditioning.  But for years activist analysts, scientists, and journalists have claimed we have too much of it.

Dan Crenshaw:  Troops at Fort Bliss Forced to Wear IDs with Race and Social Class During Diversity Training.  Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) this week revealed several instances where service members were forced to classify themselves by race and socio-economic status during diversity and inclusion training.  In one instance, Crenshaw said soldiers were forced to wear personal identification badges that listed their race, ethnicity, social class, and other things, during at training at Fort Bliss in Texas.  Crenshaw said the badges reduced soldiers to a list of characteristics that have "nothing to do with their service or their training or the content of their character."

This Independence Day, Historic American Nation Facing "State Conquest" — By Anti-America And The Minority Occupation Government.  [Scroll down]  General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson were once honored by Americans as model Christian leaders, regardless of their Civil War difference.  Today, the Southern Baptist Convention, once the redoubt of Southern Christian conservatism, is trembling before Critical Race Theory.  The desecration of Christian morality and symbols is so common it barely attracts notice.  In contrast, putting skidmarks on a rainbow flag on a road can lead to felony charges.  Let's not kid ourselves that blasphemy charges are only to be found in the Muslim world, or that we don't have a state religion of our own.

There's no point in trying to politely address a crowd any more.
Disney World has removed the 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls' greeting from its Magic Kingdom fireworks show.  Disney World has made another change at its Orlando, Florida, theme park as part of the company's initiative to become more inclusive.  Employees were invited to a "cast member" preview of the "Happily Ever After" fireworks show at Magic Kingdom on Wednesday.  The event was the first fireworks showing hosted at Disney World since the nightly shows were halted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  While the fireworks show seemingly remains unchanged, the preshow recording is now different.  As heard in videos shared by employees, Disney World has replaced the "Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls" greeting with one that says "Good evening, dreamers of all ages!"

The truly scary China Virus variant.  The symptoms vary but are becoming increasingly recognizable: uncontrollable cackling at questions that aren't funny; sleeping with Chinese spies; incoherently babbling to a national TV audience; identifying boys as girls and girls as boys; silently watching as criminals destroy our cities, while ordering the police to stand down; and, in the name of anti-racism, teaching people to hate an entire race based on the color of their skin.  There are countless more examples, but you get the general idea.  This horrible disease is most evident in career politicians (usually, but not always, Democrats), bureaucrats, newscasters, and Silicon Valley tycoons.  Sadly, the virus has now infected the military, as evidenced by the recent "woke" ramblings of an ignorant tool who sits as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  But the biggest threat to the general public comes from academics, who use the education system to infect youngsters from kindergarten through college.  Students learn to hate their country and respect socialism, the slightly weaker variant of the real virus that threatens our Republic.  The China Virus to which I'm referring is Communism.

And Now Prices Are Really Soaring:  June Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record.  With BofA predicting that the US is facing a period of "transitory hyperinflation", one which could last up to 4 years, as a result of soaring commodity prices in everything from metals to food and beyond, in what increasingly more warn is a stagflationary burst right out of the 1970s playbook.

Cops Quit in Droves as Crime Skyrockets and 'Defund' Movement Grows.  Police retirements and resignations rose significantly over the course of the last year amid widespread riots and coinciding calls to defund the police, according to a survey of about 200 police departments nationwide.  The survey of roughly 200 police departments revealed that retirements were "up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021 when compared with the previous 12 months, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington policy institute," as reported by the New York Times.

Election Integrity:  The Firewall That Keeps America Free.  There is no denying that the COVID-19 viral invasion was a catalyst for so much of the disruption of 2020, culminating in election irregularity in November.  By spring 2020, normal activities and businesses were largely shut down nationwide by federal and local governments' response to COVID-19.  Antifa and BLM protests and riots in May and June brought the costliest manmade damage to American property in history.  Then the cancel culture, already ensconced and in control of college and university campuses, came to the streets and parks of America in the tearing down historic monuments — all the while law enforcement was coming under severe attack with numerous police departments facing prospects of defunding.  This lockdown-crisis environment gave Democrats an opportunity to push for change in state election rules to their advantage, such as allowing wholesale distribution of mail-in ballots, extension of deadlines for counting those ballots, and legal challenges to voter ID and signature verification laws.  And we all now know the result:  the November 3rd election was characterized by unprecedented election irregularities and charges of vote fraud in more states than any prior election.

Austin's Homicide Number Passes 40 As Defunding the Police Takes Its Toll.  Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Council Member Greg Casar defunded the city's police in the name of racial justice and equity.  Did they anticipate that their decision would result in a skyrocketing murder rate that disproportionately impacts the city's minorities?  That's what's happening.  Austin suffered 47 homicides in all of 2020, which was the worst year for homicides in a decade. 2021, the year in which defunding the police kicked in, will surely surpass 2020's total.  Two fatal shootings in Givens Park on the city's east side this week push the 2021 homicide total to 41 so far.

Portland Police Limit Traffic Stops, Searches in [Pursuit] of "Racial Equity".  Police in Portland, Oregon's largest city, are being advised to no longer pursue low-level traffic infractions — including expired plates and broken headlights — unless related to an immediate safety threat, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Police Chief Chuck Lovell announced Tuesday [6/22/2021].  According to the changes to the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) protocols, officers will no longer prioritize making traffic stops for the enforcement of low-level traffic infractions, such as expired tags or minor equipment issues, that aren't immediate public safety threats.  Also, officers will follow new consent search protocols that will "help ensure residents are aware of their Fourth Amendment rights."  If police do stop a driver, they must receive recorded consent before searching the vehicle and clearly inform the person they have the right to refuse.  Police Chief Lovell has instructed his officers to not pull citizens over for "less serious, non-moving violations" and instead focus on those who are making the road unsafe for others, including anyone driving under the influence and reckless drivers.

Are You Living by Lies?  [Rod] Dreher was inspired to write his book by heroic dissidents who refused to bend the knee to communist tyrants and saw a similar tyranny becoming ensconced in the United States.  These moral giants are astonished that the primary beacon of freedom during their years of oppression has become a society where speech and actions disapproved by secular elites are regularly squelched and punished.  Religious freedom, for example, is being reduced to the freedom to gather in congregations where (at least for now) marriage is affirmed by a priest, rabbi, or minister, a freedom that doesn't extend beyond meeting walls to how a baker runs his business. [...] Under this soft totalitarianism, Americans are now compelled "to engage in doublethink every day.  Men have periods.  The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.'  Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.  Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result."  I might add to that short summary the lie that America is a racist country, that law enforcement and our judicial system are institutionally racist, and that America was founded in 1619 upon the bedrock principle of white racism.

What Is to Be Done?  A Blueprint for Taking the Country Back.  As we sit here, six months into the disastrous Biden administration, the question is finally becoming evident to even the most politically disinterested American.  The quality of life in the big blue cities has deteriorated markedly.  The cost of gasoline has seemingly doubled overnight.  The petty restrictions imposed unconstitutionally on the electorate are still insisted upon in many places — proof once more that tyranny is not primarily about rounding up folks and shipping them off to camps, but insisting that they conform to the most picayune and counter-factual ukases, just to illustrate their powerlessness.  The very fact that you still must wear a slave muzzle to enter a federal building is a visible sign of your continuing humiliation and subjugation.  And the manic insistence that everyone in the United States be forced to undergo the largest unsupervised medical experiment in history ought to tell you all you need to know about the "vaccines."  My body, my choice?  Forget about it, comrade.

Our National Delusion Won't Stop with Book-Burning.  [Scroll down]  It's just a little censorship, Google, Facebook, and Twitter say.  So we put you in virtual time-out or purge your voice from the internet for "spreading hate" — what's the harm?  It's just a little citizen designation, Attorney General Garland says.  What could possibly go wrong with legally defining half of the American populace as "domestic violent extremists" because they voted for Donald Trump or as "white supremacists" because they have the wrong color skin?  Conservatives are just too "touchy" these days.  Nothing bad ever happens when a certain class of people are designated as enemies of the State for supporting the "wrong" ideas — nope, nothing to see here.  Except, it never, ever ends with just censorship or labeling.  What starts with burning words — whether on paper or in digital space — always ends with burning people.

US Reliance on Russian Oil Surges to Record High Amid Tensions.  Russian oil imports have set a new record in the United States despite the strained relationship between Washington and Moscow.  Industry experts believe the Biden administration's climate policies will make the country more dependent on foreign oil producers.  The United States imported record levels of crude oil from Russia in March and is expected to continue importing at high levels in coming months, according to the Western Energy Alliance, a trade association that represents 200 independent natural gas and oil producers in the United States.  Imports of crude oil and petroleum products from Russia reached 22.9 million barrels in March, the highest level since August of 2010, according to International Energy Agency (IEA).  Of the total amount, crude oil imports from Russia stood at 6.1 million barrels.  Russia has become the third-largest oil exporter to the United States.

The US Government as a Sleazy Salesman.  [Scroll down]  Two trillion, three trillion, four.  Why stop there?  People are hurting.  You know — COVID.  Everything is "infrastructure," which everyone uses, right?  Even the huge deficits some states ran up over a period of years spending money on heaven knows what are now being underwritten by federal "stimulus."  Government is making it rain.  Its largesse is so great that many employers can't staff daily operations.  Their former employees still need grocery money, but they no longer need to clock in to earn it.  They're finding it elsewhere.  Nice work if you can get it — and many millions can, apparently.  Who can blame them?  Work is hard.  Wake up early, make the commute, and spend eight hours doing something you wouldn't otherwise do.  Most jobs aren't all that rewarding.  Even a relatively small amount of well timed government money is an acceptable substitute, especially when a chunk of it is tax-exempt.  The problem is that direct payments to individuals are hideously expensive when those many millions of citizens, plus an unknown number of illegals, may be eligible.

Tucker Carlson, Buckhead, and Why Our Cities Fail.  The rich know better than to kick up much of a fuss about bad government.  They don't need to.  Most of what they need they pay for out of pocket, like private security in their neighborhoods and private schools for their children. [...] The poor can be bought off cheaply with crumbs from the table.  They don't expect much and are given even less than that.  So the schools are a disaster — because if they aren't, the poor might become middle-class, and that won't do at all.  And the roads are a mess.  And the criminals rule the streets with the tacit approval of the politicians.  After all, a long time ago, urban Democrats realized there are more votes throwing in with the street criminals and the lowest common denominator than the law-abiding in those terrible neighborhoods; the law-abiding, after all, want nothing more than to get out and move up.  They're ruling over a ruin, but they rule.  And the ruin pays well.  Every bit of lost revenue from the disappearance of a city's tax base gets made up with federal grant money, virtually none of which is controlled very tightly by purse strings.  It's eminently stealable, and it's eminently stolen.  The worse things get, the more money is thrown at the problem.

Wholesale prices jump 6.6% in the fastest rise on record as soaring inflation threatens economic recovery.  Wholesale prices in the U.S. increased at their fastest annual rate ever in May, driven by rising food prices, as soaring inflation threatens to derail the post-pandemic economic recovery.  The producer price index, which measures inflation pressure before it reaches consumers, rose 0.8 percent in May for an annual gain of 6.6 percent, the biggest jump since annual data was first compiled in 2010, the Labor Department said Tuesday [6/15/2021].  The annual gain is somewhat skewed by a 'base effect' from last year's data, when prices plunged early in the pandemic, but nevertheless offers another worrying signal to consumers that their dollars won't stretch as far as they used to.

Police retirements have soared 45 Percent since BLM protests erupted.  Police retirements have risen by 45 percent in the past year, with officers opting out of forces across the country amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations that fueled anti-cop rhetoric.  The alarming statistic was revealed by the Police Executive Research Forum on Sunday, with the organization also revealing that resignations rose by 18 percent during the same twelve month period.  'It is an evolving crisis,' Chuck Wexler, the organization's executive director, told The New York Times, adding that police forces are also struggling to attract new recruits.

Kevin McCarthy Sends Letter To Members Outlining America's Declining Condition Under Biden, Democrats.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) unloaded on Democrat President Joe Biden in a letter sent to Republican lawmakers on Sunday [6/13/2021], warning that the Democrats' policies were doing significant harm to the country.  McCarthy's letter started off by noting that the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed was paying off big time as communities across the country come back to life following the coronavirus pandemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastated the economies of many states.  However, beneath the surface, the policies of the Biden administration and of Democrats in general are causing a variety of problems, McCarthy argues.

[The] Biden Administration [is] Turning [the] Military Into [a] Left-Wing Force.  No institution in America — from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond — is safe today from the poisonous racism of Critical Race Theory and the "1619 Project" which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that "whiteness" is an incurable disease.  The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the military, now overseen by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.  Austin has required both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon's military training programs — concealing their sinister agendas under the innocuous-sounding "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" label.  He has ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls "extremists," defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of Donald Trump and the Capitol protest of January 6th.

Inflation's Here, Getting Worse, And Could Last Longer Than COVID-19 Pandemic.  Both the out-of-touch Biden administration and our betters at the Federal Reserve Board continue to assert that inflation's no big thing.  They're right.  It's not, unless you work for a living.  Then it's a very big thing indeed.  We were told by all the best "experts" that inflation is ephemeral, a mere blip.  The Fed keeps telling us the recent jump in prices is "transient."  Democrats and many of their media friends continue to insist it's not an issue.  Just keep spending, they say.  Stimulus!  But calling the recent burst in inflation "transient" or any other such euphemism to suggest it's like a brief summer cold is not exactly accurate.  In fact, it's wrong.  The recent surge in inflation isn't likely to go away anytime soon.  Indeed, it's even worse than the numbers now indicate.

Stolen elections have consequences:
Federal Reserve tells employees to avoid 'biased terms' like 'Founding Fathers'.  The Federal Reserve has instructed employees to adopt "bias-free language" and avoid using biased terms like "Founding Fathers," according to an internal webpage obtained by Fox News.  The Federal Reserve's Board of Governors issued the guidance for all employees nationwide on April 29, a former Fed staffer with knowledge of the matter told Fox News.  "Bias-free language recognizes diversity and avoids stereotyping, demeaning, or excluding people on the basis of gender, race, ethnic group, religion, age, ability/disability, or sexual orientation," the guidance states.  "Try to avoid words and phrases that may be considered offensive, pejorative, or prejudiced (whether consciously or unconsciously), as these can distract your audience from the ideas/information you're trying to convey," it continues.

Federal Reserves Instructs Employees To Avoid 'Biased' Terms Like "Founding Fathers".  And the absurdity just keeps coming.  The latest organization to act as the speech police for its employees is the Federal Reserve.  The Fed's employees are reportedly being trained to "avoid bias" in their language, including avoidance of terms like "Founding Fathers" and "grandfathered."

Understanding the Deliberate Agenda of Our Ruling Class.  If you pay attention to recent discussions of social and economic change, much of the rhetoric attempts to normalize what used to be considered unmistakable marks of poverty.  Rather than living in a home with a family, you are supposed to embrace the child-free life and see the benefits of a pod or a tiny home.  Instead of meat, which is now scarce and expensive, you are going to eat the bugs and enjoy them.  Electricity itself may prove scarce, but this is the price of reducing global warming.  Video games and travel — ephemeral things that do not last — are offered as substitutes for the old fruits of a free market economy: a job, a home, and economic independence.  Culture makers and political leaders have moved away from talk about the American Dream and towards preparing us for privation.  Biden's speeches often have this quality.  While he's bragging now about gains in jobs, he also speaks in very dark terms about the need for collective sacrifice and the country's uncertain future.

Bidenomics is proving a total disaster that could send America back to stagnant '70s.  Bidenomics is proving an utter disaster for American workers and consumers, and don't bet on it to end soon.  With the pandemic all but over — more than half of American adults are fully vaccinated, and transmissions have fallen through the floor — the economy wants to roar back to life.  Job openings climbed to 9.3 million in April, the highest number since the Labor Department started collecting the stats in 2000 and a million more than in March, the feds announced last week.  But businesses are having trouble filling those spots: 3.5 million Americans are still on unemployment benefits, the feds also revealed.  It's a big drop from 19.2 million at COVID's height, but still twice the pre-COVID level, even though nearly all the job-killing restrictions are no more.

Biggest Core Inflation Rise in 30 Years as Biden Economy Crushes American Dreams.  The American Dream is moving further and further out of reach under the Biden regime whose disastrous economic policies are crushing the country.  While the Democrats spend as much money as they can, most of it going to political pork for their donors and backers, the cost of living is becoming impossible for millions of Americans who can't afford a house or a car, and as inflation rises, much of anything at all.

The Hangover Arrives:  Explosive Inflation Leads To Record Collapse In Home, Car Purchase Plans.  For the past several months we have warned about the pernicious effects soaring prices are having on both corporations and consumers, prompting even otherwise boring sellside research to get (hyper) exciting, with Deutsche Bank and Bank of America now openly claiming that the Fed is wrong, and the US is facing an unprecedented period of far higher, non-transitory inflation, with DB going so far as to warn "policymakers will face the most challenging years since the Volcker/Reagan period in the 1980s."  But none of this has spooked the Fed into conceding — or believing — that inflation is anything more than transitory.  And maybe just this once, the Fed has a point because all else equal, by which we mean lack of rising wages, the best cure to higher prices is, well... higher prices.  Presenting Exhibit A:  two weeks ago, we observed that anticipating an end to Biden's stimmy bonanza end and that soon they will have to live again within their means, Americans' buying intentions (6 months from today) as measured by the Conference Board, had cratered across the 3 major spending categories:  homes, automobiles and major household appliances.

We're Not Going Back to a 1970s Economy.  It's Worse than That.  We may be returning to the economy of the 1970s, but that poor economic period had its roots in the 1960s.  If we are witnessing what has been compared to the 1970s, what does our future have in store for us?  What roots are we planting now?  The bill proposed at this time by the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress is for six trillion dollars in spending.  This alone is more than 25% of the amount the Great Society spent in its first fifty years.  While that is unadjusted for inflation, the point remains.  That doesn't include the trillions spent in the previous year due to the COVID pandemic.  Are we witnessing the Great Society on steroids?

Everything was better with President Trump in the White House.  Incredibly, only four months have passed since Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. was installed as president and in that brief time, he has done more damage than anyone could have thought possible.  On day one Biden stopped work on the Keystone pipeline, now truly defunct, which cost thousands of jobs. [...] President Trump made us energy independent.  Now we are again importing oil, even from Iran.  He removed sanctions that prevented Russia from completing their Nordstream pipeline that will enrich that country fabulously.  He has stopped drilling on federal lands including ANWR and put an end to nearly all drilling for our own oil on federal lands.  He is intentionally strangling the US oil industry without regard for the hardships this will bring to all Americans.

Another jump in prices tightens the squeeze on US consumers.  American consumers absorbed another surge in prices in May — a 0.6% increase over April and 5% over the past year, the biggest 12-month inflation spike since 2008.  The May rise in consumer prices that the Labor Department reported Thursday reflected a range of goods and services now in growing demand as people increasingly shop, travel, dine out and attend entertainment events in a rapidly reopening economy.  The increased consumer appetite is bumping up against a shortage of components, from lumber and steel to chemicals and semiconductors, that supply such key products as autos and computer equipment, all of which has forced up prices.  And as consumers increasingly venture away from home, demand has spread from manufactured goods to services — airline fares, for example, along with restaurant meals and hotel prices — raising inflation in those areas, too.

Inflation surges as consumer prices leap 5%, biggest jump since 2008.  Inflation continued to surge in May, with consumer prices accelerating at the fastest pace in more than 12 years as the economy emerges from the pandemic, the feds said Thursday [6/10/2021].  The Labor Department's Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods and services as well as energy and food costs, jumped 5 percent in May from a year earlier.  That's higher than April's 4.2 percent year-over-year rise in prices, and the biggest 12-month rise since August 2008, just before the financial crisis sent the US into the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression.  Economists surveyed by Dow Jones expected a 4.7 percent spike in May.

This Isn't Your Father's Left-Wing Revolution.  Sixties protestors mainlined divorce, abortion on demand, promiscuity, drug use, and one-parent homes.  But in the end, most veteran cultural revolutionaries by the late 1970s and 1980s had gotten married, were raising families, bought homes, got jobs, and made money.  But this time around, their offspring's left-wing assault is different — and far more ominous.  The woke grandchildren of the former outsiders are now more ruthless, systematic insiders.  The woke and wired new establishment knows how to use their money and power to rebirth America as something the founders and most current Americans never envisioned.  Name one mainline institution that the woke Left does not now control — and warp.  The media?  The campuses?  Silicon Valley?  Professional sports?  The corporate boardroom?  Foundations?  The K-12 educational establishment?  The military hierarchy?  The administrative state?  The FBI top echelon?

The Amazon driver's attack on an older woman is an important warning.  On Friday [6/4/2021], a disturbing video emerged and instantly went viral.  It showed a young Amazon driver viciously punch an older woman who had been unhappy with a slow delivery.  While the video is shocking on its own, it's also a loudly clanging warning about the dangers of Critical Race Theory (CRT), especially when allied with other leftist doctrines commonly taught to the young, including the claim that words are violence.  As CRT expands throughout America, expect more attacks like this one.

Stephen Moore:  Biden's $6T spending plan [is] a danger to [the] economy.  Former economic advisor to President Donald Trump, Stephen Moore, is criticizing Joe Biden's $6 trillion spending plan.  In an interview on Sunday, Moore said the economy is continuing to recover after COVID-19 lockdowns and yet another round of fiscal stimulus is not necessary.  He added the biggest danger to the economy is raising taxes, which Biden claimed is necessary to fund his spending proposals.  Moore also criticized Biden's proposals to extend higher unemployment benefits, saying it prevents Americans from seeking jobs.  He continued on to say it hurts small and medium businesses.

Is Anyone Else Noticing a Pattern With the Increase in 'Random' Attacks on White People?  A 350-pound, large-breasted man pummeled a diminutive woman (actually two women) in Gardena, Calif., over the weekend.  Fortunately, the second beating was caught on video, leading to the suspect's arrest.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department released surveillance photos and video showing the shirtless "man" coolly walk up to a woman and brutally pound her.  He then continued to hit her as she was on the ground. [...] Mystery motive?  Random?  No reason?  How's this:  the Democrats and the lefty media demonize white people 24/7.  Biden has black people believing gangs of white supremacists are patrolling in pick-ups looking to lynch their kids.  The left tells black people, "You are a victim.  Systemic racism and oppression are keeping you down and white people are to blame."  What happens when you tell people they are helpless victims?  They lash out.

Republicans tear into Biden's 'lackluster' jobs report they say is fueled by his $300-a-week unemployment benefits.  Top Congressional Republicans took to Twitter Friday to grumble about May's 'lackluster' job numbers, holding Democratic President Joe Biden's policies responsible.  Both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise pointed a finger at the $300-a-week unemployment benefit that conservatives believe have motivated Americans to stay home.  'Washington needs to stop paying people NOT to work,' McCarthy said, while Scalise's tweet offered, 'This is what happens when you pay people not to work.'

'Woke' medicine is coming to a hospital near you.  According to Katie Herzog, writing at Bari Weiss's Substack blog, Critical Race Theory is aggressively intruding on physicians' ability to treat patients, do research, or train the next generation of doctors.  Katie Herzog's "What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?" examines a world in which doctors are silenced for fear that they will be destroyed professionally should they run afoul of the Critical Race Theory infecting medical care across America and in which young doctors, imbued with "anti-racist" zeal have the whip hand. [...] The only way to stand up to what's happening is through collective action.  Woke people, drunk with power and the urge to avenge wrongs that predate their births, quickly form mobs that surround and destroy anyone who offends them.

What Happens When Doctors Can't Tell the Truth?  They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities.  They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation.  Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools.  Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities.  The meetings are largely a support group.  The members share their concerns about what's going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do.  What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country's most important medical institutions.  This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it's called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress.

When Police Get Woke, Society Gets Broke.  [Scroll down]  I'm ashamed to admit it took some years to accept that my parents weren't wrong about absolutely everything, and that the "authorities" I had so enthusiastically questioned and rejected had achieved that status for the simple virtue of having been correct.  And I became a cog in the authority machine itself when I joined the Los Angeles Police Department after graduating from college, but even then it was only after a few years of patrolling the streets of L.A. that the scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize the liberalism I had embraced, far from improving the lives of those it purported to help, made them worse.  I spent the greater part of my police career working in South Los Angeles, where I was confronted daily with the grim harvest of liberal policies that, however well intentioned in their origins, resulted in the dissolution of families and sent forth thousands of fatherless young men who, lacking guidance in the home, found it on the streets though membership in gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, both of which originated in Los Angeles and have since spread like cancer across the country.

Building a home now much more difficult due to skyrocketing lumber costs under Biden.  The $6 trillion budget proposal from the Biden administration has to come from somewhere.  Recent reporting suggests that the White House is set to heavily tariff imports on lumber.  According to Reason, the Biden administration's Commerce Department might retroactively hike up "anti-dumping tariffs" for American importers of Canadian lumber from their 8.99% rate in 2018 to a whopping 18.32% for 2019.  Since it's the year 2021, those companies are going to have to pay up back-taxes on lumber.  According to the Cato Institute, the US government can actually do that.

Did Pandemic Signal The Demise Of Modernity?  Daniel Hannan — Lord Hannan of Kingsclere — is today among Britain's wisest and most articulate champions of classical liberalism.  He's also today very pessimistic about the future of liberalism.  This pessimism is on full display in this recent video.  Hannan predicts that the post-Covid-19 world "will be poorer, colder, grayer, more pitched, more authoritarian."  I ardently wish that I found his stated reasons for pessimism to be unpersuasive, but this wish is not granted.  Hannan's pessimism, to me, seems warranted.  [Video clip]

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.

Seattle Police expected to lose 300 officers by the end of the month, 'that's a third of the agency'.  In a heartbreaking and revealing interview on The Ari Hoffman Show on [...] KVI, President of the Seattle Police Officer's Guild Mike Solan said regarding police officers leaving the department, "At the end of this month... we will be close to 300 officers (leaving), that's a third of the agency."  Solan told Hoffman that the loss of officers was from last year to date and could range from 288 officers to 300.  Solan described the departing officers as "great human beings that do the job.  They just want to serve."  Some of the officers opted for early retirement, while others took law enforcement jobs in other cities or switched to alternate careers.  Sources told The Post Millennial that morale on the force is at an all-time low.  Last month, a Seattle police officer and trainee were refused service at a local chocolate shop.  The incident revealed a pattern of behavior by employees of the chain at other locations.

Ignorant Liberals Pushing Vaccine Passports Don't Get Who That Would Really Hurt and Discriminate Against.  We saw after BLM/Antifa rioting and demanding to "defund the police," that the cities that moved in that direction saw a big spike in crime, shootings and murders.  Among the people being adversely affected by this, black people.  So the very people BLM claims they're fighting for with all this are some of the people being harmed by the defunding as well as the rioting.

The Democrat party in Congress is a Marxist cult.  Democrats in and out of Congress and every leftist propagandist in the media are now a committed Marxists.  They no longer even pretend to respect or value the Constitution.  They are now pushing Critical Race Theory as if their lives depend on promoting outright racism as the essence of America.  CRT teaches hatred and victimhood; it is the antithesis of our founding principles.  Our Marxist left supports BLM and Antifa as well, anarchist groups to whom they've given free rein to riot, loot and burn down countless cities and businesses.  The Marxist left is on board with the campaign to defund our police.  The cities that have done so are in worse shape than ever, crime and murder rates are soaring.  They support the invasion occurring on the southern border.  Tens of thousands of migrants have been ushered into the US at the rate of about six thousand a day!  The Biden administration then secretly buses or flies these "children," (adult young men) into the interior, preferably red states who then must bear the cost of feeding and housing them and the criminal element among them.

American Division Is Now a Strategic Weakness:  Three Perilous Trends.  Three perilous trends accelerate in the United States as we speak.  They weaken us, and that weakness is now sensed and tested by foreign powers, threatening to plunge the United States into a major foreign conflict in the very years that the consensus for our federal union is at a historically low ebb.  The first perilous trend is that our division is now so prominent it's a thing our enemies can plan to.  When Russia encircled Ukraine in a traditional blockade posture and tested out de facto control of international waters in a notable percentage of the Black Sea, how did we respond?  The U.S. responded with only strongly worded statements and actually cancelled two scheduled naval deployments there.  For all the realism we celebrated over the past decade, on the horizon now is the end of the era where the bipartisan U.S. strategy of generally looking away as rising powers change borders and create new territory is consequence free.

The Dark Democratic Motives Behind The Government-Induced Labor Shortage.  As businesses continue to struggle to find willing employees in the wake of governments continuing to pay them in many cases MORE than they would make working to stay at home, many states are pushing back by preemptively ending the extra federal unemployment cash.  The first two-dozen or so states to opt-out, however, are not surprisingly ALL led by Republican governors.  Which means that Democrats overwhelmingly are behind the ongoing federal and state effort to destroy small and medium-sized businesses by purposefully denying them the labor help they need to get back on their feet and serve their customers.  But why? [...] Do they not understand that any normal, reasonable person, if given the choice, would choose free cash and the ability to either sit on the couch and watch Netflix or earn some extra tax-free money under the table over having to log 40+ hours a week for what they're now getting for free?

The great restaurant price hike.  A New Hampshire restaurateur has apologized to customers for putting prices up after the cost of basic items like oil, meat and gloves rose by as much as 300%.  Alan Natkiel, the owner of Georgia's Northside in Concord, says the price of brisket has gone up 185%, chicken breast is up 70%, and fryer oil costs have doubled in the past three months, while plastic gloves were three times as expensive as pre-pandemic prices.  The price of disposable gloves have [sic] soared by 300%.  Natkiel says the surge in prices has even forced him to stop serving chicken wings as a national shortage has made them so pricey they were no longer commercially viable.  He shared his frustration in a Facebook post at having to put meal prices up, as inflation reaches its highest level since 2008.

Biden's Budget is One More Biden Blunder.  The economy is growing very well, and we are near the level that we were prior to the virus.  There is no problem with growth.  But inflation is a problem.  Despite the administration's position, inflation is right now a serious problem that will get worse the longer we wait to react to it.  Biden's budget proposal will make the inflation problem much worse.  The inflation data is presented in a number of ways to consumers.  Sometimes a monthly price index is given, which compares consumer prices to the prior month.  Sometimes the index is compared to the same month last year.  The critical and most valuable information tells us what is happening now.  From January to April of this year, the monthly Consumer Price Index went from .3% to .4% to .6% to .8%.  That means since January inflation is running at about a 6% annual rate and it is increasing.

Woke in the City that Never Sleeps.  The Big Bagel is getting so bad, even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something.  As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly poor and minority. [...] One hears and reads about the daily gunplay, and compares the statistics to those of forty years ago.  Robbery is up close to 30%, grand larceny 66%, and shootings 166.1%.  Murder is up 32% from 2019.  One wonders when the useless mayor will declare an emergency as the place is starting to resemble a war zone, and after the Covid crisis more and more New Yorkers believe the city is ungovernable and unlivable.  Still, two of the numerous candidates running for mayor rant in their speeches about defunding the police.  Violent criminals no longer have any fears, according to Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, and having done away with bail laws, criminals get booked and walk, free to continue shooting and robbing people.  Cuomo and de Blasio, architects of these new laws, shamelessly go about their business, which is appearing on television and patting themselves on the back.

The 'Fourth Turning Crisis' Has Arrived.  Sweeping social transformations occur during times of crisis. [...] What crisis are we in, you ask?  Well, consider the staggering debt and economic collapse that is looming.  Confrontation and possible war with China is looming as well.  The pandemic has and is still wreaking havoc on our way of life.  Big Tech and Big Media are restricting free speech and fixing elections with the compliance of the administrative state in Washington.  The border is being overrun.  Schools no longer teach our history or what it is to be an American.  At the head of it all is Joe Biden and his merry band of race-baiting socialists purposely driving this runaway train off the tracks.  And in the end, societal collapse and a great reset into a Marxist world government await our demise.  So yes, we are in a crisis where the future of our way of life hangs in the balance.

The Rise of 'Blow Off Steam' Policing.  Authorities frequently met last summer's riots with a diffident response.  National Guard troops remained in their barracks, and police often stood by as looting, arson, and property destruction took place in cities ranging from New York and Chicago to Seattle and Minneapolis. [...] Such responses by police and authorities are rooted in the fear that a heavy-handed response will cause more violence.  This might be called the "blow off steam" approach to controlling civil disturbances.  Under this theory, a heavy-handed police response to community violence — with armored vehicles, riot shields, tear gas, and the like — makes matters worse, playing into the larger narrative of police brutality.  This approach is also rooted in the idea that the rioters have legitimate grievances, that ordinary free speech is inadequate for their concerns, and that riots are an expression of understandable anger and emotion.  In other words, if you let protesters cathartically break a few things and burn down a few stores, their passions will burn out and things will return to normal.

Post-pandemic New York City is laid bare as homelessness, mental illness and crime escalate.  'New Yorkers don't feel safe and they don't feel safe because the crime rate is up.  It's not that they are being neurotic or overly sensitive — they are right,' Governor Andrew Cuomo declared on Wednesday [5/26/2021].  'We have a major crime problem in New York City.  Everything we just talked about, with the economy coming back, you know what the first step is?  People have to feel safe.'

Why 260 Cops Have Fled Seattle.  There hasn't been a police department more brutalized in recent memory.  In Seattle, cops have been pummeled by a psycho city council.  It's not shocking.  Seattle is left-wing.  The residents are left-wing.  They're all nuts.  The mayor allowed armed leftists to seize portions of the city.  The 'summer of love' came crashing down when — shocker — people started to get shot and killed inside the autonomous zone.  They have hamstrung the police and spit in their faces.  After a summer of riots and not being allowed to restore order, along with an overall anti-police atmosphere, are we shocked that scores of cops have fled Seattle?  Around 20 percent of the police force has left.

Refund The Police?  Major Cities Are Backtracking On Police Cuts After Explosion Of Violent Crime.  A year after the death of George Floyd, elected officials of major cities are walking back commitments to cut police funding amid spiking crime rates.  Elected leaders in places such a Minneapolis, New York City, and Los Angeles are now pushing to increase funding to police departments after months of budget cuts and low morale have gutted law enforcement ranks.  At the same time, major cities across the U.S. are suffering spikes in violent crime.  "The violence needs to stop, it[']s unacceptable.  People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by.  That's unacceptable.  We should be holding these perpetrators accountable," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, said at a May 7 news conference addressing a spate of violence that ripped through the city.

Feet-of-Clay Icons.  Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance.  What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common?  A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others.  Add also incompetence.  Movies are mostly bad now.  The network news is blow-dried groupthink.  There is no "paper of record" anywhere.  Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols.  Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be "enlightened" by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists.  The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia.  It wasn't just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product — educating students — was defective.  No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge.  More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt.

Democrat Policies Have Created a Blue-State Exodus.  Americans can't escape from blue states fast enough.  Even before the COVID pandemic, they were fleeing Democrat-led states for red ones in droves.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2010 and 2019, California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois lost a combined four million residents.  Meanwhile, the top five states that saw the greatest influx of new residents were the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.  It does not hurt that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee also have no income tax.  But the pandemic, in conjunction with disastrous Democrat policies, has only accelerated the blue-state exodus.  It turns out that draconian lockdowns in the form of school, restaurant, and business closures; massive spikes in violent crime; few entertainment options; higher taxes; and scarce job opportunities do not make for a desirable living environment or a suitable place to raise a family.

To Fight Back, Question Everything.  In terms of safety, health, opportunity, and prosperity, there has never been a better time in human history, but hardly anyone living anywhere is celebrating. [...] In a world saturated with information, the "key" to distinguishing between truth and falsehood is one question, one word:  "why?"  Why should schools and companies discriminate based on skin color?  Why should my race say more about me than my brain?  Why is it okay for federal immigration law to be ignored while federal tax laws must be obeyed?  Why are Americans who defend the Constitution treated as domestic terrorists?  Why are Americans who burn down cities treated as heroes?  Why does every "solution" to climate change involve the expansion of government powers and the contraction of personal liberties?  Why must the government police speech in order to keep it free?  Why must government disarm citizens in order to keep them safe?  Why is the government so afraid of the people that it must spy on them at all times?  Why is it no longer "our government," but rather the government?

Two-thirds of Americans say beef, chicken prices have skyrocketed.  The steaks are too high!  About two-thirds of US shoppers say the prices of red meat and chicken have soared since the start of the year, according to a new poll.  Meat lovers have been hit hardest by rising food costs out of the 2,000 grocery shoppers surveyed between May 17 and May 19, Bloomberg reported.  The poll, which was conducted by Morning Consult, found that around 65 percent said that red meat is more expensive now, while about 59 percent said that chicken has become pricier.  Meanwhile, more than half of the shoppers said that fruit, toilet paper, milk and prepared foods also cost more.

'The Wheels Are Coming Off.' Deeper Cuts to Austin Police Are on the Way in Mayor Adler's 'Reimagining'.  The Austin Police Department is in a state of crisis.  More cuts to specialized APD units are coming this year, thanks to the "reimagining" of police led by Mayor Steve Adler and Councilmember Greg Casar.  Travis County, meanwhile, steps up targeting police officers for prosecution.  According to an internal document provided to PJ Media, several units face deep cuts or outright elimination by summer's end.  The Sex Offender Apprehension and Registration (SOAR) unit is losing its officer positions, according to the APD document.  Local Fox 7 TV has previously reported some of the cuts.  PJ Media's source, who wishes to remain off the record, said:  "As more units are cut, work conditions for those who stay will continue to deteriorate, causing more folks to leave, causing more units to be cut, and so on.  It is basically a death spiral."

A young leftist is shocked to find herself on the receiving end of cancel culture.  Emily Wilder graduated from Stanford last year.  At the beginning of May, she landed a job working for Associated Press.  Two weeks later, she found herself fired because conservatives discovered her wildly pro-Palestinian social media activity while in college.  She's figured out that she was "canceled" but cannot grasp that this happened because conservatives have finally adopted leftist tactics.

An aspiring congressional candidate unveils novel campaign slogan: 'Make crime illegal again'.  Washington state congressional candidate Matt Larkin is running on a tough-on-crime platform based on supporting law enforcement in an effort to "make crime illegal again" amid skyrocketing crime and failed liberal leadership in Seattle.  Larkin, a Republican who lost his bid for Washington state attorney general to the incumbent Democrat in 2020, plans to challenge sitting Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier for the seat representing the 8th District of Washington.  In an exclusive interview with Fox News, Larkin said that skyrocketing violent crime, rising homelessness and the growing number of assaults on police officers motivated him to jump into the race.

If it's not enhanced unemployment benefits, why are people turning down jobs?  Employers say they're having difficulty filling jobs.  Jobless Americans say they want to work.  So what's going on?  Businesses reported a record 8.1 million jobs to fill last month, up from 8 million in March, according to data from the Labor Department.  There were 7.5 million open jobs in February.  And yet the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1% in April from 6% the month before.  Many employers say that enhanced government unemployment benefits have actually given people less reason to take a job.  The Biden administration approved $300 in extra federal benefits each week to unemployed workers last March as part of a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.

Texas legislators ban homeless 'camping' statewide.  Across the blue cities of America, city officials have turned their public spaces into vast and expanding homeless camps.  That leaves such cities without public spaces, and puts the quality of life at zero.  Portland, San Francisco, Orange County, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York, all spring to mind.  In such places, we have seen whole stretches of places like Venice Beach become a freakish third world tent shantytown, with the camping homeless blocking roads, scaring children, giving cash to drug dealers, getting intoxicated, throwing trash, boosting cars, theatening those who don't want to give them spare change, and doing their bodily functions in public places, if not on private property.  The same is true in Los Angeles, New York, and the rest.  When the homeless take over, the public has no choice but to stay away.

San Fran Legalized Shoplifting.  Now Seniors Have No Pharmacies.  Actions have consequences.  Pro-crime policies work.  And electing leftists who call themselves progressives and promise to protect criminals from being locked up in the name of criminal justice reform while regulating and taxing the businesses they prey on more than ever has inevitable consequences.  [Video clip]

Labor Union's Endorsement for Biden Comes Back to Bite Them.  I have no sympathy.  You voted for this, guys.  This is the country you wanted.  You wanted Joe Biden to overhaul the economic agenda.  No more mean tweets, but now there's rising inflation, anemic jobs growth, a border crisis, and a war brewing in the Middle East.  Russia has become aggressive again, and China is getting more handsy with Taiwan.  But there are no more mean tweets.  For those in the steel industry, they're pleading with Biden to keep the tariffs established under Donald Trump intact.

Walgreens Closes 17 San Francisco Stores Due To "Out Of Control" Shoplifting.  The effects of allowing chaos to prevail in Democrat-controlled cities across America might not be evident to liberals and social justice warriors now, but when businesses close up, it's going to be very transparent then.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 17 Walgreens Pharmacy locations have shuttered their doors in San Francisco during the past five years.  At least ten of the stores in the city have closed since 2019. [...]  [Video clip]  The cost of business and shoplifting is staggering for Walgreens.  Despite closing 17 stores, the company still has 53 open in the metro area but could close more by the end of the year.  Thefts at Walgreens' in the city are four times the average for other stores across the country.  The pharmacy chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, said Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii.

Biden's 'Inflation Tax' Targets the Poor and Middle Class.  President Biden has repeatedly promised that he won't raise taxes on American families earning less than $400,000 per year.  Yet widespread and growing inflation due to his policies is — at least indirectly — breaking that promise.  Call it the Biden inflation tax.  Consumer prices have increased at an accelerated rate every month this year.  In April, core inflation rose at its fastest month-over-month pace since 1981.  The producer price index grew by the largest amount on record last month.  Commodity prices are skyrocketing, with corn rising by more than 50% this year, lumber elevating to four times its traditional rate, and copper hitting a record high.

Media in Full Spin Mode to Cover for Biden's Failures.  Joe Biden's presidency is spiraling out of control.  By any reasonable metric he has failed as a commander in chief.  He has failed on immigration, he has failed on the economy, he has failed to create jobs, he has failed on foreign policy, he has failed on handling the pandemic, he has failed to unite the country, and he has failed as a leader.  But that's not what the mainstream media would have us believe. [...] [A]lthough there are currently 8.1 million job openings in the U.S., we somehow only managed to add 266,000 jobs in April, or nearly three-quarters of a million less than the one million that Wall Street economists were projecting.  This after the March job numbers were already revised down another 140,000.  Might it have something to do with Biden's insistence that Americans receive a $300 weekly bonus check to stay home?  Even those making $32,000 a year would see a raise by going on unemployment.

States are wise to turn down Biden's poison unemployment money.  At this point, the fact is unavoidable:  The Biden administration's foolish decision to extend increased unemployment benefits through the summer is clearly retarding the job market's recovery.  It made sense to pay out something to workers in exchange for government restrictions on their livelihood.  But the long-term extension of extra-generous benefits has turned all the incentives on their head.  For too many workers, the increased benefit makes it at least as profitable not to work as it is to work.  And how can you blame anyone for not working if it actually costs them money?  Don't blame the workers.  Do blame the White House that chose to frame their choice for them so irrationally.

Portland Has Turned Into Such A Dystopian Hellhole, Homeless Men Chase People Around With Knives.  According to a video by journalist Andy Ngo, a man with knives chased another man on Sunday in downtown Portland, Oregon, near the Justice Center and Central Police Station.  Ngo said the police did not respond to the attempted sting.  The area in the video has homeless tents on the sidewalk.  The victim and the attacker both appear to be white.  The attacker, who seems to come from the tent area, repeatedly used the n-word while chasing the victim.  The victim was able to flee from his attacker without being stabbed as the attacker had to stop to put on his pants.  [Video clip]

Inflation could spike to 20% in the next few years as the US money supply explodes, says Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel.  Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel said inflation could spike to 20% in the next two or three years due to "unprecedented" fiscal and monetary stimulus and an explosion of the US money supply.  "I'm predicting here that over the next two, three years, we could easily have 20% inflation with this increase in the money supply," Siegel said in a recent interview with CNBC.  Siegel went on to criticize Fed chair Jerome Powell for not acting to quell inflation in the near term.  The Wharton professor called Powell the "most dovish chairman" that he's ever seen and said that the Fed chair's stance could "be a problem down the road."  In the meantime, Siegel said he is bullish on stocks because fiscal and monetary support is going to keep flowing in.

The city is paying the price for his bad judgment and lack of foresight.
Minneapolis Mayor Admits Anti-Police Rhetoric has Led to Crime Spike.  The mayor of Minneapolis, who himself has bashed police in order to placate the Black Lives Matter mob, now says that calls to "defund the police" have led to a spike in crime in the city.  "The violence needs to stop, it's unacceptable.  People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by.  That's unacceptable.  We should be holding these perpetrators accountable," Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said.  Star News Education Foundation Journalism ProjectBut that is a strikingly different tune from Frey's message last summer, when Minneapolis was engulfed in riots after the death of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.  At that time, he went on a tirade against police after a Black Lives Matter rally, calling them "racist," among other unfounded accusations.

Biden is the New Jimmy Carter, But He's Even Worse.  Empires rise and fall, leaders come and go, and every now and then a president wins election only to find himself in over his head with the burden of the Oval Office.  It's happened twice now in my lifetime, first with Jimmy Carter and now with Joseph R. Biden.  There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something.  Biden's presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.  We're five months into Biden's presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter's incompetence by Christmas.  Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn't exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

Biden [is] beset by crises following reversals of Trump policies.  According to the most recent figures, the Customs and Border Patrol agency encountered more than 178,000 illegal migrants crossing into the United States via the southern border in April.  That figure is up slightly from the already-high 172,000 recorded in March.  Nearly half a million illegal crossers have been shuttled through the immigration system and released into the U.S. since Biden assumed office, and countless thousands more have come in undetected.  Within a few days of arrival most migrants "have legal documents, and are sent on their way to all four corners of the United States," according to Todd Bensman, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies who is stationed at the Texas-Mexico border.  On his first day in office, Biden took major steps to reverse Trump border policies, including:
  •   Funding to complete the border wall was halted
  •   The Migrant Protection Protocols — also known as the Remain in Mexico policy — was repealed
  •   The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was sent to Congress.

Welcome Back, Carter.  Except Add Dementia.  [Scroll down]  Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a puppet with dementia.  It's clear he's not even the president.  He's just the front man doing the bidding of evil people who want to destroy America and capitalism.  The amazing thing is Biden's done it all in just a little over 100 days.  He's practically just set the Guinness World Record for fastest destruction of a great country.  Look around.  America is a dumpster fire.  Let us count the ways Biden has wrecked America from sea to shining sea and across the globe.  The borders are open, and immigrants pour in by the thousands per day.  Many of them bring crime and disease.  They bring bankruptcy and insolvency for America and our formerly great middle class.  So far in fiscal 2021, we've managed to bring in the most tax money ever while still spending an unimaginable 90% more than we collected.  Then there's dreaded inflation.  A massive wave of stagflation is clearly coming because of madman Biden's insane levels of spending.

Bidenomics Looks Like a Ticking Time Bomb for Democrats (and the Economy).  Ever since Joe Biden floated his $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill, worrywarts like yours truly have been warning about the possibility of inflation.  In case you weren't alive in the 1970s, inflation erodes the value of money.  Simply put, your paycheck is worth less today than it was last week or last month.  This demoralizing and frustrating decline in purchasing power can have the psychological effect of causing consumers to spend money quickly, for fear that prices will rise.  There is also increased pressure on welfare and wages to keep pace with the rising cost of living.  Once this cycle gets going, it's hard to unwind.

Lines at gas stations are a feature, not a bug, of Biden's green future.  Biden ran for president advocating, or at least paying lip service to, long-standing environmentalist plans designed to create gasoline shortages.  They never put it that way, of course, but that has always been their goal in shutting down pipelines and banning new fracking and oil exploration.  The whole point has been to stop fossil fuels from being extracted from the ground and burnt to run our economy, in the naive hope that this will cause global temperature patterns to change.  This plan, however, has just been preempted by a criminal plot to do much the same thing by other means.  The DarkSide hacking group's ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline put gasoline pipelines out of commission all up and down the East Coast.  This has not only sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing but has actually caused gas stations on the Eastern Seaboard to run dry.  This simply never happens under normal circumstances.  And — surprise, surprise — the public does not like it.

Democrats refuse to prioritize Real infrastructure — like Colonial Pipeline.  Child care is infrastructure, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  Health-care aides for seniors are infrastructure, say Democratic activists.  "Anti-racism" is infrastructure, we're told.  But these things aren't infrastructure; they're just things Democrats want funded with taxpayer money.  You know what's actually infrastructure?  Bridges and pipelines.  On that front, we're not doing so well.  The shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline this week demonstrated that our actual infrastructure is vulnerable and that our lives can be disrupted quickly when it fails.  Hackers, undeterred by the FBI and Homeland Security officials who are supposed to be protecting critical infrastructure, managed to lock down the pipeline controls with ransomware.  Fuel deliveries stopped, gas lines formed (shades of the Jimmy Carter era), and prices went up, all within a couple of days.  Fresh from blocking construction of another major pipeline (the Keystone XL), the Biden administration flailed, while a nation that just a year or so ago became a net oil exporter found itself facing fuel shortages.  That's infrastructure.

Psaki calls inflation surge a sign of Biden's 'successful economic strategy'.  The Biden administration seems to be proud of its inflation surge, brought on by low interest rates and monster government spending. [...] They seem to think they can command prices down with all that communication, much as Hugo Chavez used to do, creating shortages to accompany their runaway inflation as their big comforting answer.  Or perhaps more in their style, they're going Brezhnev or Chernenko again, telling us that all the bad things happening aren't happening, never mind the evidence of our own eyes.  Pay no attention to those soaring lumber prices, those high vegetable prices, those now-costly airline tickets, those leaps in price at the pump.  They're all irrelevant because Joe Biden is a ... self-declared success.

Waking Up in the Wrong Movie.  The remarkable thing about the multiple crises facing Joe Biden is how quickly they've multiplied and worsened.  These include, in no particular order:
  [#1]   the Mexican border problem;
  [#2]   the expanding war between Israel, Hamas, and possibly with Iran;
  [#3]   the gasoline supply disruption stemming from the cyberattack on the Colonial fuel pipeline;
  [#4]   economic trouble and warnings of impending inflation.
These sprung up in the first days of his term with an abruptness and progression that has taken pundits by surprise.  The administration must have anticipated eventual problems would arise but not so soon nor from so many directions.

Biden's Blast from the Past — The Return of the Misery Index.  This week has the distinct smell of Democrats in charge.  We have gas lines again, more cars waiting to fill up their gas tanks than ever waiting to hear candidate Joe Biden speak at his sparsely attended campaign car rallies.  War is breaking out in the Middle East with Palestinian militants lobbing missiles at Israel, and Israel appropriately responding to attacks on its homeland.  I wonder if Obama's "pallets of cash" paid for any Hamas missiles?  Or if the planned restoration of $235 million in US aid to the Palestinians has freed up cash for missiles?  Inflation and unemployment are both rising.  It's like traveling back in time to the late 1970s, dancing to the Bee Gees' "Stayin Alive" under a mirror disco ball.  But now it's 2021 and we are dancing to Biden's fiddle.

Consumer Prices Increase 4.2% To The Highest Level Since 2008.  The consumer price index has jumped 4.2% over the last 12 months, the fastest pace of inflation since 2008, according to a Department of Labor report.  The consumer price index (CPI) increased 0.8% between March and April, according to the Labor Department report released Wednesday morning.  Economists projected that the CPI increased by 0.2% last month and 3.6% over the 12-month period ending in April, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Unleaded Regular Gasoline Up 52 Percent, Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Rising Fast.  As expected the high-turn consumable goods are starting to rise in price rapidly.  The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) has released the consumer price analysis from April (remember there's a big lag).  The trend is rapid inflation continuing with no end in sight.  CORE inflation just jumped the most since 1982.  Overall prices are up 4.2 percent year-over-year, which is three times the rate of inflation under Joe Biden than under President Trump.  Inflation hurts the lower and middle economic class much harder; and the specific inflation sectors show massive increases on the goods and services that blue collar workers use most.  It is specifically the Biden economic policies that are to blame for the scale of these increased prices.  Inflation of this scale is an outcome of policy.

NYPD union boss blames 'feckless' Bill de Blasio and his 'imbecilic' police reform laws for the Times Square shooting.  The weekend shooting of three people in New York City's Times Square tells you all you must know about life in the Big Apple under the stewardship of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the legions of feckless elected officials and enablers dangerously masquerading as leaders. [...] The 31-year-old suspect in the latter shooting has been identified.  He, too, is a career criminal who was walking the streets despite being arrested last year for the random attack of a stranger.  In this incident, he was trying to kill his brother over a personal dispute.  There is little doubt that he will soon be arrested and indicted for the shooting of three innocent people.  Hopefully, he will be held on high bail because his offenses are some of the few crimes that are still eligible for bail in de Blasio's dystopian New York.

Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom.  The United States has borrowed about $29 trillion in debt — about 130 percent of its annual gross domestic product.  The government will run up a $2.3 trillion annual budget deficit in 2021 — after a $3.1 trillion deficit the year before.  The Biden Administration still wants to borrow more — another $2 trillion in new social programs and "infrastructure."  In the crazy last 100 days, the price of everything from lumber, food, and gas to cars and houses has soared.  Yet many interest rates are still stuck at or below three percent.  Jobs are plentiful; workers are not.  Is that a surprise when government cash handouts discourage the unemployed from taking a pay cut to go back to work?  After being freed from 13 months of quarantine, Americans are splurging.  But meeting their huge pent-up demand is causing shortages.

Here's How Biden's Spending Could Become A Hidden Tax On Everything You Purchase.  As the U.S. climbs out of a once-in-a-century pandemic, rising prices have led to increasing worry that rapid inflation could be just over the horizon.  Americans have already witnessed higher prices in the past few months, with everything from gasoline to lumber to basic home items jumping in cost.  The increases, partially fueled by non-existent interest rates and record government spending, could lead to inflation that the U.S. has not seen in decades, experts say.  "In the short term, consumers can expect to see rising prices across the board," Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a columnist at The Washington Post, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.  "I expect in the next few months people will be getting sticker shocked in virtually all aspects of their life."

The Inflation Numbers Are out and We Are in Trouble.  The government report on inflation has been released, and it's not good.  Inflation hit 4.2% in April, a crushing blow to the poor and middle class especially.  This followed on the heels of stagnating hiring shown by last week's jobs report.  Remember, the consumer price index doesn't even include things like lumber so this number is likely lower than reality despite still showing an out-of-control rise.  That rise is directly timed with Biden passing his COVID "relief" act that printed trillions of largely unnecessary dollars.  That stimmy check was nice and all, but people are about to pay for it over and above what they received via inflation.  Gas prices are up 50%, used vehicle prices are up over 20%, and home energy costs are up over 35%.  Meanwhile, with or without this number, anyone who has been to a grocery store or hardware store lately can see the inflation with their own eyes.

Minneapolis Mayor:  You know, this "defund the police" thing may have increased crime.  It's been another week in Minneapolis that looks more like the wild west than a modern, midwestern city.  On Sunday night, seven people were shot in multiple incidents, with one victim being killed.  Another person was killed on Monday night.  Meanwhile, arrests and prosecutions are lagging far behind these reported incidents.  People have been noticing and they are bringing their complaints directly to Mayor Jacob Frey when he ventures out to address the public.  One pastor named Dale Hume came forward to say that the city's efforts to defund the police haven't worked and "you can obviously see that is not the solution."  Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Mayor Frey came out this week and said that he agrees with the Pastor.

Welcome Back, Carter.  Anyone want to party like it's 1979?  Okay, at least in 1979 we weren't locked down, masked up, and socially distanced.  But, other than that, there wasn't much to celebrate.  The economy was in the tank, inflation was rampant, gas lines were long, daubers were down, and no one in the White House knew what to do about any of it.  A new term had to be coined for something thought impossible/oxymoronic... "stagflation."  Yes, even as the economy was slowing down, inflation was rampant, an unprecedented pairing of economic indicators.  And today?  The economy is in the tank, inflation is rampant, gas lines are getting long in some areas, daubers are down, and no one in the White House knows what to do about any of it.  It may be worse than that.  It may be possible that no one in the White House wants to do anything about any of it because it is part of the plan, the Great Reset, the elite's desire to take the U.S. down a peg while/by reducing greenhouse gases — and increasing intersectionality, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and other noxious forms of political correctness.

Gas Lines Return as Woke Deep State Fails to Stop Cyber Attack.  Welcome to Jimmy Carter 2.0, to an America saddled with a failed president and a failed Deep State whose minions worry about everything except what actually matters.  The [...] FBI and the [...] CIA have one [...] job, and that's to protect our way of life.  Period.  And the fastest way to unravel our way of life — the most effective, deadly, and destructive way — is to interrupt the free flow of oil.  Therefore, outside of physical threats to American persons and property, the FBI and the CIA should be focused almost exclusively on ensuring the energy that keeps our way of life alive is not interrupted.  Well, once again, these feckless Deep Staters have failed.  Instead of being focused on stopping a VERY successful cyber-attack on a crucial oil pipeline, these useless idiots have been focused on using the correct pronouns.

'Things Fall Apart' With No End in Sight.  The American birthrate has now fallen for six years in a row, to a record-low 1.64 babies per woman.  Some blame this on the dreaded COVID, but it would make more sense for births to rise, given that couples have had more than a year of snuggle time while riding out the "pandemic" and collecting government checks.  A more likely reason is the non-stop barrage of propaganda from the anti-human Left, whose refrain has long been "how can you bring a child into this world?" — a world, by the way, they've been doing their best to ruin for more than half a century with abortion, divorce, and latterly, child sex-change operations.

White House Occupant Reads Teleprompter, Desperately Attempting to Spin Horrific Policy Outcomes.  The White House occupant appeared today [5/10/2021] to deliver remarks on some key issues that are catastrophic to the long-term goals of the leftist administration.  First, let's be clear; there's no-way the Chicago control agents would allow the installed occupant to speak on any issue, publicly, that was not a direct and measurable threat to their long-term goals.  The remarks today by Joe Biden are carefully scripted to diffuse political damage that is pending as a direct outcome of the executed policies. [...] The bottom line is simple:  The Democrats can see a political backlash coming that is going to overwhelm them.  No amount of spin or manipulative talking points will change the outcome of the reality people are feeling.  Massive increases in gas prices combined with massive inflation is the exact policy outcome from Jimmy Carter.

Corn Is the Latest Commodity to Soar.  America's biggest cash crop has rarely been more expensive.  Corn prices have risen roughly 50% in 2021 and a bushel costs more than twice what it did a year ago.  Corn has been one of the sharpest risers in the broad rally in raw materials that is prompting companies to boost prices for goods and fueling concern among investors that inflation could hobble the post-pandemic economic recovery.  Lumber prices have shot to more than four times what is typical, pushing up home prices and obliterating renovation budgets.  Copper, a cog of industry found throughout the home and in electronics, hit record prices Friday.  Crude oil hasn't cost so much since 2018 and soybeans are trading at their loftiest level since 2012.

The Fossil Fuels Must Go Through.  There is something surrealistically ironic about Joe Biden's Emergency Order to mobilize tanker trucks — anything — to keep the fossil fuels going.  On the one hand it is a backhanded admission of how vital the products transported by the Colonial Pipeline are.  On the other it is a reminder of how policy errors can progressively cascade through the system, one mistake compounding the others.  Why is there a shortage of tanker truck drivers?  One reason is the Covid-19 lockdown.  "We've been dealing with a driver shortage for a while, but the pandemic took that issue and metastasized it," said Ryan Streblow, the executive vice president of the National Tank Truck Carriers.  "It certainly has grown exponentially."  More fundamentally truck driving has become an unattractive lifestyle choice for young people.

The Editor says...
Any kind of work that requires leaving the apartment (or Mom's basement) is unattractive to lazy millennials.

Jobs disappointment traces back to Joe Biden's stimulus.  "The government," wrote Frederic Bastiat, "is that great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else."  This incisive, tongue-in-cheek definition of the state, beloved by libertarians everywhere, is especially appropriate this week.  Big COVID-era government, the data now demonstrate, has put millions of workers in a position in which their incentive is not to report to work and produce something of value in exchange for a wage, but rather to stay home and collect money from taxpayers for not working.  In short, poor decisions by Democrats have created a larger-than-life version of what Bastiat described, at least for people at lower income levels.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released devastating employment numbers, showing dramatic underperformance for job creation in April.  Although the ranks of the employed did increase by 266,000, that number was expected to increase by four times as much.

'Dude, Where's My Workforce?'  It must be a nasty surprise for companies that have slavishly repeated Woke mantras and imposed overtly racist policies on workers and even customers in the name of "racial equality" to now find themselves short of the one thing they need to thrive and grow:  workers.  They can thank Joe Biden and the Woke Democrats for that.  No question, right now companies are sucking for air, finding it impossible to ramp up fast enough as workers stay home in droves rather than return to work.  People are said to be "scratching their heads" over why, after a year of pandemic-forced business closings, workers aren't desperate to work and earn.  After all, just a few months ago the concern was whether they'd have jobs to go back to.

Biden's Woke Military Will Embarrass America.  Something is happening in the halls of the Pentagon, and it bodes ill for America's future military.  Wokeness is crawling out of the shadows to neuter America's fighting power.  This is a dangerous move because of the criteria likely to be used to identify "extremists."  These will not only further divide the military ranks, but also diminish our fighting readiness and make us the laughingstock of modern militaries, prominently including existential enemies in Russia and China.  Evidently, secretary of defense Lloyd Austin's military-wide stand-down wasn't enough for the Biden leftists in the White House and Congress, along with appointees now walking the Pentagon's E-ring.  No, they are trending full-rudder left like other federal agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency.  The aim is to make our bloated federal government more "woke" — a slang term meaning alert to so-called injustice in society and especially racism — regarding so-called "extremists."

Philadelphia's Fall:  A Microcosm of Democrat Devastation.  Large American cities, the vast majority of which are run entirely by Democrats, are deteriorating before our eyes; and the phenomenon is not due to the COVID pandemic.  New York City is in rapid decay, reverting to its pre-Rudolph Giuliani condition as Mayor Bill DeBlasio is more concerned about wokeness and virtue-signaling than he is about effectively running the city's government.  In San Francisco and Los Angeles, homelessness is out of control, their treasuries are effectively broke, and residents have been fleeing in record numbers.  And in Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler has stood by as riots have been ravaging the city for almost a year now, with empty hotels across the city as tourists stay away in droves.  There are dozens of cities we could examine to illustrate the failure of Democrat policies, but Philadelphia may be the most fascinating to consider. [...] Democratic Philadelphia voters outnumber Republican voters almost 7:1.  The last time the city had a mayor that wasn't a Democrat was in 1952.

Biden and 'elitist environmentalists' lost at least 1,000 steel jobs in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward argued on "Fox & Friends" on Thursday that Scranton native Joe Biden and his administration are "partially responsible" for the cancelation of a $1.5 billion steel project, which would cost "at least 1,000 blue collar jobs" because "of their focus on only green energy."  Late last month, Pittsburgh-based United States Steel Corp. said that it is canceling the project to bring a state-of-the-art improvement to its Mon Valley Works operations in western Pennsylvania, citing the fact that the landscape has changed in the two years since the company announced its intentions.  According to the company, project permits initially stalled by the coronavirus pandemic never materialized, U.S. Steel has added capacity elsewhere and now it must shift its focus to its goal of getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by 2050.  [Video clip]

Red Pills Are Falling Down All Over the Golden State.  Californians are realizing how deeply deluded they have been about the condition of their state. [...] A deliberately created housing shortage and voilà, higher property tax revenue, and better returns for wealthy real estate investors.  Ditto for water and energy.  Cram it all down in the name of being "green," and let the "renewables" manufacturers make a killing selling surveillance gadgets into every appliance to "help manage" consumption.  Meanwhile, the corrupt public utilities, with earnings capped at a percentage of costs, watch profits soar on the exploding cost for renewables.  Perennial forest fires were another wake-up call, and here as well, a red pill moment is at hand for Californians.  All Californians have to do is let the timber companies go back to work, thinning the overgrown forests, to restore a balance to nature.  But what do the politicians do?  Cope with the latest super fires by announcing that by 2035, only electric cars can be sold in California.  Because that will somehow stop the next round of fires this summer.

Why no one needs to work in Biden's America:  Experts project anyone who earned $32,000 before COVID could now earn MORE in benefits staying at home.  People who lost their jobs in the pandemic are now earning more in benefits than they did in wages, creating a nightmare economic situation that is stopping people from returning to work and in turn, driving up inflation.  In March 2019, the average weekly payment to an unemployed person was $348 when combining federal and state unemployment payments.  That nearly tripled to $938 in April 2020, when Trump passed COBRA — a temporary economic plan that boosted weekly unemployment payments by $600 and also gave employed people one-off stimulus checks.  COBRA expired in July and the unemployment boost was halved to $300-a-week.  Now, they are $638-a-week on average and they'll stay that way until September 6 at least.

After the Riots:  Kenosha police claim they've been unfairly villainized.  For a while, it seemed as though anybody who wanted to speak poorly of the police was given a national platform.  Cable news outlets clamored for sound bites that tore into law enforcement and stoked racial resentment.  "It's incredibly frustrating to be vilified in the national media," Kenosha Police Lt. Joseph Nosalik told the Washington Examiner, adding that police officers have not been given a fair shake in the press.  He believes that police departments are up against an "instant gratification society" that allows people to trash them without knowing the facts.  Police are also not allowed to comment on active investigations, which prevents them from speaking out or standing up for themselves or their actions in real-time.

It Got Serious In A Hurry.  [Scroll down]  The current crop of corruptocrats have introduced yet another inversion in the military, the woke inversion.  The military will now be graded on its commitment to combat-irrelevant factors:  the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual preferences and political creeds of its forces, and their professed fealty to regnant political dogma.  In other words, "diversity" in everything but thought.  This inversion is huge and given the distance squared corollary, it will soon render the armed forces incapable of fighting even a war for the protection of the United States proper.  Given its ineptitude fighting offensive wars, the military will be completely useless.  The defense budget, however, will grow ever more bloated.

'Alarming rate': Demoralized cops flee police departments in record numbers.  Police officers nationwide are turning in their badges at record rates amid budget cuts, policy changes and anti-brutality protests.  An estimated 5,300 officers quit or retired from the New York Police Department last year, 200 or more cops have left the Seattle force, and in the nation's capital, the union reports that the 3,700-strong Metropolitan Police Department is down 300 badges since the D.C. Council enacted sweeping police reforms last summer.  "Officers are leaving at an alarming rate, and crime is spiking in a lot of different areas," police union chairman Gregg Pemberton told The Washington Times on Tuesday [5/4/2021].

Democrats Blamed After U.S. Steel Cancels $1.5B Project in Pennsylvania.  Executives with the U.S. Steel Corp. announced days ago that they are canceling a $1.5 billion project in western Pennsylvania that was set to bring thousands of middle-class union jobs to the region, a move that many are now blaming on Democrats and environmental groups.  On April 30, U.S. Steel President David Burritt announced that a $1.5 billion project to majorly improve its Mon Valley Works operation with state-of-the-art steel casting, rolling technology, and a cogeneration plant is being canceled.

Coming up next from the Democrats:  Fort Apache, Fear City.  Joe Biden, the press, the Democrats, and the activists have long touted the rent moratoriums in the age of COVID as just the thing, keeping their victims of lockdowns and lost jobs from being thrown out of their homes.  One problem:  Someone is not getting paid.  The Washington Post has a long, balanced, authentic report on the assorted COVID-linked rent moratoriums and what that's done for the housing stock.  The subhead gets it right:  ["]As landlords and tenants go broke across the U.S., the next crisis point of the pandemic approaches["]

Austin voters approve proposition aimed at reinstating public camping ban.  Austin voters have approved Proposition B, which aims to reinstate the public camping ban that was reversed in July 2019.  The results were 57% to 43%, with the majority voting to approve the proposition.  The camping ban makes it illegal to camp in any public area not designated by the Parks and Recreation Department; to sit or lie on a public sidewalk or sleep outdoors in and near the downtown area and the area around the University of Texas campus; and to panhandle at specific hours and locations.

Austin, TX voters overwhelmingly reject propositions pushed by progressives.  There are signs that the left has created a backlash by overplaying its hand.  Even in a stronghold of the left like Austin, Texas, where in 2019 homeless people were allowed to erect their tents on city-owned land, including parks and sidewalks, thanks to the progressive-dominated city council.  All the problems any sane person would predict started happening immediately.  And that led to a voter initiative to reinstate the camping ban, Proposition B.

"The Staffing Shortage Is Real" - Manhattan Restaurants Struggle To Hire As Millions [are being] Paid Not To Work.  Long-suffer NYC restauranteurs may have been tempted to celebrate when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday that the Big Apple would "fully reopen" on July 1.  But just as the problem of COVID-19 restrictions fades away, restaurant owners are facing the same problem that has prompted Royal Farms to offer $500 signing bonuses while some McDonald's franchisees offer prospective workers $50 just to come to an interview:  that is, President Biden's massive $1.9 trillion stimulus is paying too many American workers to stay home.

More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year, many citing anti-police climate.  More than 200 Seattle police officers quit their jobs in the last year amid months of frequent anti-law enforcement, racial injustice protests and riots in the city.  Many of the officers cited an anti-police climate in the city — including in the City Council — and disagreements with police management in their reasons for moving on, leaving the department with what Police Chief Adrian Diaz called a "staffing crisis" on Tuesday [4/27/2021].  He said 180 police officers quit last year and another 66 officers so far this year.

Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.  Almost all of the largest cities in the United States are governed by hard-left Democrats.  In fact, there is only one Republican mayor among the top 15 cities in the country and only three among the 30 largest cities.  All of the problems in our urban areas today are almost exclusively the result of the failed Democratic Party leadership.  While previous generations of Democrats might have tried to find bipartisan solutions to longstanding problems, the party's leaders in 2021 are woke leftists interested only in pushing their radical agenda.  The result has been outmigration, soaring crime rates, a drug epidemic, broken families, failing public schools, an increasing number of blighted properties, high poverty and unemployment rates, an obsession with a race-based agenda, and rising antipathy toward law enforcement officers.  No wonder people are fleeing our cities in hopes of finding safety and a better quality of life.

The Gender Non-Reveal:  How Gender-Neutral Parenting Harms Kids.  The newest generation, the children of Millennials, has been dubbed Generation Alpha — and they're coming up fast.  What ideas are they bringing with them?  For starters, they are "estimated to be the most gender-fluid and anti-sexist generation yet," according to gender studies professor Dr. Kyl Myers.  Myers and her husband, Brent, represent a small but growing group of parents who are seeking to hasten this upcoming "gender revolution" by raising their own kids as gender-neutral.  Their child, Zoomer, is an example of what some are calling theybies — a combination of "they" and "babies," referring to children whose parents refuse to tell them what their sex is.

The left's war on language continues unabated.  The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) is removing the term "master" bedroom from all of its databases and listing services and replacing it with the politically correct phrase "primary" bedroom.  According to a TRREB news release, the change was suggested by the organization's Diversity and Inclusion Task Force (DITV) to better align it with Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) practices.  The release promised that the change "will also address the negative connotations surrounding 'master' bedroom, which many Members, others in the industry, and the public at large associate with terminology rooted in slavery and/or sexism.  We also heard some of your concerns about the offensive undertones associated with this term.  We know that words matter, and this is a step forward in rethinking outdated terms and modernizing the language used in the real estate industry."  Note to the TRREB and wokesters everywhere:  Banning (or bastardizing) language is not progressive; it is regressive:  a step backward.  When you try to ban words, you are saying one of two things about them:  1) either the word doesn't matter at all or 2) the word is so powerful that it can overwhelm your ability to rationally process it.  In a sane world and to a sane person, neither should be the case.

Safe Spaces Are Creating a Generation of 'Snowflake Tyrants': Dr. Everett Piper.  Dr. Everett Piper, author of "Grow Up:  Life Isn't Safe But It's Good," told Epoch TV's "Crossroads" Program that cancel culture's relentless demand for safe spaces is making America's youth emotionally fragile, less able to cope with hardship, and more prone to advocating for an ever bigger government role in allaying insecurity and providing safety at the expense of liberty.  Piper, who served as president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University for 17 years, said that his earlier warnings, that coddling America's youth by acquiescing to demands for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" would lead to a sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit, are increasingly coming to pass.  "The 'snowflakes' have graduated," Piper said.  "And they now have jobs at Google and Amazon and Apple and Twitter and even Major League Baseball, where they're carrying their cancel culture, their demands for safety, into our country at large, and they're silencing everyone who disagrees with them.  This is ideological fascism, it is not intellectual freedom."

Transgender Child Commits Suicide, Feuding Parents Hold One Funeral for the Boy and Another for the Girl.  A teen in Western Australia's capital has been given two funerals.  The 15-year-old female — who identified as a boy — died tragically by suicide.  The child's mother and father are estranged.  Given the terrible situation, they had to decide:  Would she be interred as female?  Or would the identity of a boy be reflected by the burial?  Mom and dad couldn't come to a consensus.  The mother insisted her child — born a girl — find a final resting place as a guy.  In fact, as reported by 7News, she vowed to employ the full power of the court system if necessary.

Believe It or Not, a New Level of Corruption and Depravity for New York City.  The district attorney of Manhattan in NYC has announced that his office will no longer prosecute any unlicensed "massage" parlor workers (about 900 cases), nor loitering for the purposes of prostitution (about 5,000 cases).  Abigail Swenstein, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Exploitation Intervention Project, which works with sex workers, said that while the policy doesn't preclude the New York Police Department making arrests, she hopes officers will choose not to, knowing that prosecutors would not bring charges.  Laws against these behaviors are still on the books but will not be prosecuted.  The citizenry has not repealed these laws, but the ever wise and dictatorial district attorney will spit in the face of the citizenry (and God) by deeming these activities unworthy of punishment.  This writer could find reference to only one person, New York Assemblyman Mike Reilly, a Republican, who said Manhattan's new prostitution policy sets a dangerous precedent.  "It flies in the face of law and order," he timidly said.  To me, the fact that there is not an outcry of opposition is as grievous as the decision itself.

Woke Democrats Broke American Cities.  Almost all of the largest cities in the United States are governed by hard-left Democrats.  In fact, there is only one Republican Mayor among the top 15 cities in the country and only three among the 30 largest cities.  All of the problems in our urban areas today are almost exclusively the result of the failed Democratic Party leadership.  While previous generations of Democrats might have tried to find bi-partisan solutions to long standing problems, the party's leaders in 2021 are woke leftists interested only in pushing their radical agenda.  The result has been outmigration, soaring crime rates, a drug epidemic, broken families, failing public schools, an increasing number of blighted properties, high poverty and unemployment rates, an obsession with a race-based agenda and rising antipathy toward law enforcement officers.  No wonder people are fleeing our cities in hopes of finding safety and a better quality of life.

Broken Arrow:  America has been overrun.  The public school and universities are undermining traditional values everyday.  This has been going on for years.  Now, however, the effort is in overdrive where things like transgenderism and the hateful Critical Race Theory are taking the pride of place in the classrooms.  And perhaps worse of all is illegal immigration, The country is being flooded with illegal immigrants whose numbers will change the nature of the country in short order as has already been done in California.  And the frustrating thing is that this is happening despite it being against the will of the people and immigration laws, both of which are treated as jokes by the political establishment.  With Donald Trump out of the presidency, the American working class stands naked before the forces intent on breaking it.  The Republic is still alive, but on life support.

Are NYPD officers rushing to retire amid city's anti-cop climate?  More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020 — a 75 percent spike from the year before, department data show.  The exodus — amid the pandemic, anti-cop hostility, riots and a skyrocketing number of NYC shootings — saw 2,600 officers say goodbye to the job and another 2,746 file for retirement, a combined 5,346.  In 2019, the NYPD had 1,509 uniformed officers leave and 1,544 file for retirement, for a total of 3,053.  The departures and planned departures of 5,300 officers represents about 15 percent of the force.  Already, as of April 5, the NYPD headcount of uniformed officers has dropped to 34,974 from 36,900 in 2019.

It's Biden's 'First 100 Days' Week.  Biden is trying to pack the Supreme Court.  Even though Biden had said on multiple occasions that he would not try to, that is exactly what he and his handlers are trying to do.  Can you imagine if President Trump had tried to pack the Court?  The Supreme Court is historically the guardrail in stopping those who lust for power and seek total control.  If a packed Supreme Court becomes nothing more than a rubber stamp to progressive ideology there will be no separation of powers nor checks and balances.  Biden has enacted more executive orders in his first 100 days of office than any other president during the same time period.  Biden has put Kamala Harris in charge of the border crisis illegal immigrants pour into America, and Harris has been down to the southern border zero times.  Zero times. [...] If someone is in the country legally, they are presumed by Biden to have Covid, urged or even commanded to wear a mask in public.  If someone tries to come into the country illegally, they are assumed not to have Covid and transported to the destination of their choice.

We are witnessing the Democrats' final revenge for losing the Civil War.  Since the start of LBJ's "Great Society" and the welfare state, Democrats have been breaking American Blacks in the same way Petruchio broke Katherine.  If one were to pay attention solely to the rhetoric, there can be no greater love than that which leftists in politics, the media, academia, and the corporate world have for Blacks.  The results of this abundant affection have been devastating.  "Hands up, don't shoot."  "I can't breathe."  "I'm a crazy white lady screaming at cops on behalf of Black people."  "Math is racist."  "Ambition is racist."  "The English language is racist."  "Whites are born racist."  "Melanin makes people superior."  (That last is a paraphrase of Kristen Clarke, Biden's nominee to head the equal rights division of the Justice Department.)  Lower academic standards.  Separate dorms.  Separate dining halls.  Critical Race Theory.  White privilege.  Ibram X. Kendi bestsellers.  BLM.  Defund the police.  ACAB. [...]

Fools' overture.  It hasn't taken long:  gas prices are rising — as are the prices of other durable and consumer goods, such as timber.  Crime is soaring.  China is making threatening gestures, and Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine.  There is a crisis on our own southern border, which even President and Lid-Caller-in-Chief Biden accidentally admitted recently, causing White House press secretary Jen Psaki to claim that's not what he really meant to say.  This was all eminently predictable because, as any rational human being knows, actions have consequences.  Banning the Keystone Pipeline, printing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars, and threatening to implement preposterous environmental policies, defunding the police, and coddling criminals have had the effects that similar actions have always had.  They are the only possible results of actions such as these.

Kroger Closing Ralphs And Food 4 Less In Long Beach Saturday Over Hero Pay Law.  Kroger is closing two of its stores, Ralphs and Food 4 Less, on Saturday after the City of Long Beach mandated that the company pay employees $4 extra an hour in "hero pay" amid the coronavirus pandemic.  As customers came by the store on Saturday [4/17/2021], there wasn't much left to buy and the shelves were visibly empty, but people in the neighborhood said they wanted to shop there one more time.

Americans Exiled within America.  [Scroll down]  A corrupt voting process has deprived millions of meaningful participation within their republic.  Meanwhile, integrity of citizenship itself is imperiled by the erasure of the nation's boundaries and the granting of privileges to non-citizens.  Second, Americans have been deprived of their property, which has essentially been confiscated by the State in the interest of public "health."  Businesses have been shut down and, when partly opened, managed by bureaucrats who dictate how a business such as a restaurant may be run. [...] But most importantly, like individuals who are removed from their country, exiled Americans have experienced loss of community and communication.  The forced isolation of Americans and the shutdown of nearly all institutions have deprived Americans of supportive communities.  Churches, schools, museums, concert halls, political groups, and even family gatherings such as funerals and weddings have become tightly regulated.  Many communities have either disappeared altogether or retreated into cyberspace.

Despite Reports to the Contrary, When It Comes to Destroying American Norms Trump Had Nothing on Team Biden.  Here's an interesting exercise: plug the search term "Trump destroying norms" into Google and see what happens.  Or you can just trust me: you'll get story after story, some dating back to 2015, about how Donald Trump, with his quick tongue, profligate use of social media, and derision for the press, was sure to destroy American norms and the republic as a consequence.  Now, three months into the Biden administration, those precious norms that are definitely still around post-Trump are being seriously and actually threatened from all sides by the same progressive legislators who worked with their fans in the media to sell the idea that Trump was going to undo the fabric of American life.

Poll Shows 69 Percent of Americans Favor Legal Weed, a New Record High.  According to pollsters at Quinnipiac University, 69 percent of all Americans and clear majorities in every demographic group now favor the legalization of marijuana.  That's up from 51 percent of Americans who said they favored legalization in 2012, the first year Quinnipiac included questions about marijuana in their national surveys, and up from 60 percent who backed legalization in 2019.  The trend is unmistakable.  Support isn't just growing, it is broadening.  The Quinnipiac poll found that 78 percent of self-identified Democrats, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans, and 67 percent of self-identified independents favor legalization.  The only age demographic where support for legalization falls short of 70 percent is for respondents who are 65 and older — though even that cohort supports legalization by a slim margin (51 percent).

The Invisible Asylum: Olympia, Washington, is a microcosm of the problems created by the emptying of mental hospitals.  The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar.  In a long arc — from President Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present — federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world.  Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness.  If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before — and less capacity to treat and manage them.  The question now is not, "What happened to the asylums?" but "What replaced them?" Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an "invisible asylum" composed of three primary institutions:  the street, the jail, and the emergency room.

NYC Teacher:  Yes, 'Critical Race Theory' 'Training' Is Harmful 'Indoctrination' of Our Kids.  Ever feel like we've reached the point where daily life consists primarily of playing a never-ending game of "liberal insanity whack-a-mole"?  We smack one here insane narrative here, another one immediately pops up, there, then another one, here?  Me too.  From border-swarms of illegal alien-wannabes dressed in Biden campaign T-shirts demanding the aforementioned honor his campaign promises and "Let us in!", to "racial justice" and "abolish the police" riots — er "peaceful protests — to defiant teachers unions who continue refuse to send to their members back to their classrooms, and on and on.  The never-ending story of the grip the left has on America is a sobering reality.

New Yorker who wants to marry [his or her] adult biological child sues to overturn laws banning incest.  A New York parent who wants to marry their [sic] adult biological child is suing to overturn laws banning incest, saying marriage is a matter of 'individual autonomy'.  The parent filed the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on April 1 asking a judge to declare incest laws 'unconstitutional' and unenforceable so that they can wed their [sic] offspring in a ceremony in New York City.  The identities of both the parent and the child are not known, with the gender, ages, hometowns and nature of their relationship not detailed in the suit, seen by the New York Post.

Rural Trump Voters Already Live in the Safe, Tolerant Utopia Leftists Claim to Want.  If I had to boil down the political wisdom I've learned over four decades of observing, studying, writing, and debating, it would be this:  Life in Rural America (which is where Republican Trump voters live and govern), is clean, safe and racially tolerant.  Most places in America where life is dirty, polluted, dangerous, violent, and plagued with racial hate and race riots, are cities that are almost exclusively populated by and governed by Democrats.

Andy Ngo:  U.S. Unsafe Due To Far-Left Terror, Erosion Of Police.  A prominent Asian-American reporter commented on his decision to flee the U.S. due to threats by Antifa.  Journalist and author Andy Ngo said he fled the U.S. due to an escalation of safety concerns.  In an interview Monday [4/5/2021], Ngo of Portland, Oregon said it's not safe for him to remain in the U.S. due to his past reporting on Antifa.  Ngo stressed he left the U.S. due to the weakening of law enforcement and a rise in popularity of far-left violence.

Americans slouching toward Gomorrah.  For the first time ever, the percentage of Americans who belong to a house of worship such as a church or synagogue has fallen below 50%, according to a new Gallup survey. [...] Violent — and other — crime is rising in virtually all major American cities.  Rates of addiction, depression and suicide are also rising dramatically.  Syringes and human feces line the streets and sidewalks of formerly paradisical cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.  A growing number of us find it difficult to figure out what gender we may be.  Pot, 'shrooms and even hard drugs are being legalized in many locales.  Criminals are being let out of jail, while hard working small business owners are being ushered into jail.  Police departments are being demonized and defunded.  There is a growing push to legalize polygamy.  Yet it is a crime to say "All Lives Matter."

The First AOC Administration.  In less than three months, Biden has managed to erase the United States' southern border in order to accelerate the northward flow of undocumented Democrats.  He's having more success than he should in pushing for the higher taxes and onerous regulations that held down the economy when he was Barack Obama's dogsbody, both of which Biden's predecessor lowered, thereby causing the economy to take off.  Biden has reinstated Obama's invertebrate foreign policy, giving the world's bad guys the rope they need, and he's pledged to spend trillions we don't have in order to pursue the fool's errand of carbon-free energy (aka very little energy, and at mini-bar prices).  He's blessed the corrupt HR 1, which if the Senate falls for it would federalize all elections, installing voting rules so lax as to hang a "STEAL ME!" sign on all future elections.  The cherry on top of the sundae is Biden foisting critical race theory onto federal employees, including the military, which Democrats seem determined to declaw.

If it ain't broke, Joe Biden will break it.  The president is on a tear, as in tearing up arrangements that were achieving their objectives.  His early results are disastrous.  In an act of astonishing foolishness, Biden created a humanitarian and public safety crisis on our southern border by dismantling a successful policy structure that took years to achieve.  In the Mideast, he looks determined to undo the Arab-Israeli alliance Donald Trump forged by returning to the failed policies Biden helped to implement in the Obama-Biden administration.  If that were all, it would be more than enough.  But it's not all.  Biden also wants to end the Senate filibuster and took the first step toward packing the Supreme Court.  Those two moves are so destructive that even Sen. Mitt Romney, who usually saves his criticism for fellow Republicans, drew the line.

Biden's Chamber of Confected Hatreds.  Destructive, mindless wokeness and charges and confessions of "white privilege" are everywhere, and the United States government is complicit with the vicious drug and slave gangs of Mexico in the importation of large numbers of illegal migrants, up to 80 percent of whom are sexually violated on their way to the southern U.S. border.  It emerges that virtually the entire state school system and almost all of the university academy are peddling the lie that the United States was established as a slaveholding enterprise as its raison d'être, effectively up until Black Lives Matter exposed this heinous state of affairs and promised to "burn America down" if it were not changed.  We have also recently learned that the U.S. armed forces are systematically propagating within their ranks critical race theory, which is a complete and dangerous fiction and just more mud-slinging and myth-making about the nature of the country.  And now Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is trying to recruit the entire world to pledge to raise corporate taxes — an insane and fatuous concept.

Over 250 Male California Prison Inmates Request Transfer to Women's Facilities.  Since January, 261 California prison inmates have requested transfers to prisons aligning with their gender identity, 255 of them biological males who say they identify as women, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the Daily Caller News Foundation.  In January, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law a bill requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to ask every individual entering its custody to specify personal pronouns and gender identity, including transgender, nonbinary, or intersex.  The California law, known as SB 132, prevents Corrections and Rehabilitation from disciplining the individual for refusing to give this information, allows for the information to be updated later, and requires staff to use the gender pronouns that the individual requested.

Quality of life plummets, taxes rocket — and New York City faces doom.  "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session."  That's how Gideon Tucker put it back in 1866, a New Yorker who knew Albany as a former legislator, secretary of state and judge.  His wisdom, as demonstrated repeatedly over the ages, is timeless.  Yet there is something different, and especially troubling, about this time.  The possibility of permanent decline and the ultimate destruction of the New York we know is unmatched in modern memory.  With Republicans reduced to hecklers, Albany Democrats, oblivious or reckless or both, are marching toward the cliff in an Alfred E. Neuman, What, Me Worry?  Way.  The rising chorus of "Stop!" goes unheeded.  Washington is sending train loads of money to blue states to bail out their high tax, high spend habits.

Exclusive: Exodus Underway as Record-Shattering Surge of Austin Police Officers Leave the Force.  After the Austin city council voted unanimously to defund its police department by about one-third of its budget, in August 2020, many predicted that once the cuts kicked in a flood of officers would leave the force as soon as they could.  The new district attorney's policy of re-investigating police officers for closed cases is also expected to cause officers to resign or retire.  The city council's cuts officially kicked in and have been in place for a few months.  PJ Media reports exclusively that APD is now suffering a huge surge of officer departures putting it on pace to shatter 2020's record.

America's creation of the transgender child.  As a cynical Brit, I admire the US can-do attitude.  The American dream, the idea that people can be anything they want, is liberating and wonderful.  But it has a downside.  The idea of the self-made man or woman is taken very literally in the US, and accordingly a lucrative market for those who wish to change sex is booming.  This is no-longer just the preserve of adults; over the past decade a linguistic shift from "transexual" to "transgender" has de-sexed what had previously been considered an adult psychosexual disorder.  The modification of bodies to fit a stated sense of "gender identity" now extends to children.  Thus, with sleight of language, a puff of glitter and injection of hormones, unto the US the "transgender child" was born. [...] One might imagine the locus of concern would be the ethics of medicating and operating on children physically to alleviate mental distress, but it is the impact on sport which has captured the public imagination.

How the Transgender Movement is Destroying Feminism.  In 2005, I published a book with the title The Death of Feminism.  I saw it all coming.  But I did not foresee the rise of a transgender movement.  On March 31st, an allegedly feminist Open Letter Supporting Trans Women and Girls, was circulated.  Among other things, it stated that "We acknowledge with clarity and strength that transgender women are women and that transgender girls are girls.  And we believe that honoring the diversity of women's experiences is a strength, not a detriment to the feminist cause."  Interestingly, there is absolutely no mention of trans men — those who were born female but who have or want to become male.  As we now know, there is an alarming spike among teenage girls in America who hope to solve their teenage sorrows such as low self-esteem, body image discomfort, trauma based on sexual violence, eating disorders, psychiatric suffering, etc., by cutting off their breasts, surgically removing their uteri and ovaries, and taking potentially lethal hormones to prevent puberty, and to grow facial hair and muscle.

Society Pays When Prosecutors Fail to Punish Crime.  Imagine a society where prostitutes could solicit johns for sex just yards from police officers who did little more than wave them on their way.  Picture yourself walking through a park with your children as a homeless person is free to urinate and defecate beside the park bench where he is stashing the illegal drugs he bought from a dope dealer operating openly without fear of the police.  Does that make you feel safe?  Welcome to the new Baltimore, where law enforcement will no longer be prosecuting what it calls "low-level offenses."  These include possessing drugs or drug paraphernalia, trespassing, minor traffic offenses, prostitution, open container violations, and defecating or urinating in public.  The city announced the initiative last week after a year-long experiment to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the jails and prisons.

Georgia Democrats stare down a mob of their own making.  Leftist activists are busy whipping up a national boycott of Georgia-based businesses over the state's new election integrity law.  The boycott has the support of Hollywood and the White House, with President Joe Biden saying this week that he would support moving the MLB's All-Star Game out of the state as a sign of protest.  Georgia Democrats are now left trying to talk the mob down.  "I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia," Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said in a statement on Thursday [4/1/2021].  "Georgia welcomes business, investment, jobs, opportunity, and events.  In fact, economic growth is driving much of the political progress we have seen here."  Stacey Abrams, who, having lost Georgia's governorship in 2018, rebranded herself as a voting rights activist, agreed and reminded Democrats that economic boycotts would hurt the very communities they claim to represent.

Mass Shootings:  Another Consequence of Democrat Majorities.  When most Democrats learned of the Boulder, CO shooting last week, they salivatingly checked social media to see if the alleged murderer was a white, male Donald Trump voter.  Most Republicans scoured story after story to see if he was black or a Democrat (close to redundant, I know).  I, however, did what I always do when I hear of a shooting:  I checked who lives in the area, and who's in charge.  What do you think I discovered about Boulder County? [...] In Boulder County, since 2004, the Democrat nominee for U.S. president has received a minimum of 66% of the vote; Biden got 77% last year.  In the county, there are 96,319 active registered Democrats and 36,302 active registered Republicans.  The mayor, and all eight council members of the city of Boulder, are "nonpartisan," but the Rorschach Test of the Homo sapiens species — social media — revealed that all are Democrats.

Major cities feeling the loss of police funding as murders, other crimes soar.  Cities in parts of the U.S. that slashed their police department funding last year, in part as a result of police-involved shootings, have seen an uptick in certain crimes over the past year, according to data analyzed by Fox News.  Cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, have shifted funds from police departments to social services programs.  Such cuts have led some departments to lay off officers, cancel recruiting classes or retreat from hiring goals.  As police departments were left to make do with shrunken budgets and less support, some big cities have seen sometimes drastic upticks in murders and other violent crimes, a Fox News crime analysis found.

'The cruelty is the point'.  [Scroll down]  At one particularly overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas, an official told reporters:  "The capacity for this location for COVID purposes is 250.  Previous to COVID, the total capacity was one thousand.  Now, we're holding over 4,100 subjects in this location alone.  So you do the math.  We're way over capacity."  The short version:  Families are separated and there are thousands of young people jammed into holding pens awaiting processing.  There is no doubt that President Biden's policy is behind the latest surge.  The president and his administration have made clear that the U.S. will accept unaccompanied children but not family units, and not individual adults.  At his news conference last week, Biden said, "We're sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming."  Even though that is not entirely true, the U.S. message to would-be migrants, from the mouth of the president himself, is:  If you come as a family, we will turn you away.  If you send your children by themselves, we will take them.  Biden's policy has given those families a clear incentive to self-separate in the interest of at least getting their children inside the United States.

Biden issues first presidential proclamation on Trans Day of Visibility.  President Joe Biden on Wednesday [3/31/2021] issued the first presidential proclamation recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility.  The day is dedicated to celebrating transgender people and bringing awareness to the discrimination and violence they face everyday.  In his proclamation, Biden said Trans Day of Visibility recognizes the generations of activism by transgender and nonbinary people.

The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America.  [#3] Racialism is now acceptable.  We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality.  The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial.  It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of "good" racism.  Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

Australian Journalist:  Biden Making World 'More Dangerous,' Destroying Military With 'Wokesters'.  Sky News host James Morrow said during a recent broadcast that the world has become a "more dangerous place" under Democratic President Joe Biden, noting that America's enemies have started to become more aggressive around the world while Biden is focusing on making the U.S. Military "woke."  "On Friday, Chinese forces committed their largest ever incursion into Taiwanese airspace, as worries grow by the day of a Chinese invasion of the Democratic island republic.  Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Iran is on the march with its rebel militias, now attacking Saudi oil fields and building up a stockpile of missiles that has Israeli planners increasingly nervous about a potentially devastating conflict happening sooner rather than later."

America at the End of Empire.  [Scroll down]  Ascendant China is hell-bent on world domination and makes no apology for it.  America, meanwhile, is suffering from decades of accelerated, corrosive, Marxist subversion that has saddled us with a power-lusting leftist regime, aided and abetted by an unofficial state news media; a school system that has jettisoned rigorous education in favor of identity politics indoctrination; a woke corporate culture showering hundreds of millions of dollars on support for Critical Race training and on the communist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter; an obscenely decadent entertainment industry (itself in thrall to Chinese influence) that peddles anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, and anti-white racism; and a politicized military establishment prioritizing "gender equity" over warrior readiness.  In short, America (and the Western world more generally), once the most prosperous and powerful civilization in history, is no longer operating "from a position of strength."  It is, in fact, bleeding out from self-inflicted wounds, and our enemies foreign and domestic smell the blood in the water.

On gender madness, don't let Canada be the future.  Jordan Peterson became world-famous in 2016 because he stood up to Canada's human rights law, which made it a crime to "misgender" someone.  Since then, Canada has slid even further into gender totalitarianism.  The latest example is a Canadian man who was sent to prison for refusing to adopt his teenage daughter's new masculine pronouns.  The father and mother were not raising the child together, so it was only when his daughter was 13 that the father learned that the girl's public school and his ex-wife had been working with the child to turn her into a boy.  This included pushing the child to take hormones to mimic male sexual attributes such as facial hair and a deep voice.  The father (who cannot be identified under Canadian law because doing so would also identify his daughter) went to court, saying that he needed to give parental consent before his child was permanently mutilated.  Not only did a British Columbia court rule against him, saying the father's consent wasn't necessary, but the appellate judges also lectured him to understand gender dysphoria better.

You're Racist, whether You Like It or Not.  "In my mind... this was an anti-Asian hate crime."  So declared Congresswoman Judy Chu regarding the Atlanta shooting, in which eight women died, six of whom happened to be Asian. [...] There is no point denying that the left, at this moment, controls all the major avenues of power in America — from the media to academia, from education to entertainment, from government to business, the left has entrenched itself, giving it unprecedented power over our lives.  We see this in the nationwide spread of "drag queen story time," the unveiling of a "gay Captain America," and the continual pledges of "diversity" and "equity" from companies as prestigious as Bank of America and Nabisco.  But this narrative around the Atlanta shooting marks a graduation of the left's power.  It has, in essence, declared that it can divine our actions better than we can.

How [the] 'Minneapolis Effect' Explains [the] Surge of Violent Crime in American Cities.  This past year, "defund the police" has been a frequent call from activists seeking systemic reform of the American criminal justice system.  It became a popular rallying cry after the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.  And Minneapolis is among cities that partially defunded police departments and proactive crime prevention programs in response to the incident.  However, the months since brought a massive surge in violent crime, a phenomenon called the "Minneapolis Effect" by two legal experts who spoke at a virtual event held March 16 by The Heritage Foundation.  Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, and Lawrence Rosenthal, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, laid out the case that the serious, protracted rise in crime is tied to rhetoric and actions after Floyd's death and the ensuing protests.

I have lived in New York City my whole life — and I fear it will never recover.  This year has been a tremendously difficult year.  Covid-19 was — and remains — scary and awful.  For so many New Yorkers, what has also been awful over the last year has been watching the destruction of New York City — undoubtedly in large part because of a pair of egomaniac buffoons:  Mayor Bill De Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo.  New York City is a fragment of itself — abandoned stores and empty streets.  The city that used to never sleep is in a slumber.  After a year in which the city permitted looting and rioting, in which kids remain largely out of school, in which crime is rising rapidly and so many of us are afraid to walk in the streets, the city is largely shuttered and in disarray.  Streets are filled with crime, the homeless are everywhere — and so many New Yorkers have left.

Climate change is the perfect tool to justify complete control.  Replacing internal combustion-powered automobiles with E.V.s is policy.  Eventually, they will acknowledge the inherent pollution in battery manufacture, the production of the electricity needed to charge the batteries, and eventual battery disposal.  The goal is to eliminate private transportation in its entirety.  In major cities, roadwork now entails reducing on-street parking while narrowing thoroughfares to increase traffic.  This is a prelude to charging a yearly fee for the privilege of city parking.  Several thousand dollars a year should modify behavior and increase revenues.  The implementation of license fees (also several thousand dollars per annum) for car ownership will come to fruition.  Limiting the right to own a car for people who allow their "social credit score" to decline by saying something untoward about government or authorities on social media, or in public, will also be a tactic.  Next will be restricted usage and a fee per mile driven with driving limited to odd and even days for portions of the population.  Social scores will dictate who is allowed to fly on commercial airliners, with ticket prices including a "carbon fee" commensurate to the seat's percentage of the flight's total carbon cost.  In addition to forcing the price of gasoline to $20 a gallon, the "price of all energy will necessarily have to skyrocket" (Barack Obama).  They will triple or quadruple the price of all energy, whether it be electricity, natural gas, or home heating oil.

Culture change is far more devastating than climate change.  In the Golden Era of Sports (1920s) through the following decades, until sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it was traditional for people to dress up whenever they stepped outside or went to an event.  Pictures of hockey arenas and baseball stadiums show the ladies, of which there were far fewer than today, dressed in their finery and the men in suits and even dressy hats.  The hats eventually went away and the suits... followed suit, replaced by more casual but still nice outfits.  In recent years the nicer casual outfits have often been supplanted by ripped shorts, "message" tee shirts or sweatpants and sweatshirts, frequently far from fresh.  Similarly, people were instructed to stand silently and at attention for the national anthem, remove their hats and place their hands over their hearts.  This level of community spirit and respect survived for many years.  Eventually, however, as apparel standards flagged, fewer and fewer people bothered to put their hand over their hearts, or remove their headgear.  Or stand at attention.  Or stay silent.  Finally, in the last few years, as players routinely took a knee in "protest" during the anthem, others did, too.  And some fans in the stands were no longer moved to stand in honor of the flag, their country, veterans' sacrifices, or anything.

The American Police State Is Now Forming.  SAT exams originally established to foster equality and non-discrimination in college admissions are now being abandoned as — imagine — discriminatory, giving advantage to Asians and whites over Latinos and people of color.  Even a few short years ago, Howard Gardner's idea of multiple intelligences was being used to challenge the idea of the mind's executive function, measured by I.Q. tests, as invalid.  Because learning is supposedly based on "multiple intelligences," emphasis in classrooms was increasingly on group work, simple tasks like pasting pictures on colored paper to make booklets, or learning via computer "at one's own pace" with the teacher present in the classroom to promote student engagement.  Teachers are increasingly referred to as facilitators rather than as teachers.  Even without the so-called Equality Act, this writer knows an elementary school teacher whose school issued the rule that teachers could no longer say, "Girls line up here, and boys line up here."  A girls' line and a boys' line were no longer allowed.

Couple buys Riverside dream home, but seller refuses to move out in eviction moratorium loophole.  When Tracie and Myles Albert purchased a beautiful four bedroom house in Riverside, California they never realized that at the end of escrow the seller would suddenly refuse to give up the keys and leave.  "It's just draining, emotionally and financially," says Tracie.  On January 31, 2020, the couple purchased the home.  More than a year later, they still haven't been able get inside their property.

Biden's Illegal Immigration Agenda Creates Another Child Smuggling Crisis.  Those in government know full well the tragic consequences of opening our borders.  Rather than being motivated by compassion, they seek to gain power, and they're willing to sacrifice some of the most vulnerable people to do it.  The Biden administration's recent open-borders immigration policy and talk of potential amnesty has predictably resulted in a dramatic rise in unaccompanied children risking their lives to enter the United States across our southern border.  The number of children coming without parents is now more than 430 a day, with immigration experts predicting an influx of more than 100,000 unaccompanied children by the end of 2021.  Parents are paying murderous drug cartels thousands of dollars to smuggle their children across the border.  Some children are traveling across two or three countries to get here.

Monopoly scraps outdated Community Chest cards to appeal to woke folks.  After 85 years of cheap hospital bills, moderate stock earnings and maturing "Christmas funds" (whatever that means), Hasbro now plans to bring Monopoly into the increasingly "woke" 21st century.  The game-maker has decided to update its 16 Community Chest cards, which featured outdated prompts such as winning a "beauty contest," actually receiving a "tax refund" or the now-rarely seen "bank error in your favor." In their place are more contemporary cards that evoke community service and social awareness.  Swaps could include a reward for "shopping local all week," rescuing a shelter pet or helping tend the community garden.  But Hasbro wants players to decide which to include via voting.

The Culture Curators Want To Think For You.  The corporations, much of the media, the entertainment industry, major league sports organizations, academia and Silicon Valley all demand that we fall in line with how they think.  They want to approve of how we speak, what books we read, what movies we watch, what words we use, who we support politically, how we educate our children and what parts of history are acceptable to teach. [...] When one of them deems something unacceptable in its version of the world, many others follow suit, often crumbling to their younger employees' demands.  The latter has been given enough power in this age of corporate social justice to destroy the very place they work if that corporation does not bend to their demands.  The decision no longer to publish six Dr. Seuss books was made internally.  So was Disney's decision to prevent young viewers from watching "Dumbo," "Peter Pan," "Swiss Family Robinson" and "The Aristocats."

Poison, Mutilate, and Sterilize.  Before the smartphone and the Great Awokening helped make transgenderism the latest craze among adolescent girls (partly displacing older teen fads such as anorexia, cutting, and recovered memories), psychological science knew of only two main types of gender dysphoria (when an individual is dissatisfied with the sex of his or her body):  Childhood-onset gender dysphoria [... and] Late-onset gender dysphoria[.] [...] Only a vanishingly small number of American teenage girls thought they were boys until the media started hyping transgenderism around 2013.  Unhappy pubescent girls shopped online for some explanation of their discontent and found en masse that the hot new one was transgenderism.

For US, Gradual Ruin Is About to Become Sudden.  [Scroll down]  For a moment, during President Donald Trump's tenure, it seemed as though we'd returned to the sunlit uplands.  Leave aside his partisan successes, the judges, and tax cuts, for example.  Concentrate instead on what he did to secure the borders, to upgrade the military, to make America energy independent.  It's only mid-March 2021. In just six weeks, and with 60-odd executive orders behind him, Biden has largely unraveled all that and more.  This is the reality:  Biden has set us on a collision course with tyranny at home and armed conflict abroad.  He has denominated his political opponents "domestic terrorists" and directed the FBI to harass and arrest them.  He has done everything in his considerable power to surrender the country to the woke mob.  Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't standing still.  Look for a kinetic clash with Russia, China, or Iran soon.  It's coming to a theater near you by the end of this summer, and I do not mean a movie theater.

Portland cut police funding and got a 2,000% surge in murders.  Last June, the city of Portland, Oregon, hopped on the "defund the police" bandwagon.  Now, it is flooded with gun violence, and the mayor is already backtracking from his support for the cuts.  Mayor Ted Wheeler has requested $2 million in emergency funding for the police department, pointing directly to the surge in gun violence.  At this point last year, Portland had seen just one homicide.  This year, that number is 20, with 208 shootings in the city so far.  Wheeler backed the Portland City Council's decision to cut $15 million from the police budget last June, which included disbanding police units that investigate gun violence.  Predictably, that move backfired in a city that saw 100 consecutive days of violent rioting last year.  Riots are back once again in the city, thanks to Wheeler's spinelessness.  Rioters have once again targeted a federal courthouse in the city, a reprise of the violent storming of the courthouse last July.  In June, it was reported that the city lost around $24 million due to the riots.  Damage to federal buildings totals roughly $2.3 million.

US Military:  Social Justice Warriors.  A pastor I know personally told me that one of his congregation is in a service academy, and sends him photographs of assignments and readings they are given.  The young person asks the pastor for advice on how to navigate all this as a Christian.  The pastor said he — the pastor — is a conservative, but the things that the new woke military is putting into the heads of our young people are shocking.  Let me be clear:  the pastor is not hearing about this second-hand; he's seeing photos of the actual documents.  I have asked him to share them with me so I can pass them on to you.  I'm waiting to hear back.

Conservatives: Stop Whining and Take Action.  We must now regard our open borders as a funnel for new COVID infestation, legislative threats to our Second Amendment rights, an educational system that from kindergarten through graduate and professional schools is fully committed to indoctrinating students with woke socialism instead of teaching job-earning skills.  They have institutionalized racism with the white fragility doctrine and promoted wholesale abortion not only in the United States, but around the world with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Top 1% Are Not Causing the USA's Problems.  [Scroll down]  In today's world, unlike the USA at the turn of the 20th century, there are hundreds of thousands of big city residents who want their kids to be in "daycare" until 9:00 p.m. (many people who work in daycare centers encounter many parents who complain that they have to pick up their kids at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm when they would prefer more downtime by themselves).  So, we may be moving towards a system of compulsory education to age 20 or 22, or perhaps a Spartan model where children are raised by the state 24/7 from the age of 6 onwards.

The Pentagon's Fight With Tucker Carlson Proves It Doesn't Even Exist To Win Wars Anymore.  Tucker Carlson may have never served in the armed forces, but he's still decisively winning a PR war against the U.S. military.  That shouldn't surprise anyone, of course.  The U.S. military loses most of the wars it fights these days.  During America's long golden age as a country, the military typically abstained from politics and won wars.  But in the decaying Globalist American Empire, the military plays a very different role.  Protecting America and winning conflicts isn't the military's goal at all.  Instead, the armed forces have become a skinsuit.  This once-great institution has been repurposed into a vehicle for globalist and left-wing domestic political goals.

Landlord homeless, unable to evict deadbeat' tenant thanks to COVID law.  A Brooklyn homeowner unable to evict an allegedly deadbeat tenant because of new state housing laws claims she has been forced to live in her car for weeks.  Shawna Eccles, 30, says in court papers she sleeps on the couches of friends and relatives whenever she can, and in her four-door Toyota when she can't, after fighting and failing for months to evict Sharita Patterson, 33, from the two-family home in Carnarsie.  "There is no one I can stay with until I am able to evict, and all of my money covers the mortgage, water bill and property taxes," Eccles told The [New York] Post.  "If anything gets cut off, it will be considered an illegal eviction.  I have no additional funds to rent an apartment."

My Democrat Friends are Getting Very Embarrassed.  They bought into the propaganda that all the turmoil in Washington was created by the erratic and immoral behavior of Donald Trump.  Their vote for Harris/Biden was a vote to return to normal.  They didn't realize that the Democrats weren't offering a return to normal, they were offering the establishment of a "new normal."  The "new normal" includes restricted energy exploration and cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.  This has caused a loss of well-paying union jobs, damaged relations with Canada, and triggered skyrocketing gasoline prices.  It also threatens to return us to dependence on the most unstable region in the world.  To those who would like us to leave the Middle East to resolve its own problems — we can't now.  We've implemented more "humane" immigration policies, creating a flood of illegal immigrants across the border — wearing "Biden" t-shirts.  Our humane policy has given us men, women, and children sacrificing their lives pursuing the dream promised them by the Democrats.  Thankfully, we're no longer keeping illegal immigrant children in cages.  Now we're keeping them in Conex boxes.

Leftists' inconsistencies are catching up with them.  The most obvious ideological clash within the Democrat party involves biological women and fake women (i.e., "transgender women"). Since the 1960s, the Democrats have owned the women's liberation movement and a significant part of the women's vote.  Democrats support abortion, "woymn's" and "womxn's" studies, free birth control and sanitary products, compulsory equal representation of women on corporate boards, and so much more.  Democrats were going to elect the first woman president (Hillary) and will soon sneak in a woman into the Oval Office via the back door (Harris). And of course, Democrats are the party of "believe all women."  However, Democrats are proving to be a radically anti-women party with their Equality Act.  This Act explicitly "prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity." It also mandates that "gender identity" is not a barrier to "public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, [and] housing...."  In other words, biological men, simply by saying they are women, will have full access to women's restrooms, locker rooms, prisons, battered women's shelters, athletic competitions, women-only business opportunities, athletic scholarships, etc.  The bill is an invitation for rape and other physical abuse.

Biden's Border Brouhaha is Just the Start.  [Scroll down]  Do you Dems not understand that unlimited immigration hurts the undereducated and underskilled PoCs the most?  Do you Dems not understand that the minimum wage prices undereducated and underskilled PoCs onto the unemployment line? [...] And do you Dems not understand that wokery like "decolonizing math" means that white Beckys go buy homeschool math books for their children and PoC children get screwed?

Cops defunded, de Blasio's wife urges New Yorkers to do their own policing.  Did it occur to any of the leftist politicians boostering for the 'Defund the Police' far-left trope that they might just be left holding the bag?  Seems not.  And sure enough, it's slowly starting to dawn on them that were played for fools.  Because in the wake of the media-vaunted 'defund police' movement, every last blue city in America kowtowing to this has, surprise, found itself in the middle of a crime wave.  Crime-plagued blue cities are now becoming unliveable, and citizens who form their tax bases are fleeing, That presents some problems for these pols.  Caracas-ization is not for the faint of heart.  But remaining fools, they don't exactly know what to do about it.  Crime in New York City is out of control, so Chirlaine McCray, the scandal-plagued wife of far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio, is now offering a bizarre new solution to resolve the problem:  Every citizen his own policeman.

The Editor says...
Sounds a lot like the Wild West.  We don't need no stinking badges!

Jill Biden, the Meghan Markle in the WH, is egregiously guilty of elder abuse.  [Scroll down]  After just eight weeks in office, Biden has been a one-man wrecking ball to American jobs, energy independence and border security.  Under Trump, the Border Patrol and ICE were allowed to do their jobs which, like all law enforcement, was and is to protect this nation and its legal citizens.  And we are to believe that Americans chose Biden to undo the tremendous successes of the Trump administration?  No chance.  Every poll, even those rigged by leftists, shows that Americans do not support the violence perpetrated by Antifa and BLM.  They do not support defunding the police in any state or city.  Sure, those anti-White racists do support those groups and policies, but they are a minority.  Ask any Black mother trying to keep her sons alive beyond the age of fifteen in Chicago or Baltimore. [...] And then there is the border.  Whoever is calling the shots for all the Biden executive orders are having a grand old time at our expense.  They are destroying the America we once knew faster than anyone could have thought possible.

Gay poly throuple makes history, lists 3 dads on a birth certificate.  A gay, polyamorous California throuple made history in 2017 when they became the first family in the state to list three parents on a birth certificate.  Their reproductive journey and legal battle to become fathers to Piper, now 3, is detailed in "Three Dads and a Baby" (out March 9, Cleis Press), written by one of her dads, Dr. Ian Jenkins.  Jenkins and his partners, Jeremy Hodges and Dr. Alan Mayfield, don't see their family — which now also includes their son, Parker, 1 — as unusual.

Trump Reloaded.  Former president Donald Trump emerged from 38 days of self-enforced silence for a lengthy speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, that was frequently interrupted with boisterous applause and chants from an adoring, mostly white and older crowd. [...] Conservatives will not disagree with Trump when it comes to the issues he mentioned.  These issues included Biden allowing more immigrants to unlawfully cross our southern border and resuming a so-called "catch-and-release" policy Trump ended, the killing of the Keystone XL pipeline, which has led to lost jobs and higher energy prices, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and withdrawing Trump's restoration of UN sanctions on Iran, and the reversal of his energy policies, which Trump claims caused gasoline prices to soar by "30 percent" since he left office.  He predicted a gallon of gas could eventually cost "$5 $6 $7" dollars unless those policies are reversed.

This Administration Is Already a Failure.  Obama's administration was a policy disaster, but it was at least a competently implemented disaster.  The Zombie Administration is a disaster in both form and substance.  What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office?  Well, there's putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him.  There's telling the American people that their kids can't go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something.  There's another war in the Middle East.  Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.  His administration had someone named "Ducklo" who was mean to women.  He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women.  And Neera Tanden's confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.  If this is normalcy, what's a freak show look like?

Now's Our Chance To Create Public School Alternatives.  Throughout parts of the United States, children have not been in school for a year.  Instead, they are expected to daily attend zoom classes.  What that means in practical terms is that many kids sit somewhere at home, log in to class, turn off the camera, and go back to bed or play games on their phone throughout the "school" day.  One young man I know is one of only two students in his entire middle school class whose face appears in the zoom classroom — and that is because he is a disabled student whose mother sits with him.  The school district cannot force children to turn the camera on.  In my work counseling children, numerous children have complained to me of isolation, severe loneliness, and anger.  One formerly school-loving boy asserted that teachers don't care about their students and it makes no difference if he does his work or not.  He will carry that sentiment back into the classroom, should they ever open up.

California Bill Would Give $1,000 Fines to Retailers With Separate 'Girls' and 'Boys' Toy Sections.  Retail stores in most of California are only allowed to operate at 25 percent capacity.  A new bill in the state legislature would ensure that whatever part of their shop is allowed to be open is as inclusive as possible.  Last week, Assembly Members Evan Low (D-Cupertino) and Cristina Garcia (D-Los Angeles) introduced a bill that would require retailers to offer their toys and childcare products in a gender-neutral format.  Brick-and-mortar shops would have to display the majority of their products and clothing aimed at children in one undivided, unisex area on the sales floor.  They'd also be barred from putting up signage that would indicate whether a product was intended for a boy or girl.

Is this the dumbest state legislature in the country?  No state in the United States has had single-party political rule at the state level longer than this state.  The ruling party has held a majority in both houses of the state legislature for 81 of the last 91 years (thus eliminating Nebraska).  The last time the minority party held a majority on the state supreme court was in the 1920's.  The state has the worst ranked K-12 public education system in the country.  It has 7 state universities that grant four-year degrees but only one is ranked academically in the top 500 in the U.S. (#484).  It is estimated that an astounding 46% of the adults in the state are functional illiterates.  This state is ranked as having the highest property crime rate and the second highest violent crime rate in the country.  It has the 5th highest unemployment rate in the country and an incredible 43% of the population is on Medicaid.  It is ranked as the 5th worst-run state in the country.

We Are Living in the Ruins of Our Civilization.  It is evening, very late evening.  I am walking in the remains of what once was New York City.  Broken trash bags and discarded clothing, furniture and debris line the sidewalks, spilling out onto the streets, the bags' black plastic jerking and lurching as though some near-suffocated life within were struggling to break free of confinement.  But I know it is only rats, still moving quickly and fearfully out of habitual wariness of the humans no longer around to challenge them.  I traverse blocks of shuttered and abandoned storefronts, their housing-code-violating neon displays gone dark, the "For Rent" signs in the windows already faded and frayed.  The first higher species of being I come across is only a shadow of any such description — a teetering, drooling zombie barely maintaining the accustomed vertical orientation of humanity — its head, neck, and back doubling over further and further, heavy eyelids drooping down time and again on the remaining vestiges of any consciousness to which it only weakly clings.  I hear a dead moan as I pass.  Others around have already given up the fight.  In piles of rags and filth and the stench of their own excrement, they are laid out in corners and crevices.  I navigate around one such specimen transecting the middle of the sidewalk, with the telltale final bottle capping off its drunken stupor still clasped in its gnarled fingers.

The Chinese Communist Takeover of America Is Well Underway.  [Scroll down]  Popular culture has become a useful tool for the Communist Chinese to use.  Much of our society revolves around what we see on television, in movies, and what we listen to.  Sadly far too many people, especially young people, take at face value anything they see on the Internet, in social media, or the pronouncements of popular entertainment figures.  Unions have been infiltrated as well to the point that they no longer exist to protect the rights of and benefit American trades and workers, but to support a leftist political agenda instead.  The Communist Chinese have been subtlety indoctrinating young impressionable minds here on school campuses all across America with their Marxist ideology.  An effort that's been underway for years.  And an effort that has had a great deal of success, considering the level of self-loathing about America that they have been able to instill in a great many of America's youth for a couple of generations now.

The Great Reset Rubric:  Making Sense of Our Present Dystopia.  The Great Reset represents the best rubric we might find for grasping much of what's going on in the world today:  the prevalence of woke ideology and cancel culture; the draconian COVID responses; the seemingly endless Antifa/BLM riots; the supposed Biden presidential victory; Big Tech censorship; and the endless stream of propaganda, double think, and gaslighting propagated by mainstream and social media.  Even if not by design, as I will show, all of these seemingly disparate elements interlock in a way that support Great Reset objectives, and the Great Re-setters favor all of these developments.  Likewise, once we are able to grasp the contours of the Great Reset, we will be poised to understand the reason for the prevalence of these elements and how they all interconnect and function together to produce our present dystopia.

Warning for America:  The Four Steps of Marxist Takeover Were Activated in 2020.  Back in July 2020 Scott McKay at American Spectator wrote an amazing piece on the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover.  McKay's report is based on the words and warnings of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov.  It's been seven months since the report was published and the situation today is even more dire than predicted.  Even McKay would never have predicted the antics of the Marxist left during the 2020 elections.  The Marxist takeover of America is well on its way.

By Offering Amnesty Now, Democrats Are Setting Up A Massive Immigration Crisis.  Perhaps Democrats could have picked a worse time to unveil their expansive immigration bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, but not much worse.  The legislation, introduced Thursday by congressional Democrats with the full support of the Biden administration, dubbed the "U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021," comes as President Biden is rolling back border security measures implemented under Trump and the number of illegal border crossings is surging.  Combined with the ongoing pandemic and shortages of food and water in Texas after freezing temperatures left millions of Texans without power last week, a perfect storm is brewing on the border.  Earlier this month, Mexico stopped accepting Central American children and families apprehended at the border.  They had previously been quickly "expelled" under emergency pandemic protocols.  Now, U.S. border officials are releasing them into communities across South Texas, often without conducting COVID-19 tests.

Mark Zuckerberg Worked to Free Criminals in Oklahoma.  A Monster Freed Early Ate a Woman's Heart and Killed a 4-Year-Old Girl.  Criminal justice reform is a euphemism for a horrifying nightmare in which criminals were set loose under pressure from billionaire activist donors to commit horrifying crimes, terrorizing cities, destroying communities, and taking lives. [...] Anderson's sentence was apparently commuted in June.  Oklahoma was a major target of an alliance between lefties and "conservatives" on criminal justice reform that predated the coronavirus mass jailbreak. [...] Anderson should have been kept locked up.  He was yet another obvious example of a monster who should never have been loose.  But he was.  And now a girl lies dead, stabbed in the eye, and a woman lies dead, her heart torn out.  The only question is how soon Anderson will be released this time.

Save the Rhino!  Today's environmental activists are so hostile to capitalism that they end up killing animals they want to protect.  Like the African rhinoceros.  Poachers kill them to get their horns, which can sell for as much as $300,000. [...] South Africa, home to the largest number of rhinos, once tried something similar.  For 20 years, they allowed people to own rhinos and sell their horns.  Rhino farmers put the rhinos to sleep with tranquilizer darts, sawed off their horns (the horns grow back) and sold the horn.  Farmers had an incentive to protect rhinos.  South Africa's rhino population quadrupled.  But in 2009, under pressure from "environmental" groups, South Africa banned sales of horn again.  The sad result:  Poaching increased sharply.  Poachers also killed park rangers who tried to protect rhinos.

Feudalism Is Coming to America, and You're the Serf.  Society is becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population, whose well-being has been exacerbated by economic restrictions imposed as a response to COVID-19 pandemic, and which is to getting hit even harder with Biden's "progressive" policies.  Simultaneous with the new "aristocratic" ruling class rises a class of new clerisy that provides intellectual support of the emerging system — the media, academia, and celebrity influencers (pop culture).  The model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe for different reasons, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of autocracy, elitism, and socialism that drastically curtail the capitalist methods and achievements.  They do not offer reform; they insist on a complete demolition.  The first structure of the "old" system to go is democracy.

A Word About The Biden Return To 'Normalcy'.  Less than a month into Biden's term, let's take a look at America's return to "normal":
  •   Is it our standard-operating procedure to call, without evidence, those we disagree with racists and white supremacists?
  •   Is being obsessed with, and bowing down before, identity politics who we are?
  •   Is letting males compete with female athletes playing it straight in the U.S.?
  •   Is a militarized zone around the U.S. Capitol a long-standing American custom?  What about a political witch hunt disguised as an effort to root out domestic terrorists?
  •   Is it normal for an administration to snub Israel, America's only natural and traditional ally in the Middle East?
  •   Is it routine for the president's family to conduct "corrupt business dealings in foreign countries"?
  •   Is it normal for public schools to be closed across the country because the teachers unions in a real sense own the party in power in Washington?
  •   Is it a time-honored American practice for the media to snuggle up to that party in power and treat the president as a celebrity, even a savior, and refuse to sufficiently fact-check him?

A Fifty-Year History of Anti-Patriotism in the United States.  Patriotism is under attack.  The idea of the cultural Marxists on the left is to replace traditional patriotism with a different vision of the meaning of American nationalism from the vision that has obtained since 1776, although that traditional understanding and vision of the USA has gone through modifications over decades.  Unwillingness to say the Pledge of Allegiance or even to stand for the Pledge is not a first step in that direction, but part of an endgame toward a revised understanding of what America is and what its role is in history.  The readers of this article should not be surprised if legislation for a revised American flag is offered in the halls of Congress in the near future.

An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power.  [Scroll down]  If this sounds outlandish, here's the head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas:  ["]The fundamental decision made in the middle of the night on Monday to have outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators we have here, Magness said.  If we had waited and not done those outages ... we could have drifted to blackout.  That's not just outages, but we could lose all electricity on system, and it could take months or longer to repair that.["]  With a total ERCOT system failure, as many as 12 million customers and possibly 20 million Texans could be in the cold, in the dark, in their cars with nowhere to go — for months.  Wind power did this to Texas.  Be very afraid of the Green New Deal.

Texans Froze To Death Because Biden Admin Ordered ERCOT To Throttle Energy Output By Forcing It To Comply With Environmental Green Energy Standards.  The White House said on Thursday [2/18/2021] a severe winter storm engulfing Texas and nearby states was the type of extreme weather event that climate change is triggering, rejecting assertions by Texas officials that "green energy" caused widespread power outages.  The crisis in the largest U.S. oil- and gas-producing state has put Democratic President Joe Biden's White House squarely at odds with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who initially did not acknowledge Biden's 2020 election win. [...] But Biden's "America last" agenda was again on full display.  After Texas Gov Abbott declared a state of emergency back on Feb 12 Biden administration ordered ERCOT to throttle energy output by forcing it to comply with environmental green energy standards, knowing full well Texans could freeze to death in their homes with zero electricity as temperatures plunged into the single digits.  Going into effect Sunday, Feb. 14, Emergency Order 202-21-1 shows the Energy Dept. was aware of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's statewide disaster declaration and that ERCOT was readying gas utilities in preparation for a demand surge.

Texas Gov Abbott Declared A State Of Disaster On Feb 12, Biden's Team Ordered Restrictions That Sent Texans Freezing In The Dark.  Governor Greg Abbott has issued a disaster declaration for all 254 counties in Texas on Feb 12 as a winter storm struck the state. [...] Texas is the only one of the contiguous 48 states with its own stand-alone electricity grid, one of the three main grids in the U.S.:  the Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, and Texas Interconnection.  The Texas Interconnection, which covers 213 of the 254 Texas counties, is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.  Portions of Texas near the state's borders are covered by the eastern and western grids.  Texas produces more electricity than it consumes and maintains a buffer referred to as the "state's reserve margin."  This margin ensures that we should never have to suffer from rolling blackouts like California.  Then why are so [many] millions of Texans without power right now?  Why are we dealing with rolling blackouts?  The answer is all-too-familiar:  our relationship with the federal government.

Kroger says Seattle's hazard pay law has raised labor costs and is forcing it to close 2 more grocery stores.  Kroger has criticized Seattle's city's hazard pay law that requires grocers to temporarily pay workers an additional $4 per hour, saying the mandate is forcing the company to close two QFC stores in the city.  The QFC stores will remain operational until April 24, QFC said Friday in an emailed statement to Insider.  The company said that it will help workers with the transition and consider any transfer requests.  "City officials need to consider that grocery stores — in a pandemic — operate on razor-thin profit margins," Kroger said in a statement.  "The mandated extra pay makes it impossible to continue operating underperforming stores."

Minnesota Nasty.  Crime, homeless encampments, riots, crime, loopy left-wing government, crime, litter, violent protests, imperious left-wing activists seeing off mainstream liberal Democrats, boarded-up shops downtown, a vicious social-media-driven politics of personal destruction, crime, crime, and crime, to say nothing of the crime — today's Minneapolis is where Minnesota Nice turns into Minnesota Nasty.  Let's talk about the crime first.  Everybody does.  "We're moving," says one longtime resident of downtown Minneapolis.  "Prior to COVID, I walked to work every day and walked home.  You couldn't pay me enough to do that now — and it's only a mile.  It's a changed city."

Cadbury under fire for same-sex kiss in new Creme Egg commercial.  Cadbury is getting creamed by critics on social media, who say the British candy company is "selling sex to children." [...] "By choosing to feature a same-sex couple, Cadbury's are clearly hoping to cause controversy and escape criticism," the petitioner alleges, "by claiming that any objections must be rooted in 'homophobia,' but members of the LGBT community have also expressed their dislike of this campaign."  The author goes on to accuse the Cadbury campaign of using sexually explicit content to provoke viewers while "seeking to hide under cover of LGBT rights."

Conservatives Must Read Marx.  When Tucker Carlson defended Trump's Wall, his antagonists didn't collect evidence against his words.  No, they threatened his advertisers with boycotts.  When Jordan Peterson refused an Ontario law mandating pronoun usage, his critics didn't mount arguments against him.  They demanded the University of Toronto fire him.  Money, jobs, resources, access — that's the target now.  Academia requires that all job candidates compose a "diversity statement," essentially a loyalty oath that imposes leftist ideology onto the hiring process.  An honest conservative doesn't survive, and that's the point.

The Compound Fractures of Identity Politics.  Every citizen fatality in the custody of a government official — like George Floyd's excruciating death in Minneapolis — deserves a solemn response and ultimate accounting, including both criminal investigation and broader assessment.  The fear and fury flowing from recent law-enforcement casualties, however, have been inflamed and manipulated by opportunists to produce something much more sweeping.  Hard facts and data about our systems of law and policing are being ignored.  Emotional hysteria is increasingly substituted for reasoned problem-solving.  There is enormous pressure to conform to approved ideological assertions, and people expressing alternate views are often railroaded.  Broad attacks on social order, widespread destruction of public and private property, and new waves of street crime have unfolded.  There is open hostility toward the fundamentals of American justice and governance.  It is now routinely claimed that "the United States government was founded on racist intellectual premises and economic practices that institutionalized oppression of people of color that continues to the present day" (to quote the Seattle Public Schools). U.S. society as a whole is characterized as a "system of oppression."  In consequence, our classical liberal traditions of fierce competition of ideas, mutual tolerance, political compromise, and individual freedom are visibly withering.  Yet there is scant resistance to any of this among elites.  Journalists, social leaders, academics, clergy, businesspeople, and many politicians show little awareness that essential American principles are being washed away.

Are you feeling safer yet?  A New York Post editorial quotes New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea:  "We have made staggering numbers of gun arrests, taking guns off the streets from felons, but when you look, three days later, four days later, those individuals are back on the street committing more gun violence."  The editorial continues by saying that years of often ill conceived criminal justice reform has set up a revolving door that frees even repeat offenders almost instantly.  And "[w]orse, because everyone knows the perp will be back in the neighborhood again — and the no-bail law lets the defense know right away who has talked — witnesses are ever-harder to come by."  Well, that's in one Democrat-run state.  What about California?  According to Hotair.com:  "Through a series of measures starting back in 2014, the state of California has made it increasingly easy for people to commit property theft and get away with it[.] ... Even in cases where they do manage to catch somebody stealing, it's too often not worth the trouble of taking them down to the station because they'll just be released immediately without bail anyway."  One result of this is that California businesses are shutting down for good.

The Dirty Little Secret of Cancel Culture.  Cancel culture isn't a singular thing.  It's a collection of strategies and tactics, each designed to use the power of the collective against the individual.  Typically, the cancel mob starts with some attacks on Twitter or Facebook. [...] Sooner or later, and this is the goal, the news media gets involved, validating those attacks by taking them as legitimate.  The end result is someone gets fired, loses a contract, or a company has its products removed from shelves.  People get deplatformed from social media or lose their mass media platforms.  It's a 2021 village shunning with real consequences.  The medieval village mob is now a virtual mob but the hysteria is the same.  In today's cancel culture, the triggers for the cancel mob are often unpopular statements, actions, or decisions, but it doesn't stop there.  The cancel mob can put a target on your back for not speaking up.  For doing business with their primary target.

Gas Prices Have Already Spiked Under Biden (And They Could Go Much Higher).  After four years of stable gas prices under President Donald J. Trump, Americans may have to get used to some pain at the pump.  Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't even been in the White House for a month and gas prices are already up a whopping 18 percent with at least one analyst predicting that they could hit $4 per gallon in the near future.  Biden's ideologically-driven decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and the expectation that his Green New Deal policies will place onerous regulatory burdens on domestic energy producers in the fossil fuel industry is already hitting Americans in their pocketbooks.  Sadly, the worst may be yet to come.

The Editor says...
Of course the worst is yet to come.  With Biden cutting off oil exploration anywhere he can, blocking pipeline projects, and dreaming of a world without carbon dioxide, the price of gasoline will only increase.  Biden and his minions, who oppose every practical source of energy, are responsible for this mess.

More businesses flee Seattle because of crime and violence.  TR International, a global chemical distributor, is moving from its home of more than two decades in downtown Seattle, crossing the county line to neighboring Edmonds.  The company is one of at least 160 businesses that have left Seattle since last March.  While some of the companies that have left Seattle is due to the coronavirus pandemic, business leaders have said that much of it could be traced back to a sense that no one is minding the store in Seattle anymore, and a lack of accountability from city leaders.

Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo 'racism in mathematics'.  The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.  An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics."  The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.  Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms."  Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations.

Discouraged? Remember:  Truth Always Prevails.  In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised to fundamentally transform America.  Well, "mission accomplished."  Perhaps I give the former president too much credit, as he didn't build that, but his philosophy and policies directed our culture onto a path such that now everything has become political.  It's infected our education, science, businesses, and even health care system.  Like attending a movie in 3-D, everyone uses a political lens in which to view the world.  Sadly, it is to the destruction of us all.  Politics is a zero-sum game of winners and losers — us versus them.  If politics is our governing mindset and prevailing worldview, then we will never have unity.  A divided house falls.

Oil rigs relocate from New Mexico to Texas over Biden's permitting freeze.  New Mexico is already paying the price for the Biden administration's freeze on agency-level approvals for permits on federal lands as oil rigs relocate to private property in Texas.  Sarah Cottrell Propst, New Mexico secretary of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources, said operators are moving rigs out of state over the "confusion" surrounding the Interior Department's Jan. 20 order requiring top political appointees, instead of career staff, to approve permits for 60 days.  The order has had little impact on states such as Texas, where only 1.8% of the land is federally owned, but could prove devastating to New Mexico, which leads the nation in oil production on federal lands and depends heavily on oil-and-gas tax revenue to fund its budget.

Biden's Misery Index.  Stagflation and the resulting high misery index could return if Biden's stated economic policies are fully enacted.  The reason will be very simple:  business will not be able to respond to market conditions by expanding output.  Business will be forced to respond by raising prices.  In other words, Biden's push to give people free goods and services creates a greater demand in the market.  He wants to pay for those giveaways by eliminating the 2018 tax cuts and by further raising taxes on the highest income earners and on the wealthiest Americans.  Biden's policies will also result in much higher energy prices.  Energy is used in the entire business process meaning the increased cost will put upward pressure on all prices.  He wants to raise the top income tax bracket to at least 40%.  And he wants to raise the capital gains tax rate to 40%.  Biden says the wealthy should pay their fair share.  But the higher tax rates will force business to an undesired response to market conditions.

The Editor says...
If everyone should "pay their fair share," that's what percentages are for.  If everyone pays X percent of their income in the form of taxes, and that's a fair percentage, then fairness extends across the board.  When the percentage goes up and up, depending on one's income, that is patently unfair.  When the percentage goes below zero, as in the case of refundable tax credits, that's really unfair.

Our Tarnished Institutions and the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Over the past few decades, a group of people with a particular political outlook have infested most of our cultural institutions with the goal of using those institutions to advance their cause(s).  Inherent in this effort is ignoring the nominal purposes of the institutions in favor of the overarching goal(s).  As a result, news outlets no longer worry about facts.  Judges no longer follow the law.  And, most surprisingly of all, sports leagues don't concern themselves primarily with playing sports.  There are numerous other examples, but you get the idea.  Beyond the obvious problems which arise from this situation, there is a longer-term issue.  These institutions are, in effect, lying to the public.  We can't trust the news media, the legal system, entertainment, sports, etc., anymore.  They have cried wolf too many times, and the wise move is just to ignore them.

The Science-Denying Woke War on Women and Girls Is Speeding up.  The war on men and boys has been underway for nearly two decades, and now the woke Left is waging war on women and girls.  The woke activists are determined to erase the lines that biology draws between men and women.  Decades of research documents physical, biological, genetic, and biochemical differences between the sexes, but woke activists expect us to ignore this evidence in service of the concept of gender.  Gender used to be a linguistic device to denote biological sex.  In several foreign languages, such as Spanish, the article for "the" has feminine and masculine versions.  "La" and "el" mean something.  Perhaps the woke will cancel the Spanish language next.  They have already tried with "Latinx," which only 4% of Hispanic Americans prefer.  Only 3% use it, and less than 25% are even aware of it.

Midwives told to stop using terms such as 'breastfeeding' and 'breastmilk'.  Midwives have been told to stop using terms including "breastfeeding" and "breastmilk" as part of a new trans-friendly policy at an NHS trust.  Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals (BSUH) NHS Trust is the first in the country to formally implement a gender inclusive language policy for its maternity services department — which will now be known as "perinatal services".  Staff have been told to avoid using the word "mothers" on its own and have been given a list of alternative terms to use when addressing patients including "mothers or birthing parents", "breast/chestfeeding" and "maternal and parental".

To Be Inclusive of Non-Binary Parents, Hospitals Nix the Terms 'Breast Milk' and 'Father'.  We're living in the age of inclusion.  To that end, nurses are being asked to think before speaking — about nursing.  As reported by the New York Post, on Monday [2/8/2021], two UK hospitals put the kibosh on "breast milk." Words matter, and the wrong ones hurt.  Hence, medical workers are being asked to reference "human milk" — in order to include transgender and non-binary parents.  In the prenatal units of Sussex and Brighton University Hospitals NHS Trust, staff should eliminate words such as "breastfeeding."

Our Illiberal Moment.  To be adequately maintained, classical liberalism demands three key virtues.  Humility, so that each of society's competing factions might comprehend that it will not always hold power.  Tolerance, so that the habitual reaction to a difference of opinion is the shrug rather than the bayonet.  And forbearance, so that the immediate rush of victory can be subordinated to longer-term ambition.  Little by little, we are losing all three and, as they go, forgetting the good practices that have built, sustained, and improved our remarkable society for generations.

Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes Lose Their Minds 'Inciting' Against GOP And Reveal Next Step to Control the Narrative.  [Scroll down]  The GOP got "hundred of thousands of Americans" killed?  When did that happen?  "Then helped a deadly attack on the Capitol."  No, as far as I know, the GOP denounced any violence and were themselves threatened with a bomb at the RNC.  No, actually there wasn't "unprecedented death" for a pandemic.  Unfortunately, there are deaths in a pandemic as there have been all over the world.  Had Trump not been in power, if Biden had been there, it would have been far worse.  Biden wouldn't have cut off travel with China and it would have been exponentially worse.  "Destruction and misery and mourning."  Yes, there was a lot of that from mostly Democratic lockdowns, where Democrats denied aid, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proved, until after the election, exacting the most harm to the economy believing it could adversely affect President Donald Trump.  There was also a lot of that during the BLM/Antifa riots that the Democrats not only failed to condemn, but actually embraced by donating to a rioter bail fund, supporting violent rioters over the people and the police being harmed, and attacking efforts to curtail the riots by law enforcement and the federal government.

The Betrayal of the American People by Biden and the Ruling Oligarchy.  The Biden Administration is willfully and permanently undermining the economy and the future well-being of the citizenry as well as trampling on the Constitution with an unprecedented avalanche of executive orders, proposed legislation and untenable regulations.  The current leader of the United States, safe in his plush bunker, is without a clue as he and his confederates in the ruling oligarchy are more interested in consolidating power and enriching themselves than they are in the long-term welfare of the nation and its citizenry.  In their mad and childish dash to purge the nation of all things associated with Donald Trump, this cabal is deliberately being oblivious to the fact that there is but one major responsibility of the leaders of a Constitutional Republic.  That is to be certain their country is capable, in the both the short and long-term, of successfully weathering a worst-case scenario such as global war, a massive economic downturn, or a catastrophic natural disaster.  Those currently entrenched in the ruling oligarchy are pursuing policies that will leave no margin for error in the event of an apocalyptic natural or man-made disaster.

Millions of Americans Projected to Remain Jobless as Biden Packs U.S. Labor Force with Foreign Workers.  Millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless for the next three to four years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), though President Joe Biden is looking to fill American jobs with foreign workers.  In a report released this month, CBO analysts said the number of jobless Americans — all of whom want full-time jobs — will not return to pre-coronavirus levels until around 2024. [...] Before then, millions of Americans are projected to remain jobless though that has not kept the Biden administration from pursuing a labor policy that floods the United States labor market with millions of illegal aliens, foreign visa workers, and green card-holders.

California politicians demand grocery stores pay workers more; groceries close instead.  Every business operates at a risk, and the risk-reward ratio was obviously closed to the point that it didn't make sense to put effort into a store with declining profits.  Is this so hard to understand?  Apparently, it is, because an emotionally driven, fact-bereft city councilperson going by the name of Mary Zendejas, who sponsored the bill, said that "it really saddens me that they'd rather take away 200 jobs instead of doing the right thing, which is paying hazard pay for these local grocery store workers who risk their lives everyday they come in and who are putting their lives on the line every second they're working."  There is so much wrong with this sentiment.  In Zendejas's world, there is now a moral obligation of private companies to pay whatever rate is deemed appropriate by leftists on a given day.  Today it's a $4-an-hour boost because everyone is a hero.  Tomorrow it's a national $15-an-hour increase.  These are entirely arbitrary numbers, and by Biden's logic, if there is no evidence that they upset the balance of supply and demand, then why stop there?

Democratic Governors Have Devastated Their States.  Over the past year, there has been a pretty clear divide between liberal governors, who almost without exception imposed irrationally harsh covid lockdown measures, and conservative governors, who generally took a more nuanced and pro-freedom approach.  The data are now in, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they tell a story that cannot be misinterpreted.  My colleague Martha Njolomole created these charts.  First, job losses in December 2020.  She focused on the fact that Minnesota, shut down once more by feckless Governor Tim Walz, lost nearly 50,000 jobs in December alone, trailing only Michigan and California.  By contrast, Wisconsin, about as similar to Minnesota as a state can be, is on the way to recovery, adding 15,000 jobs in that month.  What state added the most jobs in December?  Texas, by far.

Former CBP Head:  Biden Has Decimated Border Protections With 'Stroke Of A Pen'.  Former Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan slammed the Biden administration Tuesday [2/2/2021] for undoing significant border protections put into place by President Trump.  Morgan first took aim at White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for trashing Trump's efforts to secure the border, and attributing the infamous Obama/Biden 'kids in cages' and family separation policy to Trump.  After Psaki had spoken, calling Trump's border policies "horrific", Morgan stated that "There isn't enough time to address all the spin and misinformation that the Press Secretary just sent out."  Morgan outlined that agencies within the Trump administration have been "working tirelessly" to reunite families separated at the border.

Landlords in New York suffering from lack of rent payments amid pandemic.  78-year-old Donna Szucs says she has lost thousands in unpaid rent from the tenant of a home she owns in Wyoming County.  "It's very frustrating because I have to provide him with water, heat, and everything else even though he pays me nothing," Szucs said.  Szucs has no legal recourse.  The New York State moratorium on rent, aimed at helping those who lost jobs due to the pandemic, allows for people to miss rent payments and not face eviction.  For Szucs, that's meant almost 12 months of lost wages.

Governing Elites Are Destroying the Nation They're Supposed to Run.  Consider these facts:  [#1] Before Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, nine tenths of all new immigrants to America came from Europe; after the act's passage, nine tenths of new immigrants have come from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.  [#2] Since the 1965 Act's passage, over sixty million new immigrants have arrived in the United States, and over a hundred million more are expected over the next half century.  [#3] In 1970, 4.7% of the American population was born outside of the United States; in 2017, 13.7% of the national population was born in a foreign country. [...] [#4] Eighty-four percent of Americans born between 1928 and 1945 identify as Christians, and 50% of them still attend religious services at least once a week.  In contrast, less than half of millennial Americans today identify as Christian, and 64% rarely, if at all, attend any kind of religious service.

Is This the Normal You Voted For?  We are being bombarded by a triangulation of disinformation from the Left's political hacks, complicit media, and crony corporations.  This deceitful trifecta is a psychological operation against Republicans, populists, and conservatives -- the sane coalition that alone can and must save our republic from the tyranny of "[their] democracy."  Through this diaphanous prism of realization, one can starkly comprehend the Left's game and aims:
  •   The reckless misuse and mistreatment of National Guard troops to paint a false narrative that anyone, not a leftist is a white supremacist and terrorist; and the re-weaponization of the federal government against the Left's opponents for partisan advantage.
  •   The Democratic Congress' vindictive impeachment of a former president to decapitate a populist movement of over 74 million Americans; corrosive partisan lust to expand and pack the federal courts with judicial activists, including the Supreme Court; and angling to give the District of Columbia statehood to secure more Leftist senators and a representative.
  •   Our current executive sock puppet's record-breaking torrent of job-crushing, science-denying, citizenry dividing executive orders; his pretending there was no plan for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine, while cynically plagiarizing his predecessors' plan.
  •   And, lest we forget, Mr. Biden's mendacious invitations to "unity" — the rank hypocrisy of which gnaws at the fraying bonds of the elementary fairness that is one of the last shards of civic comity.

It's Not Just 'Gender Dysphoria.' It's Now 'Rapid Onset Marxism.'  The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new rules package that explicitly strikes "gendered language" from the official House rules.  The rules prohibit the use of terms that designate the gender of familial relationships — father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, and so on — and replace them with gender-neutral terms.  Commentator Tammy Bruce, a radio and Fox Nation host, says this move Jan. 4 is "obscenely Marxist" because it "deconstructs what it means to be female."  She went on to say:  "It reduces all of us, it eliminates the value of the individual and our uniqueness as individuals."  The goal of social policing of our language is thought control, which epitomizes the Marxist agenda.

Biden's climate executive orders devastated these US workers in a day.  On the morning of Jan. 20, every room of the two-story Stroppel Hotel in Midland, SD, was filled with men and women who work on the Keystone XL pipeline.  Most of these union laborers, welders and pipefitters started their day over a cup of coffee in the hotel's common room before heading out to their jobs.  By 4 p.m., the entire place was cleared out, leaving the historic hotel silent for the first time since owners Laurie and Wally Cox took it over six months ago.  "Our whole world turned upside down with the stroke of a pen," Laurie said.  She is speaking of President Biden's executive order, signed on his first day in office, that halted work on the Keystone XL pipeline in South Dakota and immediately eliminated 1,000 union jobs.  TC Energy, the company that was developing the project, predicts that more than 10,000 jobs will be lost in 2021 due to the order.

One week in, Biden administration shows its exquisite cruelty.  [Scroll down]  So along with Biden's dictatorial executive orders comes Schumer's plan to further constrain our freedoms due to the "climate emergency."  But there is no climate emergency.  It's just another hoax, a fear-mongering ruse to create a global government.  The planet has survived all manner of climate changes.  We humans can no more affect the climate here than we can on Mars.  And even if we could, we are not responsible for the irresponsibility of nations like China and India re: filthy air.  The Paris Climate Accord is only about making U.S. taxpayers pay billions of dollars to those nations to equalize the quality of life on the planet.  Not a single prediction of the Gorist climate alarmists has come true.  Snow still falls from the sky; there are no more hurricanes than normal; polar bears are alive and thriving; droughts occur here and there as they have throughout the millennia.  But the Biden administration is going to use climate alarmism to continue restricting the American population from living their lives.  President Trump energized our economy, made us energy independent.  Biden has in the span of a week tanked it in order to make us dependent on Saudi Arabia again.  He is about to ban coal-mining, too.  What will happen to those miners?

Biden's normal is abnormal.  The media is peddling the narrative that Chairman Xiden is bringing back normalcy.  Well, let us see what the media and the rest of the Democrats consider normal.  The new normalcy is impeaching a president and trying him after his term ends and he has gone home to Mar-A-Lago.  The new normalcy is arresting and prosecuting a man for making memes on Twitter.  The new normalcy is 25,000 National Guard troops in Washington on Inauguration Day.  The new normalcy is replacing a viewing audience for the occasion with 100,000 American flags.  The new normalcy is cries of deprogramming political opponents.  The new normalcy is banning reporters who ask tough questions at press conferences.  The new normalcy is not deporting criminals.  The new normalcy is making women shower with men in the military.  The new normalcy is attempts to expel duly elected opponents from the Senate.

Environmental Extremism Is Creeping Into Every Domain of Public Policy.  Many on the left continue to place their ideology of environmental extremism above all other considerations, including economic growth, individual freedom, and the welfare of low-income Americans.  This worldview ignores critical tradeoffs and places environmental interests above even basic principles that have long served as a foundation of this nation.  Further, this extreme environmental movement has crept into almost every issue area imaginable.  There are certainly environmental issues that need attention, but sensible environmental policy doesn't address those issues in a vacuum without regard for other important concerns.  Yet, this extreme movement acts in such a manner.

Biden's Climate Orders Will Flip America's National Security on Its Head.  On Wednesday [1/27/2021], President Joe Biden signed two executive orders and issued a memorandum pushing the climate alarmist narrative and boosting the climate-industrial complex.  Biden claimed that his administration's climate boondoggle will create more jobs, but his first climate move — nixing the Keystone XL pipeline — cost 1,000 jobs right away, and an estimated 10,000 more.  His climate orders will upend America's national security as well as its economy.  "Today is 'climate day' at the White House, which means that today is 'jobs day' at the White House," Biden said as he introduced his new climate agenda.  The president repeated the canard that his transition to green technologies would create more jobs than it eliminates, without mentioning that creating this climate-industrial complex requires massive amounts of taxpayer money and more government intrusion into the economy.  Naturally, vocal criticism came quickly.

More about the Keystone XL pipeline.

Federal Reserve Warns Joe Biden Policies are Weakening US Economy.  The Federal Reserve panel sent a warning about the U.S. economy starting to suffer as the JoeBama administration starts to institute "America Last" policies.  The financial media will not directly point to the Biden policy agenda as the primary source of the issue, but the background context of a new administration is exactly the difference.  Even during the worst aspects of the 2020 COVID-19 impact during the Donald Trump administration, the underpinning of the U.S. economy remained strong.  However, now that JoeBama has taken office the 2021 COVID-19 impact is being used as an excuse.

The Editor says...
This might be Biden's goal.  Barack H. Obama had the same goal, and Biden is doing exactly what Obama would do, but with a heavier emphasis on China's benefit.

US Media Makes Heroes of Teens Who Betray Their Family Members and GoFundMe Makes It Profitable.  One of the elements in the Communist Manifesto, right before the abolition of the nation-state, is the abolition of the family.  We've seen a gradual chipping away at the health of the family under the guise of good intentions.  We've created a society where out-of-wedlock births are the norm rather than the exception.  Where state provided daycare and before- and after-school programs act in place of parents.  We have a school system that actually believes it knows best, and so you, the parent, can't send your kid to school with aspirin without the royal assent of school administrators, but school officials can arrange for your child to have access to birth control devices.  The hostility of the public school mafia to homeschooling is often packaged as one of competition for resources.  It isn't.  It is about control of what your child learns and what they imprint as values.

The push to decriminalize 'streetwalking' follows a deadly run of NYC 'reforms'.  Think Bill de Blasio's dumpster fire of a mayoralty can't get worse?  Think again:  Albany is planning to send him more street hookers.  Whoopee.  State Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat now running for borough president, considers the notice police pay to transsexual streetwalkers to be a pressing civil-rights issue — and so he's pushing legislation that effectively would make street-walking of all sorts legal.  The bill appears fated to pass — and what could go wrong with that?  Plenty.  Blame for much of what makes New York City so difficult to navigate these days rests squarely with the normalization — and outright legalization — of anti-social, often dangerously aberrant, public personal behavior.

Why the Left has to suppress free speech.  Let us begin with this fact:  The left always suppresses speech.  Since Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, there has been no example of the left in control and not crushing dissent.  That is one of the important differences between liberal and left:  Liberalism and liberals believe in free speech.  (The present leftist threat to freedom in America, the greatest threat to freedom in American history, is made possible because liberals think they have more to fear from conservatives than from the left.  Liberals do not understand that the left regards liberals as their useful idiots.)  The left controls universities.  There is little or no dissent allowed at universities.  The left controls nearly every "news" medium.  There is little or no dissent in the mainstream media — not in the "news" sections and not in the opinion sections.  The left controls Hollywood.  No dissent is allowed in Hollywood.  That is why we have "cancel culture" — the silencing and firing of anyone who publicly dissents from the left, and even "publicly" is no longer necessary.

Obey, America, for Your Own Good!  So, just to be clear about where we now stand:  The Constitution's out sick because of Chinese Flu.  You still get to say and print what you want so long as what you have to say conforms to whatever CNN has to say.  If you stick up for the Founding Fathers who fought for our freedoms, you're likely a "white supremacist," but if you destroy monuments to the Founding Fathers, you're a freedom fighter.  It's patriotic to inform on your neighbors for violating government health decrees but unpatriotic to pray with your neighbors in church.  Rioters who destroy cities are protesting for democracy, but Americans protesting for free and fair elections are threatening democracy.  It's good and noble to burn down buildings around the White House when members of Congress promise to pay for arsonists' bail, but breaching the Capitol perimeter is no less tragic than Pearl Harbor.  Social media protect speech by silencing it.  News corporations protect freedom of the press by urging the censorship of points of view.  Americans can no longer be trusted with guns because they might use them to protect their natural rights.  The only person ever to receive more votes than Donald Trump is Joe Biden, but Americans are supposed to remember at all times that Donald Trump is immensely unpopular while Joe Biden is historically loved.  And so many Americans support the incoming president that he requires a standing army to ensure his safe installation.

Clarity in Trump's Wake.  In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past.  Americans' movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted.  Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom.  Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives.  In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.  Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt.  They solicit mutual accusations.  While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment.  Today's rulers don't try to convince.  They demand obedience, and they punish.

San Francisco's "Progressive" Drug Policies Kill Hundreds Annually.  Last year, 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco.  To put this in perspective, 173 people died from COVID-19, which is identified as the primary public health crisis in the Bay Area.  For years, San Francisco has tacitly encouraged drug abuse with remarkably lenient policies, and those policies are now inadvertently killing hundreds of people annually.  San Francisco uses a policy approach called "harm reduction," which stresses "culturally competent, non-judgmental treatment that demonstrates respect and dignity for the individual."  But this approach, as it is practiced within San Francisco, is inhumane and cruel.  It is destroying the dignity of the lives that some could have with more sensible policies.  In addition to overdose deaths skyrocketing, drug abuse has increased in San Francisco, and it is becoming more difficult for addicts to affect positive change.

Everything Is Broken.  For seven decades, the country's intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions — universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc.  Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as "American" — conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country.  This wasn't a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.  But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.

Welcome to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's new abnormal.  It is an article of faith for many Americans that the Donald Trump years were an aberration and that Joe Biden will usher in something close to normalcy.  I'll take the other side of that bet.  I believe the coming years are going to be at least as tumultuous as the Trump presidency.  Although Biden will not directly cause that tumult, his weakness as a leader, of his own party and the nation, will help fuel discord and make it impossible for him to forge anything resembling normalcy.  Most of those who think Biden can wave a magic wand blame Trump alone for the deep polarization gripping America.  They're wrong — Trump was elected precisely because the country already was deeply polarized.  Moreover, while Trump's personality is highly unorthodox, to say the least, he did not single-handedly set in motion the dangerous levels of strife engulfing our nation.  His successful policies on immigration, taxes and the Mideast were fairly conventional by Republican standards.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.  [Scroll down]  The idea is almost too big for the mind to contain: a political class that has betrayed its country; a Supreme Court that effectively accepted and thus contributed to an unprecedented catastrophe by refusing to hear a suit filed by Texas and 17 other states alleging election law tampering; an education system that bears a disquieting resemblance to the German academy of the 1930s; a "free press" that is not a free press but a state propaganda network; a dedicated and effective president who has been discredited and attacked, including through incitement of political violence against him and his family; organizations like the Trump Accountability Project and the Lincoln Project compiling a "database of all Republicans who worked for President Donald Trump with the aim of ensuring they never land jobs in the private sector," a measure associated with Fascist and Communist dictatorships; and a nation demonstrably in the throes of destabilizing turmoil.

A message to RINOs — it's time to choose.  The Democrats and their fellow travelers on the left have some very disturbing aspirations.  Just a year ago, discussion of tyranny in America would have been considered crazy talk.  Not now.  The temperature on this pot has been turned up slowly, and now we're at the boiling point.  Just look at everything our ruling class has done in the past year.  Lockdowns have restricted our movement, commerce, and assembly.  Our rulers are not making us carry papers yet.  That would be an inconvenience for illegal aliens.  They are however, making us wear masks to demonstrate our obedience.  Big tech oligarchs are using censorship and deplatforming to censor dissenting views.  Conservative commentators such as Dan Bongino and The Conservative Treehouse have been evicted from their web servers or had their advertising revenue restricted.  Donald Trump and his followers have been banned from Twitter.  Conservative postings mysteriously disappear from Facebook.

The worst run cities in America.  The state of cities around the country is rapidly declining, leading to the greatest rates of emigration since the days of disorder and distress in the 1970s.  Eight cities stand out as the worst run in the country, when ranked with markers like costs of living, education, poverty, and crime.  These are New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, Portland, Oakland and Chicago.  Despite billions of dollars doled out annually, every one of these cities has dire mismanagement issues.  Cities that use the most dollars per capita are some of the worst run cities.  Washington spends some $15,600 per citizen annually, over 12 times that of cities such as Miami.  New York has a budget hole of over $540 million.  Debt in many cities is driven mostly by pensions and public payrolls, with New York ranked first with its glaring $64,100 in debt per citizen, Chicago second with $36,000, Philadelphia third with $27,900, San Francisco fifth with $22,600, and Oakland in seventh with $21,100.

Here's a Perfect Explanation of Why the Capitol Hill Riot Happened.  In truth, it's been made clear to some Americans that attempting to talk it out and even take their grievances to the voting booth isn't working.  However, they flip on the news and see riots happening as those involved scream things like "black lives matter" or "defund the police."  They see this and then see politicians, media, and "experts" heap praise on these violent radicals, and politicians both defend and even encourage them.  For some Americans, they see violence get results and a dangerous idea begins to formulate in their head.

A Daring Left and a Cowed Center.  The first fact of sociopolitical life in America today is this: liberals in elite positions are frightened of the Left.  A college president may direct an institution with a $900 million endowment, meet with legislators and business heads, and boast a 30-year record of academic honors, but the sight of eight African American undergrads marching toward his office with scowls on their faces alarms him like nothing else.  A CEO may draw a $3 million salary and manage 1,300 workers, but the threat of a boycott coming from a few networked Millennials with ties to Sleeping Giant calls for immediate emergency action.  They know what they're up against.  Leftists form digital mobs, shut down events, block access, cancel, and dox.  They show up at people's homes, harass employers, and ruin businesses.  They're ruthless, they're irrational, but the tantrums they throw muck up the works and clog the pipes.  That's the advantage they press — they will tear the system down if the people in power don't comply.

Indianapolis Has Fallen:  A Red State Capital City Degrades Itself to Blue City Levels.  I had known this mid-size metropolis since the seventies when I lived here as a medical student, attending the Indiana University School of Medicine.  Then, Indianapolis was referred to as India-no-place or Naptown. [...] This year, Monument Circle swarmed not with tourists and patrons but with a succession of homeless encampments, bedecked with tents, sleeping bags, blankets, cardboard shelters, and, of course, hundreds of vagrants sleeping or milling about.  What had been one of the cleanest, most scenic, and safe downtown centers in the country had deteriorated into a third-world, garbage-strewn, threatening urban nightmare.  The entrances to the Hilbert Circle Theater and the nearby Indiana Repertory Theater were boarded up and crammed with itinerants, trash, and debris.  It was demoralizing and disgusting, an urban cesspool of dystopia and vagrancy.

Radical Democrats Are Turning Minneapolis Into A Violent Wasteland.  The world witnessed in the streets of Minneapolis this spring and summer the feature presentation after many increasingly violent coming attractions, created, produced, and distributed by a one-party, radical left government.  If you want to know what the real-time self-destruction of a city looks like, Minneapolis offers the perfect model. [...] Downtown's ghost-town feel is taking a dystopian turn as empty streets are being taken over by a resurging homeless population openly using drugs and increasingly aggressive.  The mentally ill are left to similar fates, often found huddled in bus shelters.  A decline in police and mental health resources compounds the impending disaster as winter deepens and shelters fill.

We Don't Need To Accept The 'New Normal' The Left Is Forcing On Us.  All of us have seen and heard things during this past year that would have been unimaginable in 2019, but which today are almost a daily occurrence.  We call these transformative events "the new normal."  Examples of the new normal are all around us and affect all aspects of our lives.  Defunding the police while crime skyrockets is the new normal.  Prisoners being released back on the streets, while hairdressers and restaurant owners are fined and sometimes jailed, is the new normal.  Big tech and mainstream media shutting down all voices opposing their agenda, while extolling the virtues of democracy and free speech, is the new normal.  A CNN reporter describing demonstrators as "peaceful protesters," while behind him the skyline burns, is the new normal.  Closing down all restaurants, houses of worship, and small businesses while allowing protesters to burn, riot, and loot in the name of "social justice" is the new normal.  Prisoners in certain states receiving the COVID vaccine while vulnerable seniors must wait is the new normal.  The latest COVID Relief bill, which included only a paltry sum in relief for tens of millions of desperate Americans, while granting billions in foreign aid, is the new normal.

Note: All material below was once located on an overflow page, but has now been rejoined with the main page.

Hey, GOP: This is Your Do or Die Moment.  If Democrats, the corporate media, and foreign interests can steal a presidential election, they can steal any congressional or gubernatorial election, easily.  If a thief can rob Fort Knox with ease, any bank on Main Street will be child's play.  If they can weaponize the CIA, FBI, IRS, and DOJ to target their political enemies, without punishment, why won't they double down next time?  For the left, crime does pay.  There has been no reckoning or accountability for the stolen 2020 presidential election.  What's to stop every subsequent election from being stolen in the same way? [...] Does anyone seriously believe that the Biden FBI or DOJ will lift a finger to investigate voter fraud?

You're It.  If the communists gain control, it won't be long before you will not be able to travel as you always have.  Checkpoints will ensure that you are permitted to travel, especially to other states and the conditions of travel in those states might vary wildly.  In some, you might have to quarantine for a period of time upon arrival.  This rules out a lot of civilian transcontinental travel.  This is part of the Green New Deal imposed through other means.  It also gives the government the right to restrict travel for purposes of political demonstration.  Private property will be eliminated.  That sounds ridiculous as I write it, but then so did the idea of shutting down the powerful American economy all because of a virus based on intentionally inaccurate death rates and wildly speculative ideas of how the virus spread.  The communists don't want private property or a middle class.  Those are means of self-sufficiency they cannot tolerate.  It sets a bad example and encourages people to live outside of their control.  They need a population that is reliant on them, in close quarters where they can be monitored by other citizens; citizens who will inform on them for any violation.

Biden's 'Dark Winter' Is A Warning About His Economy, Not The Virus.  Should President Donald Trump's election challenges fail to keep Joe Biden out of the White House, it's a certainty that bleak days will be ahead.  We're staring into the barrel of at least four years of sclerotic economic growth.  Six days after the election, Biden, employing the Democratic Party strategy of sowing fear whenever possible, warned that the country is facing a long night.  "Before the surge in COVID cases we predicted, many predicted, and the deaths rise that we've seen in December ... we head into a very dark winter ahead," he said. [...] Apparently it never occurred to Biden and his handlers that government intervention, not the virus, caused 2020's downturn.  Nor have they even begun to understand that Democrats' economic policies, filled with steep, punitive taxes, and impossible-to-jump regulatory hurdles, are a slow-motion march of the economic lockdowns that almost instantly paralyzed the economy this year.

The Democrats' Road to Hell.  The ruling political class in Washington D.C. is always making matters worse through what appear to be appropriate solutions for serious problems facing the country.  Then when they don't work out as advertised many years after they've been implemented, they tell us that they've got the solutions for the newer, more serious problems that to the unsuspecting and unknowing public seem as if they came out of nowhere, and who are clueless as to how they began in the first place. [...] Government assistance has morphed from safety net to entitlement where there is no accountability for the failures of the ruling political class that perpetually creates problems, as well as government incentives to "right social wrongs" that do the same by distorting the marketplace in ways that are not good for anyone.

How Democrats are sneakily destroying the Electoral College.  Add the Electoral College to the list of American institutions that the Democrats have destroyed (along with education, media, entertainment, Silicon Valley, sports, big cities, the justice system, the family, the FBI-CIA, the Supreme Court, etc.).  By manufacturing massive fraudulent vote counts in the big cities they control, Democrats invalidate suburban and rural votes in key battleground states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.  Elections simply become who can produce the most votes, which is most easily accomplished in large Democrat-run cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.  The Democrat machines that control those cities can effortlessly run up large vote counts for Democrats without fear of being found out by manipulating the voting rules and by manufacturing ballots.  Local Democrat judges "on the payroll" look the other way, while Big Media leads in the cover-up with information blackouts.  Large Democrat donors, Silicon Valley bigwigs, and geopolitical rivals like China bankroll the operation.  By relying on big city votes to swing the national elections, our electoral system degenerates into a de facto direct voting structure, thus invalidating the Electoral College and violating the Constitution.

November 2020: The Good Points:  The Presidential election of November 2020 was an unmitigated disaster to any sane-thinking person concerned with the good of America.  While unintellectual, style-obsessed political simpletons cheer the outcome based strictly on emotional rooting interests, intelligent individuals who are more concerned with full employment, energy independence, military readiness and border security than identity politics, racial/gender quotas and the microaggression du jour realize that a "Biden" administration will set American economic prosperity and social progress back by decades.  If the Democrats come into power, the government will pick the winners and losers and the country will devolve from a meritocracy to a selectocracy. [...] Under a progressive administration:
  •   Crime will increase as the police are defunded and bail/sentencing standards are relaxed and eliminated
  •   We'll get higher taxes, and have less disposable income
  •   Energy costs will increase as exploration and production are intentionally curtailed, leading to higher consumer prices across the board
  •   Progressives will refuse to "allow" life to return to normal, even after widespread dispensation of the COVID vaccines
Voters will see this all quite clearly and that's good.

Christmas Message for a Broken Republic.  The left has done its utmost to air-brush God out of the Constitution, ban the Ten Commandments from every public square, and ostracize Christ from all public discourse, while at the same time expropriating Christ's words for their conceited, bewitching subterfuge, preached from every "progressive" altar and chanted as they burn restaurants and beat Trump supporters to a pulp.  All these acts of eradication were merely rehearsals for the final ransack and rapine of the electorate now taking place.

Portland police [officers are] resigning for jobs elsewhere making less money and it's not hard to see why.  Portland police officers are resigning from the force in unusually high numbers in the middle of their careers.  Many are seeking jobs in other cities where they will be paid less money and also lose some of their time toward retirement.  According to the Portland Tribune, it's unusual for the number of resignations to exceed the number of retirements but that's what's happening right now.

Nullification Isn't Just for Democrats, Anymore.  Since the 2016 election, Democrats have made all kinds of nullification standard fare, but more pernicious than displaying a disagreeable temperament, or contrary opinion; more than First Amendment-protected civil disobedience.  Instead, making that which is legitimate, illegitimate; making what is illegitimate, legitimate.  Making what is decent, abhorrent; making what is grotesque, glorious — all enjoying approbation from a fawning media.  Any and all tactics, now including election fraud, and covering up bribery of a president to-be, are used unapologetically, with no subterfuge, and with impunity.  Truth now is subjective, conditioned on identity and whether it will be canceled by the mob, or approved by the neo-aristocracy.

The Plot to Steal America.  [Video clip]

The reimagined police as servants of the left.  We back the blue, but will they back us?  Like most conservatives, I support the police and the vital role they serve in a civilized society.  But like many conservatives, watching them stand down on orders from blue-state mayors during months of riots was jarring.  (They even stood down during a Back the Blue rally in Denver when speakers were attacked.)  Many of us asked how the police could obey such orders and allow criminals to have free rein in our streets — criminals whose victims, I might add, included over 2,000 police officers.  Don't police officers swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution?  Well, yes, they do.  In fact, that is their paramount responsibility.  Perhaps this year, it seems we witnessed the rule and not the exception — the rule being that most people, including the police, will be cowards in the face of tyrants.

What's happening in Minnesota bodes ill for Democrats.  Across America, the Wuhan virus has allowed Democrats to implement some of their long desired plans for "reforming" America in a properly Marxist mold.  One of the most hallowed plans, which academia promotes, is "de-incarceration" (i.e., ending prisons).  The other one, although it's kept hush-hush, is to end that pesky, morality-driven, hardworking, freedom-loving middle class.  Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz is working on both issues, with disastrous results for good people.  That's why this arrogant societal manipulation could soon prove to be the Democrats' downfall. [...] For the crime of feeding her family, Walz, through the Minnesota attorney general's office, is filing documents to imprison [Larvita] McFarquhar for trying to stay afloat.

U.S. City May Pass "Duress Legislation" to Give Criminals "Poverty Defense".  Elected officials in a major U.S. city plan to pass a law that will allow thieves to sell items they steal if they do it to earn money for basic needs and trespassers to set up camp on private property when it is to obtain adequate shelter.  Dozens of other crimes — including assault and harassment — will be excused under the preposterous measure if suspects are poor, mentally ill or addicted to drugs.  It is being crafted as a poverty defense and will allow municipal court judges to dismiss a multitude of crimes if poverty, mental illness or a substance-abuse disorder drove the perpetrator to commit them.  Even for a famously liberal left coast city like Seattle it seems like a bit much.  The proposal was first introduced during the Seattle City Council's budget deliberations weeks ago, according to a local news report.  It was put on hold over a budget process bureaucracy but has gained incredible steam and appears to have enough support to alter the city code early next year.  "The idea could enormously impact the city — and set Seattle apart from the rest of the country in its approach to misdemeanor crimes," according to the news story, which includes the concerns of frustrated public safety advocates who say the law will essentially legalize most crimes in Seattle.

If the Media Doesn't Report on Crime, It Won't Exist.  The Nieman Foundation for Journalism was set up at Harvard.  Like everything touching old foundations and journalism, it's a toxic disaster.  And this one is right up there with In Defense of Looting. [...] No this stuff isn't marginal.  Nieman is influential and it's part of the larger pro-crime push.  And the reshaping of the legacy media.  Even at this late date, one of the few things the local news does anymore is sports, weather, and crime.  Lefty virtue signaling destroyed sports.  The push to make every weather report about global warmunism while firing any weatherman who doesn't go along has been underway for years.

Republican Mackenzie Kelly Wins Austin City Council Runoff.  Local Paper Declines to Cover It.  In a stunning upset, Republican Mackenzie Kelly defeated Democrat incumbent Jimmy Flannigan in Austin's District 6 runoff Tuesday.  Kelly ran on a platform that includes restoring police department funding and ending the city's permissive homeless camping ordinance.  She won with 52% to Flannigan's 48%, a margin of just about 700 votes overall.  Kelly's win, and Republican Jennifer Virden's near-win in District 10, may signal a major shift in Austin voters' thinking.  The Democrat-dominated city was already up in arms over the homeless camping ordinance, which allows homeless people to camp just about anywhere they want all over the city (except city hall) since the council passed it unanimously in the summer of 2019.  That has led to encampments under overpasses and even on the fringes of neighborhoods all over Austin.

The 'kraken' is the sleeping giant now awakened within the GOP.  [Scroll down]  We're censored by big tech, smeared in the media, mocked in popular culture, and endure malicious political prosecution, as in the cases of Michael Flynn and Kyle Rittenhouse.  On the other side, Hillary Clinton destroyed 30,000 emails, federal bureaucrats broke countless laws in the Russian Collusion hoax, leftist radicals burned cities and attacked police, Obama weaponized the IRS against Republicans, and illegally imposed DACA.  The rules are clear:  Democrats can break the law whenever they want. [...] Can you imagine a country where Democrats can commit blatantly unconstitutional actions to enable voter fraud while simultaneously using the same Constitution to insist Republicans have no legal grounds to challenge them?  This is the America we're living in.

Can We Survive the Coming Socialism?  It's looking pretty grim right now regarding President Trump's chances of getting the four more years he deserves, and that he almost certainly would have received had the Democrats' cheating game not gone to all time high levels.  It's also looking like justice and honesty are going to play a diminishing role in the United States for the foreseeable future, as evidently about forty or so percent of the country is perfectly comfortable with massive voter fraud and willing to participate in it, all because they wanted to have their own way.  With that, it also looks like we are on our way towards a pretty heavy dose of socialism as the Left is now emboldened by their brazen acts of fraud and encouraged by the fact that even SCOTUS does not seem willing to challenge their crimes.

Republicans [are] Pushing Themselves Off the Cliff.  [Scroll down]  If Democrats can steal one presidential election, they can certainly steal another one, and enough Congressional elections for a permanent Democrat majority in the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government.  Elections will no longer matter as the winner will be preordained by the ruling class.  Democrats can add states to the union, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and a split California, giving them a solid Senate majority.  Eliminating the filibuster, as promised, will make Republican objections to any bill or nomination irrelevant.  A stacked Supreme Court, as also promised, will allow the left to rewrite the Constitution to suit Bernie, AOC, and George Soros, rather than Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison.  Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal will soon be the law of the land, as will open borders and tens of millions of new Democrat constituents.  Expect a carbon tax as we sign on to the Paris Climate Accord.  Iran will be back to building nukes and China will control of most of corporate America.

Seattle is considering making it legal to steal, as long as you're poor and plan on selling the items.  Remember over the summer when AOC blamed the spike in crime in New York City on parents stealing food to feed their families? [Tweet] She was roundly ridiculed for that, of course, but now Seattle hopes to make AOC's fantasy a reality by creating an affirmative defense for theft if you intended to sell the stolen items for "basic needs" like food or rent.  It's called "the poverty defense," and would not only make stealing legal, but apparently fencing items as well, and would cover over 100 misdemeanor crimes.

Judge to California's 3rd Largest County:  On Account of COVID, Release Half Your Convicts.  How do you empty a large county's jail system by half?  That's a question currently demanding an answer, as a West Coast judge has ordered that very thing.  As reported by The Daily Wire, on Friday, Superior Court Judge Peter Wilson dictated Sheriff Don Barnes must liquidate Orange County's jail system by 50%.  The decision comes following the American Civil Liberties Union's April lawsuit demanding the release of disabled and vulnerable inmates in light of the pandemic.

America's Two Plagues.  [Scroll down]  And I say, the inmates have taken over the asylum.  There is a madness loose in the society stemming from the collapse of classical, Biblical, sexual morality.  The US has become Sodom and Gomorrah and evidence of this is this latest lunacy.  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and the rest is history.  It led to the AIDS epidemic and to the tolerance of such low life millionaires such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein and his pedophilia, with Bill Clinton their soulmate in sexual predation.  It led to this sexual degenerate in the Oval Office engaged in perverse sex games with a woman young enough to be his daughter.  Clinton's historic legacy will be a semen-stained dress.  Joe Biden may be supportive of so-called "transgenderism," but there is no such thing because there is no such thing as "gender," as the "Woke" misuse that word today.  The existence of "gender" as they understand it is nothing less than magical, not scientific, thinking.  No source for this sensation is known in the body or brain.

Our political opponents are vicious, but they're also crazy.  Leftists live in a world of racial hatred, gender confusion, white self-loathing, religious loathing, American loathing, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic feelings, misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia, and so much more.  Everything is defined by hatred for others.  It's impossible to live in a world imbued with hate and still be happy.  These -isms and -phobias get pushed onto young people in public schools and in institutions of higher leftist learning.  Many of these people, when they leave college or university, continue to bathe in this fetid broth of self-loathing and paranoia.

Minneapolis delivers on its George Floyd promise to defund police and wipes $8m from force's budget.  Minneapolis City Council on Thursday [12/10/2020] approved a controversial budget which is set to move $8 million of funding from the police — despite record crime rates since the May death of George Floyd.  Mayor Jacob Frey, who had threatened to veto the entire budget if the council went ahead with a plan to cap police staffing, said the vote was a defining moment for the city which was the first to be hit by anti-police protests following the death of Floyd.  The city has been plagued by soaring violent crime since then — with homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and arson all up on last year's figures.

Alternate headline:  Democrats Abandon the War on Drugs
Drugs Declare Victory in War on Drugs.  The 2020 elections delivered a resounding victory for drug policy reformers, who won everywhere their proposals were put to a vote.  Across the country, in red and blue states, on both coasts and in between, in the Midwest and the Deep South, voters passed ballot initiatives that not only continued to reverse marijuana prohibition but also broke new ground in making drug laws less punitive and more tolerant.  New Jersey's approval of marijuana legalization was expected.  Preelection surveys consistently put public support above 60 percent, although the actual margin of victory was a few points bigger than the polls suggested.

Where's the Kraken?  Where's the Storm?  If Democrats control the federal government, there is zero chance any electoral fraud will be investigated.  The only investigations will be of Trump and his supporters.  Democrats will use the 2020 election as a pilot project, refining their ability to steal enough future elections to keep themselves in permanent majority.  Democrats will change the rules so that Republicans never have control of either branch of government again.  Added states will insure Democrat control of the Senate.  Institutionalized electoral fraud will make future elections as irrelevant as the outcome when the Harlem Globetrotters play the Washington Generals.  A good show with a predetermined result, banana republic style.  How do those countries end up?  A stacked Supreme Court will rewrite the Constitution and Bill of Rights to suit Bernie, AOC, and George Soros.  Masks, lockdowns, and censorship will become the norm.  The Mitt Romney's of the GOP will be yapping chihuahuas in cages, annoying but irrelevant.

If vote fraud wins in 2020, prepare for life to get ugly.  What kind of changes will we have to endure?  We will wear masks forever.  There will always be a medical crisis mandating them.  There will be a war on combustion.  We will be forced to drive electric cars or no car at all.  Barack Obama began this effort in 2009 with his "cash for clunkers" program.  Thanks to new regulations, we will pay much higher prices for technology and medical care.  We will have medical death panels.  It is already starting.  The first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine will be health care workers and nursing home residents.  So far, the choice is palatable, but who will be the next one to be deemed worthy of survival? [...] The war on combustion means there will be no fossil fuel to heat our homes.  We will have to use heat pumps exclusively.  Heat pumps require refrigerant.  There is already a high price for refrigerant because of previous regulations.  Expect the price to go higher.  All of this will lead to rationing of electricity.  There will be either rolling blackouts or central control of the thermostat.

Car Jackings In Minneapolis Up 537 Percent.  Honestly, who with a functional brain didn't see this coming?  As I've noted before, even if you take every dime you remove from the police budget and put it toward crime prevention measures, it'll take years before any of them show any potential results.  Defunding law enforcement now is idiotic, and now we can quantify just how idiotic.  I mean, a 537 percent increase?  That's insane, but also think about how few carjackings there were during the lockdown.  For months, few people went anywhere, which meant fewer opportunities to jack someone's car.  It was also more difficult to mill about on foot while waiting for a potential target.  That means it's very likely these numbers have skyrocketed in just the last half of the year, making it even more insane.  It looks from here like the whole "defund the police" thing has turned into the trainwreck we all expected it to become.

Where We Are.  [Scroll down]  You cannot create a world of perfect equality because people are not equal, and the attempt to make them so requires taking away the freedom of most for the benefit of what turns out to be a few.  You cannot create a government that is socially "just" because the people who will run it are the same people whose lies, bigotries, selfishness and greed created the unjust world you are attempting to leave behind.  The new rulers, corrupt as ever, will have more power than ever.  You can only make things worse.  Much worse.  I learned these truths first in my work with the Black Panther Party, a murderous street gang whom we regarded as "the vanguard of the revolution."  We did so because the Panthers were the only leftists with guns who were willing to use them.  The Panthers preyed mainly on vulnerable blacks but also murdered a friend of mine who was white.  My second awakening came with the success of the New Left's "antiwar movement," which forced America out of Vietnam.  The New Left's claims to be "anti-war" in behalf of the Vietnamese were actually two dangerous lies.  When the movement succeeded in forcing America's withdrawal from Indo-China, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two and a half million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam.  There wasn't a single demonstration against the slaughter.  Not one.  I realized then that it was never an "anti-war" movement.  It was an anti-American movement.  The Left wanted the Communists to win and didn't care how many innocent Asians were murdered in the process.

Seattle homicides [are the] highest in over a decade as council cuts police budget.  Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan plans to sign a new city budget that will reduce the police budget by 18% despite homicides reaching record highs not seen in a decade.  Council members overwhelmingly voted last week to cut funds for police training and overtime and to eliminate dozens of vacant positions within the Seattle Police Department after months of contentious talks.  The reductions fall short of the 50% that local activists demanded amid nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice.  The council also decided to transfer parking enforcement officers, mental health workers and 911 dispatchers out of the police department.

How Liberals Can Destroy Football with COVID, and Why They'd Want To.  Football has always been reviled by the left.  It is quintessentially American:  invented in this country; played by high-testosterone, masculine men; and operating almost entirely as a super-competitive meritocracy — i.e., the test of whether someone gets to play in the NFL is whether he can play, and play better than the other guy.  In the NFL in 2020, there's no time to humor racism or any other "ism" in fielding a winning team; there's only the all-defining imperative priority to put the best players on the field and "coach 'em up" to play the game well.  All of those attributes of the sport are precisely why it has been so popular in America; it has been aligned with American cultural norms and preferences for decades.  The sport's popularity is in fact proof that America as a whole is not racist — systemically or otherwise.  Americans don't root for their team or watch the NFL in huge numbers based on a team's compliance with racial hiring quotas; they root and watch because they appreciate the best playing the best using talents that most of us don't have, and deciding on a level playing field who wins a competitive game and who loses.

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.

Racism is alive and well in America.  Leftism destroys everything — absolutely everything — that it touches:
  •   It took first and second wave feminism (right to vote, equal pay for equal work) and turned it into third wave man-hating feminism.
  •   It took the Great Society and welfare, and turned them into the destruction of the black family in America, with all the pathologies that follow.
  •   It took the concept of avoiding cruel and unusual punishment when dealing with criminals, and turned it into no punishment at all, which increases crime, destroys societal trust, and puts criminals at grave risk of vigilantism.
  •   It took the idea that the state cannot promote or interfere with religion and turned it into a state hostile to religion.
  •   It took the Civil Rights movement, one premised on the fact that we are all equal before God and the law, and turned it into a foundation for dangerous, divisive, and tragic anti-white hatred.

By Every Legal Means Necessary.  The Democrats began a comprehensive assault on the electoral system several years ago in many states; they consecrated great resources to electing the secretaries of state who effectively administer federal elections within their states; they agitated and litigated in many states to change voting practices and to facilitate ballot harvesting through unsolicited mass mailings to the entirety of the voter rolls and the collection and delivery of ballots with increasingly dubious verification that they represent the will of the voters ostensibly casting them.  Many of these processes were challenged and proved unsuccessful.  But the movement to alter the election process decisively in favor of those who could exploit mass mailings to the whole voters' lists, which inevitably include a great many people who have died or moved, was greatly strengthened by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The War on Thanksgiving.  [Scroll down]  Here we see the fruits of a generation raised on [Howard] Zinn.  While it is likely pointless to convince the vandals who attack statues and businesses that their views are misguided, we need to take the propaganda that has undermined our country and driven fellow citizens to lunacy and extremism seriously.  Thanksgiving is in the beginning stages of receiving the Columbus Day treatment.  We can't underestimate the threat of a few militant voices amplified by America's elite culture-shaping institutions.  Columbus was once nearly universally admired in America, his holiday only questioned by an odd collection of left-wing radicals and, at an even early date, white nationalists who resented the celebration of a Catholic and Italian-born hero.  Now, the holiday has nearly collapsed.  Even his statues are going undefended by the descendants of Italian immigrants who helped construct them.

"Burn It Down".  American cities are entering a period of chaos.  Protests and riots have dominated headlines, but beneath the surface, activists are launching an unprecedented campaign to overthrow the traditional justice system and replace it with a new model based on a radical conception of social justice.  In Seattle, where this campaign may be most advanced, activists have crafted a narrative about police brutality, mass incarceration, and punitive justice that leads to a natural sequence of solutions:  "abolish the police," "divest from prisons," and "defund the courts."  Over the past three decades, the city's radical-progressives have seized control of municipal government — with the notable exception of the criminal-justice system, which they see as the final obstacle to total control.  If they can dismantle it, activists believe, they can bring about their transformation of society.

Redfin says 30% want to live 'somewhere else' because of protests.  In a new study, Seattle-based real estate service Redfin really gets to the heart of the matter of the summer's Capitol Hill occupied protest zone — condo prices:  "Seattle's condo market has really struggled in general during the pandemic, but the units that are closest to the CHOP have typically been selling even more slowly than other condos in Capitol Hill," said local Redfin real estate agent Forrest Moody.  "I had one listing that was a block away from the CHOP and across the street from a Ferrari dealership that had its windows smashed," Moody goes on to say.  "The condo actually sold within five days, but that's likely because we listed it for $25,000 less than we had planned to back in February."

A warning from the future:  The US may soon look like New Mexico.  If you don't believe that the United States can become very radical, very quickly under a Biden administration, you haven't been paying attention to New Mexico.  I know what you're thinking:  When it comes to radical liberal policies, California is the gold standard.  Yet, for the past two years, New Mexico has embarked on an unfortunate mission to become just like California, but faster.  The disastrous results speak for themselves. [...] Millions of people are justifiably worried about California's radical policies spreading nationwide, but don't sleep on New Mexico.  In less than two years, we've gone from a budget surplus and low unemployment to the disaster you see today.

Seattle's downward spiral — these city actions are driving the decline.  The city of Seattle may legalize most misdemeanor crimes.  This isn't an exaggeration.  It's arguably not even the most radical idea introduced by the Seattle City Council.  Rather, it's the latest move by politicians growing increasingly dangerous and aloof to concerns in a city spiraling dangerously out of control.  In the final week of October, the Council used the 2021 budget process to forward an updated plan installing heroin injection sites, replace a specialized police unit tackling homelessness, and lay off more Seattle police, which already has record low staffing.  Seeing the writing on the wall, some of the city's best paid residents are fleeing.

The California Elections Pandemic.  The once Golden State, renowned for creating and exporting much of what constitutes American popular culture, now exports a vote-fraud rich, elections-stealing contagion across the nation. [...] A consequence of Californizing elections will be rampant cynicism.  Sullen distrust will take hold.  Voters, in droves, may elect not to vote.  Yet nonparticipation may be the best case.  In time, the nation may devolve into warring political factions, who thuggishly vie to control the levers of power.  Does that seem surreal?  Investigate Latin America, where countries are colored with rigged elections and associated violence.

Looking to Solzhenitsyn for clues about the present.  Solzhenitsyn warned America and the West time and time again that abandoning its religious foundations and embracing secularism would in turn lead to total chaos, followed by a complete loss of freedom.  America and the rest of the West are already in chaos.  What follows is the people's determination and destiny.

The Chump Effect.  We all know the feeling: when you're inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor's child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed "learning disability"; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane's cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an "emotional-support animal," gets to ride on its owner's lap for free.  You didn't know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency?  What are you — a chump?  What makes these indignities so infuriating isn't just that a few people game the system.  It's that their selfish gambits work only because the rest of us follow the rules.  If every driver mobbed the freeway exit from the passing lanes, traffic would come to a halt.  The student who fraudulently obtains extra test time gets a leg up only if most other students stick to the original time limit.  And if every pet were designated an emotional-support animal, airplanes and restaurants would become full-time menageries.  (Some airlines have begun tightening rules on support animals for just this reason.)

Conspiracy Theory, Or Stolen Election?  I have no opinion on whether the election was stolen by the Biden campaign or not.  I don't think there is any way to know, on the current evidence, whether, if only legal votes were counted, and each voter voted only once, Donald Trump or Joe Biden actually won the election.  I do know that if the United States is to avoid banana republic status, we need to institute more secure and reliable election procedures.  No more ballot harvesting, no more millions of mail-in votes, and some reasonable attention paid to the machines and software that ultimately count the votes. [...] One more thing:  liberals are quick to dub anything they don't like a conspiracy theory.  But four years ago, I wouldn't have imagined that top officials of the FBI and the CIA would collaborate with Hillary Clinton's campaign to propagate lies in order to try to swing the election to her, or failing that, to disable the incoming administration of the candidate that they didn't favor.  That scandal has greatly expanded my, and our, understanding of what may be possible.  This isn't your grandfather's United States of America.

It's a Coup.  Just Say It!  Political science types have a word for every happening.  One is the Overton Window.  Like lots of these terms, it is not too scientific, but it well describes things observed every day.  For instance, the idea that an eight-year-old boy decides to be a girl, because he feels like it, and is then medicated with hormone therapy to look as close to a girl as science enables was once a preposterous idea.  Then it was possible, then probable, and now, voilà!  A boy is now a girl, and if you use the wrong pronoun, you lose your job!  Meet the Overton Window:  that period of time when something seemingly quite impossible becomes mainstream.

Washington State is a worrisome window into the future.  [Scroll down]  Completing our state's social-engineering trifecta is the law originally passed in 2008, and subsequently endorsed by referendum, that allows physicians to write prescriptions for lethal doses of drugs for individuals who in their opinion have less than six months to live.  The measure applies to any patient over the age of 18 who can produce an accepted form of ID, which, thanks to the largesse of our state's SB 5023, specifically excuses the applicant from providing 'Proof of citizenship, a Social Security number, or command of the English language.'  If you happen to find yourself here in Washington, are aged 17 or over, can pass the not-demanding traffic safety test and sign your form with an X, the state will happily issue you with a driver's permit valid as photo ID, and you're good to go.  It may fail to surprise readers that Washington was also in the vanguard of the same-sex marriage crusade, or that the last local politician to openly question the ethics of providing publicly-funded abortions, a Republican assemblyman named John Koster, was roundly mocked for admitting that he was guided in such matters by his reading of the Bible.  This is what 'political debate' has come to in my state.

Minneapolis authorizes $500k to hire cops from OTHER forces after officers leave in wake of BLM protests.  The Minneapolis city council has authorized $500,000 in funding for the police department to hire cops from other forces, after several officers have quit and crime has soared since the start of the year.  Council members on Friday narrowly voted 7 to 6 in favor of approving $496,800 in extra funds for Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).  The money will be used to bring in 20 to 40 cops from the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department and Metropolitan Council/Metro Transit Police to help the department tackle the recent crime wave across the city.

The Biden Threat to Law Enforcement.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were unambiguous throughout their presidential campaign: they believe that racism pervades policing and all other aspects of the criminal-justice system. [...] Biden's plan for "strengthening America's commitment to justice" reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list; there is no reason to think that a Biden-Harris Justice Department will not implement it.  Among its most consequential proposals, it calls for a return to the practice of imposing weakly-justified consent decrees on police departments.  During the Obama years, career attorneys in the Justice Department regularly opened civil rights investigations into police departments (called "pattern or practice" investigations) without credible evidence that an agency was systematically violating citizens' constitutional rights.  Those investigations almost invariably resulted in settlements (called consent decrees) that placed police departments under the control of a nonelected federal monitor and a federal judge; monitors collected millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fees while they held police departments to draconian deadlines and mindless paper-pushing mandates for years on end.

Refund The Police?  Minneapolis Starts Begging For Outside Resources.  Old and busted:  We don't need our police in our city!  New hotness:  We need your police in our city!  Minneapolis' city council, which spent most of the summer and fall demanding the ability to dismantle its police force, has now started begging for police officers from neighboring jurisdictions to help them deal with skyrocketing crime.

The Editor says...
Let the city of Minneapolis rot!  Let the miserable residents contend with the fallout from their left-wing politicians' actions.

Let's Take Stock of Where We Are.  The 2020 election in particular, and our electoral process in general, have been badly compromised.  First there have been the successful efforts by Democrats to loosen electoral administration standards and practices by legalizing ballot harvesting (where partisan "volunteers" go out and collect ballots as well as "assist" voters in filling out their ballots), allowing same-day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and the like.  On the flipside we have Democrats tenaciously fighting any efforts to shore up the integrity of the system, such as requiring ID and proof of citizenship to vote.  Couple all of this with unprecedented last minute rule changes on the eve of what was sure to be the most contested election in generations, if not in American history:  all changes designed to favor one side over the other.

A House Divided Along New Lines.  Americans used to agree on certain things.  They believed in God.  They believed that America was a force for good in the world.  They believed in the individual.  They believed in protecting the innocent.  They believed in the rule of law.  They believed that all men are created equal but are not guaranteed equal outcomes.  They believed in charity rather than subservience to government.  They hated communism and socialism, loved the challenge of innovating, and took delight in the market's response to their gifts.  They hunted and fished and went to church and minded their own business and helped their neighbors.  In the current political realignment, these beliefs are no longer universal.  Half the country holds them.  These citizens are derisively referred to national populists, but really they're the same old people who consider themselves patriotic Americans.  It's the other half of the country that has changed.  The Oligarchy of America is guided by New Age spirituality.  God is mutable, as is truth.  Abortion is a sacrament.  Individuality has given way to conformity of thought and ideas.

Why Shouldn't Black America Walk Away From The Democratic Party?  For years, Black America's absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years.  The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.  During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay.  Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia:  None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century.  Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.  Now, thanks to President Donald Trump, that may all be changing.

Supporting Systemic Victimhood Is Not Caring.  Socialism has never worked.  It spreads misery wherever it has been tried.  Under the guise of caring, Biden's platform calls for new entitlements designed to meet all needs — healthcare, college tuition, guaranteed income, and the list goes on.  It's clear that those on the Left have no confidence in the minorities they claim to help.  To the left, minorities need a political Robin Hood ready to steal from their neighbor to give them what they deserve but can't earn.  What an affront to those they claim to help.  Unfortunately, the reality is that once a citizen is locked into government programs and funding, it's hard to get out.  They live too well.  To actually work and start at the bottom and work their way up in a real job means a cut in income.  They call it "The Cliff!"  Why work when being dependent can meet my needs.  Why be married when not having a husband or wife increases my benefits?

Last-Minute Voting Advice.  [Scroll down]  For me, the top issue is religious freedom/freedom of speech.  Far too many people are seemingly unaware of the threats undermining religious freedom and freedom of speech in this country.  Even with the riots and looting that have decimated many American cities this spring and summer, too many are not connecting the dots and are falling for the "mostly peaceful protests" line the media and the Democrats are promoting.  The political correctness movement has declared that people cannot speak truth about current events; only certain approved perceptions can be spoken.  Facts are irrelevant; there is "your truth" and "my truth."  The perceptions of an event or incident become the "fact" regardless of further investigation or other information that shows that distortion has occurred, such as when a person with a history of violent actions charges the police with a knife in hand and commits "suicide by cop."

Austin sees spikes in violent crime, officer retirements after defund police vote.  Austin has seen a spike in violent crime and officer retirements after the city council voted over the summer to immediately slash $20 million from the police department budget, becoming the first major Texas city to do so.  In August, Austin City Council members voted unanimously to cut about $150 million, or roughly one-third, from its police department and allocate those funds to areas like violence prevention, housing and mental health services.  Only about $21.5 million was immediately removed from the department's funding in part by canceling three upcoming cadet classes and slashing overtime expenses.  "It is demoralizing for the officers.  It is angering for the citizens because they're having to wait longer for officers to get the calls.  And it's unsafe for citizens and officers," Austin Police Association President Bill Cassidy told Fox News.

Will anti-lockdown sentiments spur the next populist revolt?  As the nation frets over the possibility of the "dark winter" that Joe Biden recently predicted, we're already seeing signs of renewed authoritarian lockdowns in many parts of the nation.  Curfews are being put back in place in a number of cities.  Orders forbidding gatherings of more than a certain number of people have accompanied them.  Far too many schools are still either closed or holding "virtual classes" that have been failing spectacularly.  There have already been signs of growing resentment toward yet another round of crippling restrictions on the activities of private citizens and businesses, along with the mounting damage these policies have done to what was one of the most thriving economies our nation has experienced prior to the arrival of the novel coronavirus.  So how much of this will people stand for before enough is declared to be enough?

Logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected.  [Scroll down]  The Democrats are tainted by their intimate dependence upon their corrupt urban political machines, personified by the grossly incompetent Democratic mayors of New York (de Blasio), Chicago (Lightfoot), Los Angeles (Garcetti), Washington (Bowser), Seattle (Durkan), and Portland, Ore. (Wheeler).  The Democrats are also severely compromised by having maintained total silence all summer as the worst rioting in America in over 50 years raged across the country and white-hating urban guerrillas and white hooligans burned and stole and vandalized billions of dollars of property and tried to destroy statues and monuments of inoffensive people such as Columbus, and of some America's greatest leaders, including those most dedicated to the advancement of African Americans:  Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Anarchy in New York?  One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks.  Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage.  Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.  You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story.  Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window.  He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately "ROR'd" — released on his recognizance — with no bail.  This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces.  Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges.

China's Communist Party is backing the left's revolution, seeking our downfall and subjugation.  The demonization of U.S. police as racists killing black people, is a tactic designed to defang the police and give free rein to marauding mobs.  A breakdown of order serves the left's attempts to gain power.  It provides a crisis, something that must not be wasted according to Obama's former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.  Disorder scares [...] normal people and makes them vulnerable to accepting radical changes like abolishing the police, a move that would result in rule by leftist mobs.  It's pathetic how privileged youth fall for this lie about the police.  They are products of our educational system, one of the institutions that the left has been marching through for decades.  The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and the German communist Rudi Dutschike are both credited with the idea of the left marching through institutions, like the schools and courts, as a means of stealthily imposing communism, probably renamed true democracy.

Exposing Liberals' 'Tiny Fraction' Lie.  [Scroll down]  [T]he threats from the left are anything but tiny fractions.  The cancel culture is not a tiny fraction.  The radicalized faculty at the university is not a tiny fraction.  The indoctrination of socialist ideas and identity politics and white privilege in schools is not a tiny fraction.  The falsehoods and half-truths spread by the media are not a tiny fraction.  The high-tech crackdown on dissenting speech is not a tiny fraction.  The division created by falsely accusing and demonizing one part of the population while exaggerating the malice and damage to provoke the rage of another heavily indoctrinated, hyper-sensitized part of the population is not a tiny fraction.  And it is self-perpetuating, since the isolated outlier incident serves as the basis for rioting and the bottomless pit of grievance and recrimination, which in turn continue to be dismissed by adversaries as tiny fractions.

San Francisco:  A string of drug stores close after shoplifters strip the shelves bare.  You'll be shocked to learn there are some serious problems in San Francisco with petty crime.  This week the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the seventh Walgreens drug store to announce it is closing in the city since last year.  The problem is a wave of shoplifting from retail locations that can add up to millions of dollars in lost merchandise. [...] The Walgreens clerks can't do anything about the theft because the company has a policy preventing them from interfering in shoplifting.  Allegedly this is for their safety but I suspect it's really because if they didn't have this policy and anyone got hurt, they would be sued.

Unemployment Figures Dramatically Favor Republican-Led States.  August's unemployment figures, just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, paint a remarkably consistent picture that correlates — almost uncannily — between low unemployment rates in states led by Republican governors and high unemployment rates in states led by Democratic governors.  Drawing national conclusions from the unemployment statistics for all fifty states, those Republican-led states that have tried to follow President Trump's lead in reopening America are doing much better in terms of unemployment than are states likely to support Biden in November.  Former Vice President Biden, while repeatedly complaining about President Trump's actions in fighting COVID, has yet to articulate a coherent COVID policy.  Remarkably, these early-opening Republican-led states do not have a statistically-valid comparative rate of increase in COVID deaths, as presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though the three states with the lowest death per 100,000 population are led by Republican governors.

Uptown Apple store in Minneapolis closes permanently.  The Apple store in Uptown will close permanently, the latest in a growing list of shops and restaurants that have recently abandoned the beleaguered south Minneapolis retail center.  Apple has had a presence near the bustling corner of Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street for the past decade.  It informed its approximately 60 employees Wednesday [10/21/2020] that the store would close.  The store had yet to reopen since March when the state's stay-at-home orders to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic forced many retail establishments to temporarily shutter.  Following the killing of George Floyd in May, the Apple store was one of nearly 40 businesses near the corner that was damaged by rioters.

The City is Killing America.  Welfare states don't create jobs.  They're what happens when there are too many people and no jobs.  We might be able to build our way out of this dead end, but we have to begin by questioning the urban model which is at the root of all of our national problems.  America doesn't need an expanding population.  Urban political machines do. [...] There is no shortage of cheap labor in America.  We don't need more of it.  Every major city is already choking on the unemployed cheap labor forces they have.  And unless we have a massive manufacturing boom, the only employment opportunities for them are in the gig economy where they can deliver pad thai and give rides to environmental consultants.  The urban model hasn't worked for America in sixty years.  The pandemic has put it on the verge of collapse as the wealthy industries that made cities their base flee into virtual workspaces.  It's time to rethink and defund cities as the hubs of our economy and our nation.

Houston Police Sgt. Killed By Repeat Offender After Soros-Funded D.A. Refused to Press Charges.  A police sergeant in Houston, Texas was shot dead Tuesday morning [10/20/2020] by a suspect who was in police custody just two days earlier, but was allowed to go free when the Democrat district attorney refused to press charges.  HPD Sergeant Harold Preston had been with the Houston Police Department for 41-years and was due to retire at the end of the year, according to the Montgomery County Police Reporter.  The local pro-police paper is urging voters to oust the D.A., whose campaign for office was bankrolled by left-wing billionaire George Soros.

My week with the baying antifa mob.  As one long-term [Portland] resident said to me last week: 'This used to be a very civil town.'  Not any more.  Of course, like every city in the West, the madnesses that already existed here have been exacerbated by the coronavirus and the ensuing decision to lock down the population and shutter the economy.  The businesses here are mainly closed, many for good.  Some were able to get through one lockdown but very few can get through multiple lockdowns or the depression to come.  As a result, downtown Portland is a desolate, dangerous place, populated by homeless people who flooded into the area over recent decades, incentivized by left-wing administrations that allowed them to pitch their tents wherever they liked.  In the main squares, unattended tables of food and drink are set out for them to pick at.  But it isn't just the virus or the reaction of the authorities that led to this wasteland.  The giveaway is the status of the few shops that are still open.  Almost all have hardboard affixed to their remaining windows.  Some have bullet-holes in them, not fired by the police.  The businesses that do still operate do so as in a city under siege.

"We want law and order": Minneapolis residents sue over shrinking police resources.  Who didn't see this moment coming for the Minneapolis city council and Mayor Jacob Frey?  The council's police-abolition posturing prompted an abrupt and widespread drain of sworn officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, through retirements, disability claims, and just plain old resignations.  The MPD canceled recruiting classes as well, while waiting to see whether their would be a force to expand or even maintain.  As police retreated, crime exploded.  And the people who have been paying the price for the city council's empty posturing ever since now want some accountability.  A group led by a former council member has launched a lawsuit against the council and Frey, essentially for dereliction of duty.

CHOP Zone Businesses Pursue Lawsuit Against Seattle.  The 21 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the city of Seattle for not enforcing the law against the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP, will get their day in court, though the city's liability in such matters remains in question.  U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly of the Western District of Washington issued an opinion on Friday stating, "Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the City's actions — encouraging CHOP participants to wall off the area and agreeing to a 'no response' zone within and near CHOP's borders — foreseeably placed Plaintiffs in a worse position."  Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal.  The plaintiffs are 21 businesses in the area of the city that protesters declared an "autonomous zone" from June 8 to July 1 and used barriers to block off.  "Inhabitants" even declared the area was no longer part of the United States.

The Terrible Ten.  As of September 18, 2020, these are the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates in the country:  NE; UT; ID; SD; VT; ND; AL; GA; MT and OK.  The 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, all in excess of 10%, are:  PA; NJ; IL; MA; NM; CA; HI; NY; RI and NV.  See a pattern?  Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, only Montana has a Democrat governor.  Of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, only one, Massachusetts, has a Republican governor.  Additionally, of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, all have Democrat control of both houses of the state legislature except for Pennsylvania, with Republican control of both houses.  I live in deep blue New Mexico, one of the terrible ten with unemployment rates in excess of ten percent.  NM has had single-party Dem rule at the state level for most of the last 90 years.  In the state legislature, the last time Republicans held a majority in both houses at the same time was 1930.

'Banana Republic of America'.  We are living in times in which our leaders have intentionally cast doubt on the court.  Members of Congress have managed to earn the doubt of nearly 90% of America simply through childish partisan behavior.  They have intentionally cast doubt on the presidency through the abuse of the impeachment process.  Elected officials and the media have both cast doubt on law enforcement.  It seems nearly everyone even tangentially involved in politics now says or does whatever they think can win the moment regardless of the long-term consequences.  Bureaucrats in the state of Virginia have decided to ignore the law on the books regarding ballot postmarks.  The state legislature didn't change the law.  No.  Virginia administrative officials have simply made the choice to do something different.  On whose authority?  No one has that authority under the law, yet they insist anyway. [...] Stability no longer exists.  The rules change day to day.  The laws only apply sometimes and only to certain people.  Election results, the courts, the police and elected officials themselves are under a constant shadow of doubt.

Research Shows Critical Race Theory Is Actually Making People More Racist.  President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 5 an end to critical race theory training in federal agencies.  As explained by Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the policy change targets "training or propaganda" pertaining to "white privilege" and efforts to advance the claim that "the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or ... that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."  On Sept. 22, the president extended this ban to companies doing business with the federal government.  He was right on both counts.  Critical race theory and similar academic left perspectives over the last decade stormed the political mainstream through a surge in news and popular media attention.  As a result, today politicians, celebrities, and corporations employ "critical," or woke, rhetoric.  Even comic books push critical themes despite hostile reactions from their readers.

There's Never Been a More Important Time to Choose Wisely.  This critical election is a choice between progressive government and its collective baggage and representative government and its free enterprise. [...] So-called "progressives" brought us such societal horrors as the War on Poverty.  Progressives are rooted in the intellectual arrogance of self-anointed "experts."  Not only are their theories proven 180 degrees wrong, but they never pay the price for their failures.  They just move on to "solve" the next problem, leaving their mess behind.  Exhibit 1 is the War on Poverty.  Contrary to good intentions, it devastated minority communities for generations and created fatherless homes for 70% of blacks without making a dent in actual poverty.  Progressives applaud "reducing" poverty from 19% of the population in 1964 to 14.8% in 2014.  But they ignore that much "improvement" simply moved people onto public support, building a dependency on welfare, food stamps, "free" lunches, and other subsidies.

Orwell Rears His Head.  On Monday of last week, to use the phrase "sexual preference" was completely acceptable.  As recently as last month, multiple gay rights publications used the phrase.  Leon Panetta had used the phrase in the past couple of years.  Joe Biden has used the phrase this year.  Merriam-Webster considered "sexual preference" to be just another version of "sexual orientation."  But then Tuesday happened.  On Tuesday, the village idiot from Hawaii masquerading as a senator, Mazie Hirono, attacked Amy Coney Barrett for using "sexual preference" instead of "sexual orientation."  By Tuesday evening, the employees of Merriam-Webster had changed the phrase in their online dictionary to note it was offensive.  No, I am not making that up.  The dictionary company literally changed it after Barrett's exchange with Hirono.  Steve Krakauer, a former CNN producer who now produces Megyn Kelly's podcast, documented the change on his social media feed.  Gay rights publications such as The Advocate went on the attack as well.  In just 18 days, "sexual preference" went from acceptable to a hate crime.

The Chinese Virus — Why We Panicked and Why We've Got to End the Panic Now.  [Scroll down]  The programmers have been busy making us, or enough of us, believe not that truth is optional, but that there is no truth, in the manner Pilate iterated.  There is only the convenience of the moment.  Who can doubt that we are being taught the truth no longer exists?  Examples are legion.  Let's take one.  A president denounces white supremacy dozens of times.  But the "truth" — the fake truth de jour — is that he has not.  How convenient!  Another beauty: many American cities were recently devastated by riots.  But the "truth" is that the rioters were "mostly peaceful."  How convenient!  It's not that the collective "we" are dumb.  "We" have been made to be dumb.  And they are trying to make us ever more dumb.  They require that we believe their fake "truth."  If we don't, we are deplorables.  At best.  Some now call for our physical destruction.  In other countries, similar things have occurred.  Perhaps even worse.  They are actively jailing people who express incorrect feelings.

Seattle mayor who praised CHOP, supported police cuts, is now 'deeply concerned' as more than 100 officers have left the force.  Democratic Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan — who once called the police-free autonomous zone in her city a "block party" amid a "summer of love" — is now "deeply concerned" over the mass exodus taking place within the city's police department.  KING-TV reported early Friday morning that a record number of officers had left the department in September, according to a new Seattle Budget Office report.  The report noted that 39 officers and officers-in-training "separated" from the department while an additional 14 officers extended their leaves.  The exodus is part of a continuing trend that has resulted in at least 118 officers leaving the force this year, KTTH-TV reporter Jason Rant said.  He added that "even this number is misleading" because "many officers are using their accrued sick time as they begin their escape to other agencies or wait for retirement."

The literally deadly results of "bail reform".  Last week, a 43-year-old Long Island man named William Farnum was being pursued in his vehicle by the NYPD. The suspect eventually crashed into a utility pole.  When the police arrived on the scene and approached to investigate they discovered that Farnum had slit his own throat in the driver's seat of his car and was dead.  The bad news didn't end there, however.  When officers attempted to notify his next of kin they discovered two dead bodies in his home.  They are believed to be the remains of Farnum's father and sister, reportedly killed by Farnum.  What's really got the local police and Republican lawmakers up in arms about this situation is the fact that Farnum never should have been out on the streets when all of this was taking place.  Scrolling through the man's recent history of engagements with law enforcement and the totality of his criminal record, he should have been behind bars.  But new bail reform laws in New York have tied the hands of judges and it was virtually impossible to keep Farnum locked up for more than a few hours at a time.

If Republican Senators Were Like Crazy Mazie.  [A] fair-minded observer cannot avoid recognizing that the poison and vitriol in American politics long preceded Donald Trump.  It was the Democrats who changed the landscape by murdering Judge Robert Bork's name and reputation for a generation.  While Republicans repeatedly treated Democrat Supreme Court nominees with kid gloves, the Democrats just assassinated one human being's character after another.  They destroyed Bork.  They came up with the most racist, stereotypical garbage imaginable against Clarence Thomas.  They lied about Brett Kavanaugh, defaming that very extraordinary man, a man who reflects so elegantly the Divine spirit that reposes within all of us.  In the presence of his dignified wife and innocent children, and before the eyes and ears of hundreds of millions of Americans, they proffered false accusations of rapes, attacks that never happened, fantasies of truly sick minds. [...] And then the Democrats pontificate and hypocritically ask why our democracy is no longer civilly bipartisan as it once was.

Destroying the Institutions We Inherited.  The annual Academy Awards were once among the most watched events in America.  In 2020, however, Oscar viewership crashed to its lowest level in history, due in large part to backlash against the left-wing politicking, sermonizing, and virtue-signaling of award winners.  Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, announced that it will adopt racial, gender, and sexual identity quotas for nominees — refuting the ancient idea of "art for art's sake[.]"  Such ideology has also infected, and thus tarnished, the Grammy and Emmy awards, and left-wing virtue-signaling has also become part of the NFL and the NBA.

Conservative Answers for Poverty.  It is an unfortunate fluke of history that in the 1960s, the time when the civil rights movement crystalized and black Americans achieved equal treatment politically — what should have long before been achieved morally — was a time of moral unraveling of the country.  Religion and moral principles were increasingly seen as a barrier to freedom, rather than its source.  Prayer was banished from school, abortion on demand legalized.  But the choice of man is not whether to believe.  The only choice is what to believe.  As religion was pushed out of the public square, the new religion became government.  Government programs were increasingly seen to be the path to salvation, rather than personal commitment to eternal truths.

Hawaii "Has Committed Suicide" — Local Rages "Hardly Anyone Is Sick, But We're All Broke".  While we have grown used to the people (well, at least those who are capable for thinking for themselves) of Michigan and California complaining that the tyrannical COVID lockdown rules imposed by Governors Whitmer and Newsom are arbitrary and capricious (if not downright unconstitutional), it is less often we hear from those living on the beautiful islands of Hawaii. [...] ["]The new travel requirements will trap Hawaii residents here as securely than if they were slaves.["]

Slaughter in the Cities.  Establishment voices are finally, grudgingly admitting that murders and shootings are up spectacularly in 2020.  But the reasons, they all agree, are immensely complicated and rather boring.  Perhaps, they muse, it has something to do with lockdowns?  Or there could be any number of other subtly interacting factors.  Who can tell?  In any case, this mysterious rise in violence is beyond the comprehension, much less the control, of politicians. [...] Did anything happen in late May that encouraged criminals and discouraged cops?  The data journalists appear stumped when they try to think back that far.  But, as you may recall (it was in the news at the time), George Floyd died in police custody on May 25, and three days later the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis let rioters burn down a police station.  From there, looting and rioting spread nationwide as the press and universities extolled the Mostly Peaceful Protesters.

Pay Attention To Local Elections, Because Whoever Wins Can Make Your Life Miserable.  This year, more than any other in recent memory, we got a bitter taste of the power of local officials to enable, and even promote, rioting and mayhem in America.  Many of us have watched aghast as mayors of blue cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and New York turned a blind eye or even encouraged mob rule that resulted in wide-scale violence, vandalism, looting, injury, and, yes, murder.  They have flatly rejected all offers by President Trump to bring it under control by calling in the National Guard.  Let's not forget that these mayors — along with the many other officials close to them — were elected locally.  Recall, it's local elected prosecutors, district attorneys, state's attorneys, and attorneys general that have the power to allow violent criminals to roam free after an arrest.  We see this happening repeatedly in Democratic Party-run cities like Seattle and Portland where Antifa thugs caught on camera assaulting officers and citizens are immediately set free without bail.

Media Vs. The People:  The War Over Pedophilia.  The media has been working to normalize pedophilia, but the American people keep rejecting it.  Until recently, the pedophilia pushers suffered no serious consequences for their relentless campaign to sexualize children and groom them for adult exploitation.  But the recent indictment of Netflix for distribution of child pornography has changed the dynamics.  A grand jury in Texas has indicted Netflix, a streaming giant with $20 billion in annual revenue, for allegedly promoting "lewd visual material" of a child. [...] Almost unanimously, the major film critics adored the award-winning "Cuties," lavishing praise on it as "extraordinary," "inspired," and "empathetic and analytical."  These arbiters of cultural standards dismissed criticism of the film's sexualization of children as closed-minded tripe from right-wing "pearl-clutchers."  But the American people despised "Cuties" and launched a campaign to cancel Netflix subscriptions.

Why Some People Take Q-Anon's Pedophilia Allegations Seriously.  [Scroll down]  If charges of organized pedophilia at the highest ranks of society are so delusional, then why is Obama-connected Netflix doubling down on its support of child porn?  Why has California created a legal loophole for twenty-four year-olds to engage in "consensual" sodomy and oral sex with fourteen-year-olds in the name of LGBT equality? [...] When these issues were raised during the debates about gay adoption, the constant response we heard from the left was that "children don't need to be raised by their mother and father; they only need to be loved."  If you unpack that logic, you'll see the underlying evil.  Q-Anon has figured out that terrible things happen when adults think all children want their "love" all the time.  Stalking, molestation, grooming, trafficking, and harassment of underage people quickly become normalized when the left reserves the right to say the child wanted whatever strange treatment the adults believed they were entitled to force or press upon the child.

BLM rioters move into rich, liberal suburb as resident complains that they are supporters.  Affluent liberals deceive themselves that they will get a "pass" from violent radical revolutionaries if they sympathize enough with their causes.  The latest group to begin to learn the hard way lives in swing state Wisconsin.

Protesters want to defund police.  Homicides and violence are spiking.  The homicide rate is spiking, a troubled police department is reeling from street demonstrations seeking racial justice and accountability, and the city budget is ravaged by the coronavirus economy.  The push to reshape police departments is occurring in cities across the country, but it is perhaps nowhere more evident than here in Oakland, where veteran activists want to sharply reduce the police budget but much of the broader community is struggling with what that could mean.

NYC: The example America should not follow.  New York City is becoming an economic basket case.  "'We're at war': New York City Faces a Financial Abyss," screams a New York Times headline.  New York City's unemployment rate stands at 16%, double the nation's average.  Yet, even in the midst of a "financial abyss," the animosity of New York's liberal elite remains undeterred in its hostility toward free enterprise and entrepreneurship, the pillars of job creation and economic recovery.  In a latest example, commercial real estate development firms have pulled out of a proposed project, Industry City, that was estimated to bring 20,000 jobs and $100 million in tax revenue to New York City.  After several years of fighting opposition to get approval for rezoning that would have made the project possible, they threw in the towel.

The Art of Propaganda.  An ally of BLM posted a video of herself three months ago.  The young lady ("I'm gonna stab you" to the next person with the "Caucasity" to say "all lives matter") may well represent the majority attitude of our Ivy League — she is a Harvard grad — and of much of the left.  How did this come to pass?  Her intelligence is not small.  It's in the incessant propaganda, coming not only from academia and the schools, but from the mass media — especially television and film.  It's not just the overt message, it's in the subtext.  See a villain on the screen, there's a good chance you'll see an American flag in the background.  Propaganda is exponentially more potent than it was in 1922, when Mein Kampf was written.  The electronic media are pervasive, and their product, entertainment, almost always has a political message.  To a large extent it's not merely the art of propaganda but the propaganda of art.  As for the Harvard grad, even Hitler youth did not exhibit such ice-cold hatred.  She is no longer a free agent.  Her values are "fixed" — they will not change.  Nor will the politics and values of much, if not most, of her generation.  She is the future.

Red states are outperforming blue states economically.  Overall, Democratic-run states, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest, had larger contractions in gross domestic product than Republican-run states in the Plains and the South, according to the latest state GDP data for the second quarter of 2020, released by the Commerce Department on Friday.  Of the 20 states with the smallest decrease in state GDP, 13 were run by Republican governors, while the bottom 25 states with the highest decrease in state GDP were predominantly Democratic-run states.

The Language of Privilege:  I can speak fluent wokese.  [Scroll down]  Or maybe you have by now read about the now-infamous wokese imposition of "Latinx" (pronounced Latin-ex) to name a group of people first designated by a Nixon administration-era census as an ethnicity, and whose members either haven't heard or don't want to be termed by that label rather than the supposedly problematic "Latino" or "Hispanic."  A recent New York Times essay by progressive strategists Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito found that, "Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well.  Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted.  Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color."  But pretend you don't know that.  Keep calling Hispanics people of color.  Use the phrase "people of color" often enough that you are inclined to shorten it to "POC."

Left Wing Governor Of Washington State Freaks Out As Boeing Moves Production To South Carolina.  Jay Inslee, the left wing governor of Washington State, is freaking out because Boeing has decided to move production of its 787 airplane to the more conservative and business friendly South Carolina.  Who can blame Boeing for making such a move, especially if it benefits them financially?  Besides, in Seattle, leaders have shown that they will allow mobs of left wingers to destroy businesses.

A Case Study in Punitive Liberalism.  Never mind small business and retail shops.  Big business in Seattle isn't very happy either.  Boeing announced today [10/1/2020] that it plans to discontinue manufacturing its 787 Dreamliner plane in Washington state and consolidate 787 production in (nonunion) South Carolina.  This shouldn't be a huge surprise to Seattle, given that Boeing already moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago a few years ago.  Let that sink in a moment: although Boeing said they wanted an HQ location closer to their global customer base, you really have to wonder that Chicago would be preferable to Seattle, given the parlous state (and higher taxes) of Illinois.  In other words, this should have been a wake up call for Seattle's political class.  Well, Boeing pulling its 787 production out of Washington isn't sitting well with Washington's dimwit Governor Jay Inslee.

Garbage In Garbage Out.  What is wrong with New York City?  Their streets are lined with garbage from Wall Street to Midtown Manhattan.  [Photos]  Garbage everywhere even though businesses remain closed and half the people normally working there haven't stepped foot in the city for months.

Formerly known as the Ferguson Effect:
US sees 710 additional homicides and 2,800 more shootings, attributed to 'Minneapolis effect'.  With police departments across America under siege, pushed back on their heels by the oft-violent Black Lives Matter movement, the Democratic Party and their media allies, violent crime is "skyrocketing."  That's the assessment of Paul Cassell, a professor at S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, who has dubbed the explosion of violence the "Minneapolis effect."  The professor is the author of a recent research paper titled, "Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities:  The 'Minneapolis Effect' and the Decline in Proactive Policing."  "I think what Minneapolis is seeing is the same thing we're seeing all over the country," Cassell told Fox 9.  "We're seeing a reduction in proactive policing, and as a result of that homicide and shootings are skyrocketing all over the country."

Colonizing Trump country.  90 minutes away from the maddened crowd in DC, the farmers of Rappahannock County and their neighbors live a bucolic life amid rolling hills and mountains.  The 7,252 residents face an invasion as DC residents, who having fouled their nests, seek new territory to destroy.  They are trouble makers who seek to turn the rural county into what they left behind. [...] [Mike] Massie didn't talk to the [Washington] Post.  I don't blame him.  Never talk to a cop without a lawyer, and never talk to a reporter at all.  But the Post reported, "For many who have been here, the objections to the hay bales were the breaking point.  They could tolerate the new wine bar — and the corner store that offers seven kinds of kombucha.  But they would not allow a farmer to be told what kind of sign he could erect on his land."

The Way to Perdition.  Encountering a certain segment of our society's acceptance of burning, looting, and execution of the police, not to mention the outrage prevalent when criminals or simple bad actors get their just desserts when police exercise their duty, I have been challenged to find any rhyme or reason to excuse such actions, not only in the permissiveness our leaders attach to such activity, but the actual encouragement they offer.  Indeed, you can find many who are so completely invested in this mindset to the point they cannot cope emotionally with any pushback or appeal to traditional law, justice, or morality.  Simply put, the traditional moral parameters of good behavior no longer apply. [...] This is simply the cost of doing business in a "woke" society.  Inevitably the chaos will submit to someone's organization, for good or ill.  Possibly, it will lead to even greater oppression and tyranny from a more pervasive, more powerful entity.  And where power alone regulates activity, perdition is the inevitable outcome.  This is the fate of a society that embraces such thinking in the first place.

The Progressive Medusa.  Large swaths of the downtowns of America's large cities — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland — are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable.  Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless.  Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism.  The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse. [...] Stepping over human excrement, accepting that if mugged the assailant will either rarely be caught or if so, released shortly without bail, and resigned that "brick and mortar property" is not properly one's own are all no way to go through life.

Zimmerman woman paralyzed after missing window for urgent medical care during riots.  A 59-year-old Zimmerman woman told 5 Eyewitness News she had an extreme medical emergency May 29 but was delayed getting specialized treatment during Twin Cities riots and is now paralyzed from the waist down.  Retired Minnesota National Guard Master Sgt. Launette Figliuzzi said she had a spinal stroke and needed to be airlifted to a metro hospital that specializes in emergency stroke care, but airspace over the metropolitan area was restricted at the time and major highways were closed as well due to the rioting.

Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense.  Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue.  After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police.  So-called crime experts often concurred.  So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities.  Looting and arson were often ignored.  If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered.  So gun sales have soared.  Some people who never before owned weapons, or even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed.  Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.  According to a recent Gallup poll, most black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence.  Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed.  The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

The War of All Men Against All Men.  [Scroll down]  With few exceptions, our culture has murdered the idea of objective truth, leaving us unable to agree on what is good, right, or true, even as regards fundamental issues.  Most of us, for example, oppose child abuse, but some critics have applauded the lewd film "Cuties" with its sexualized adolescents, and we tell children who are too young to vote, drive a car, or drink a beer that they can decide to change their gender.  Facts have also taken a nosedive in our society.  Look, for instance, at COVID-19.  Were the lockdowns necessary?  What is the actual death rate from the virus?  Why are we still wearing masks?  Has the fallout from this policy been more deadly than the virus?  It's almost impossible to answer such questions objectively, because instead of sticking to facts, we made the virus a political and emotional tennis ball.  Oppose closing schools, for example, and you risk being called a murderer.

America [is] in peril if RBG's SCOTUS seat is not filled before the election.  [Scroll down]  SCOTUS confirmation hearings used to be boring even by C-Span standards.  Senator Bob Dole once remarked that the toughest part of a confirmation hearing was for the Senate committee chairman to be able to "stare straight ahead at the witness while sleeping."  Presidents of both parties were given broad latitude to appoint whoever they liked to the courts and to their cabinet.  Unless a nominee had been guilty of serious malfeasance, they were easily confirmed.  Ideology was never a factor since it was expected that nominees shared the ideology of the president who nominated them.  This all changed in 1987.  Judge Robert Bork would have been the fifth vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.  Democrats decided that the ends justified the means.  Bork had to be personally destroyed.  Leading the charge against Bork were Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden.  Ideology alone became grounds for disqualification.  Democrats declared every liberal nominee to be mainstream and every conservative nominee to be extreme.  After torpedoing Bork, Democrats almost derailed Clarence Thomas.

Minneapolis' Guilty Whites Think BLM Lawn Signs Will Save Them When the Mob Comes.  It's a strange time to be staying in Downtown Minneapolis. [...] If I lacked purpose, I could go for days without seeing a soul, and even chance meetings near elevators or stairwells make people scurry away like frightened rats.  No one comes here anymore.  As I walked back from NoGo Minneapolis yesterday, a man rose from his little group of thieves to follow me as I passed, putting a scarf across his face as he approached to take whatever I had.  He was different from other men in other cities who have done the same, and knew in a heartbeat my reactions mattered in this moment, if I was to walk away unharmed.  This man had nothing to lose.  The streets are eerily empty too.  Its like the day after some kind of apocalypse where shocked survivors venture out to find water, only to quickly scurry away, hugging the outline of buildings in the shadows with their faces down to the curb.  Minneapolis is lost.

Shootings soar in Portland after mayor disbands police gun unit.  Shootings in Portland, Oregon, nearly tripled over the summer after Mayor Ted Wheeler disbanded the city's police gun crimes unit, according to new police data.  The city recorded 223 shootings in July and August, up from 77 over the same period in 2019.  And a little more than halfway through September the city already had 64 shootings, or double the shootings from the same month last year.  The numbers were released last week.

Minneapolis city councilors:  Residents are feeling 'terrorized,' say police 'nowhere to be seen'.  Minneapolis city councilors told the city police chief Tuesday [9/15/2020] that their residents are feeling "terrorized" and say police are "nowhere to be seen" months after the police killing of George Floyd set off protests against police brutality.  The Minneapolis City Council called on Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo to address constituents' reports of increased street racing, carjacking, robberies, assaults and shootings.  The meeting this week came months after the city council unanimously voted to amend the city's charter to allow the city police department to be dismantled.  The proposal, which would need to be voted on as a ballot measure, would replace the police department with a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention, "which will have responsibility for public safety services prioritizing a holistic, public health-oriented approach."

San Francisco's Deathly Compassion.  San Francisco has a serious drug problem, particularly among its homeless population.  Roughly 8,000 people live on the city's sidewalks or in its alleyways, public parks, and playgrounds.  People with needles in their arms and legs, holding glass pipes and lighters, are a regular sight.  Users go limp in doorways and tents, or they career about, dazed and distraught, or angry and violent.  Dealers selling heroin, Fentanyl, methamphetamine, and crack are ubiquitous.  So, too, are the advocates for "harm reduction," which holds that widespread drug use should be accepted but its worst effects mitigated.  Organizations such as the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Harm Reduction Coalition, the Drug Users Union, and even the Department of Public Health, in partnership with The DOPE Project, focus almost exclusively on "safe drug use."  In fact, the Drug Users Union's goal is "to create a safe environment where people can use & enjoy drugs as well as receive services."  This attitude led to today's humanitarian crisis: thousands of people living on San Francisco's streets, languishing in an endless cycle of homelessness and addiction.

Blue States Slammed with Multiple Interlocking Crises.  Black lives (along with all other lives) are now more endangered by increased crime than they were before.  Violent crime is on the rise in the cities that rallied the hardest demanding racial justice — Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Seattle.  These processes are superimposed on economic recession caused by the unnecessary shutdowns of businesses and schools.  The economy — President Trump's greatest achievement — has been hit hard and mercilessly.  [...] While all Democrats-run states went to lockdown, almost half of the Republic states remained opened, with closed states imposing fewer restrictions.  Still, the blue states got hit harder.

'Enter At Your Own Risk!': Texas Police Group Puts Up Billboards Warning Those Entering Austin That City Defunded Police.  People entering Austin, Texas, from Interstate 35 will see two billboards warning them that the city defunded police.  One billboard says, "Warning!  Austin defunded police.  Enter at your own risk!" CBS News reported.  The board is referring to the Austin city council's vote last month to cut the police budget.  The second billboard reads, "Limited support next 20 miles," the outlet reported.  The billboards were put up by the Texas Municipal Police Association, which announced its campaign Wednesday [9/9/2020] on Facebook.

Never-Trumpers Need A Lesson In Basic Math.  [Scroll down]  But a Joe Biden win?  That will harm the entire country.  And the damage will last a lifetime.  If you don't think so, look at the legacy of past Democrats who were able to shove their agendas through.  Now in place for 55 years, Lyndon Johnson's Medicare, Medicaid, and "Great Society" programs account for a third of the federal budget.  (And their fiercest defenders are often Republicans.)  ObamaCare costs close to $100 billion a year (after Republicans betrayed voters and failed to repeal it).  Welfare dependency — another of Johnson's legacies — is the main cause of the disintegration of families and the perpetuation of poverty, despite Republican efforts to mitigate the damage.  For 40 years the Jimmy Carter-created Department of Education has been pouring taxpayer dollars into schools, achieving nothing on standardized tests while massively fueling college tuition inflation.  Liberal judges with lifetime appointments make a mockery of the separation of powers.  The list goes on.

Oscars' woke quota will backfire on Hollywood spectacularly.  According to last February's ratings, 93 percent of us are already not watching the Academy Awards.  Now Oscar is wondering:  How do I whittle down that last 7 percent?  Answer: woke quotas.  That thunk you heard coming out of La-La Land on Tuesday [9/8/2020] was the sound of the Academy grandly planting its face in the sidewalk by announcing it was formally rejecting the pursuit of artistic quality in favor of a byzantine quota system.  Starting with 2024 films, your project can't even be considered for a Best Picture Oscar unless it meets a set of diversity targets of the kind you'd normally expect to see credited to the Oberlin Freshperson Student Social-Justice Initiative & Sustainable Vegan Hemp Co-Operative.  Good news, whoever staged that Rob-Lowe-meets-Snow-White dance number:  You're now the second-most embarrassing thing ever associated with the Academy Awards.

Oscars' Orwellian diversity quota throws out merit.  In the latest act of craven capitulation to the BLM-Antifa mob, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decreed Tuesday [9/8/2020] that no movie can win the top award unless it satisfies a set of genetically and sexually diverse quotas.  For example, lead actors must be from an "underrepresented racial or ethnic group ... Asian, Latinx, Black, Native American, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander."  At least 30 percent of the rest of the cast otherwise must be chosen from at least two of the following victim identities:  women, underrepresented racial or ethnic group, "LGBTQ+" and the disabled.  Or the Academy gets to dictate the content of the movie so that the "main storyline, theme or narrative of the film" must satisfy the same intersectionality requirements on gender, race, sexuality and disability.  And that is just Standard A, one of four labyrinthine prescriptions for creating Academy-sanctioned art.  They all read like satire.  You have to pinch yourself to make sure you're not having some dystopian dream.

Oscars announce that films will have to meet 'representation and inclusion' requirements if they are eligible to win Best Picture.  Actress Kirstie Alley raged at the Oscars' 'dictatorial' new diversity rules last night [9/8/2020] — claiming they were akin to 'telling Picasso what had to be in his [...] paintings'.  The Academy Awards shake-up means films hoping to win Best Picture from 2024 will have to hire more black, female, LGBT or disabled cast and crew or address themes that affect those communities.  Academy chiefs say the rules are intended to 'better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience', but critics accused 'Woke Hollywood' bosses of turning the Oscars into a 'weapon against anyone who disagreed with their politics'.

Liberals figure out a way to make the Oscars even worse.  I realize that many of you will read the title of this column and assume that it's just more fake news.  How could anyone possibly make the Oscars worse than they've been in recent years? [...] From now on, it won't be enough to simply make a good movie, or at least "good" as defined by the Hollywood elite.  Now the prospective nominees for the Best Picture Award will be judged on whether or not the people involved in every aspect of the production are "diverse" enough.  This is apparently Hollywood's latest nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, though we might at least hope that it will include Hispanics, Asians and Indigenous Americans as well.

Insufferable San Francisco.  Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the American city hardly exists at all. [...] I had figured I could stick around forever.  Then I took my daughter to see The Nutcracker.  The two blocks we had to walk from the train station to War Memorial Opera House made a greater impression on my nine-year-old than any magical offering from the SF Ballet.  The city greeted her with the army of cracked nuts, the ubiquitous 'zombies' who aimlessly roam our streets.  The need to be hyperaware of their presence while pirouetting to avoid discarded syringes and human excrement left her depressed and terrified for days.  My daughter refuses to go to the ballet at the War Zone Opera House ever again.

The True Cost of Riots.  A striking case against riots is clearly expressed in the findings of Professor Mary C. King whose research demonstrates "little relationship between regional progress for African Americans and relatively proximate race riots."  Riotous behavior often results in businesses fleeing minority communities, thus depriving residents of employment and income.  Racism is an extremely sensitive matter; however, sensitivity must be tempered by logic.  African Americans have experienced substantial progress over the past century.  Eroding these gains is a possibility if rational adults refrain from correcting misguided activists.  Such was the impact of the race riots of the 1960s.  Examining the effects of civil disorder on small businesses in inner cities, sociologists Howard Aldrich and Albert Reiss found that riots not only inflicted serious property damages but in the long term they made it prohibitive to operate in inner cities, hence driving up insurance costs.  As a result, businesses migrated to nurturing environments.  Low-income residents are the major beneficiaries of entrepreneurship in the inner city, so when emotions trump logic and businesses exit these communities, the losers are poor black people.

New York Had It Coming.  NYC's streets are now too dangerous and too disturbing for normal folks to tolerate.  If they're not being attacked, beset, robbed, or murdered, they're being disgusted.  The streets are the problem that must be fixed before we can consider a resurrection for NYC. The psychotics, thugs, panhandlers, loiterers, tent campers, muggers, and everyone else making life in the city a trial need to be removed and never tolerated again.  New York City was America's premier metropolis.  It should be reserved for "movers and shakers," ne'er-do-wells should reside elsewhere.  Last year when hoodlums started dousing NYC cops with buckets of water and little was done about it, NYC's fate was sealed.  Giuliani would never have allowed the streets of NYC to descend into the chaos that de Blasio has let happen; Rudy would have stopped it cold.  If New York is to be revived, then a new policy of zero tolerance for bad behavior must be instituted.  Panhandling, public urination and defecation, nudity, sex in the streets, loitering, malingering, tent encampments, etc. should no longer be tolerated.  If New Yorkers aren't willing to forbid such things, forget about the city coming back.

Don't Be a Victim of Democrat Abuse and Voter Endangerment.  If you have been surviving in a pocket of America where Democrats have forced you into unemployment over a virus that is proving less lethal by the day, robbed your kids of an education while using teachers' unions as political weapons, turned your elderly parents' nursing home into a death camp for disease transmission, fire-bombed your favorite restaurant or neighborhood drugstore because you've been deemed insufficiently "woke" and irredeemably racist, and now deprived you of any sports or entertainment shows that don't first take a moment to tell you how awful and evil you are, then you are a victim of Democrat abuse and voter endangerment.  American cities didn't kill themselves, after all.  Democrats did that.  All this mayhem and violence in the streets — the Democrats built that, too.  Democrats have had an absolute monopoly on the way most American cities are governed for fifty to a hundred years.  They run those cities' police departments.  They control the national news media housed in those cities.  They sit on the boards of all the "woke" corporations that fuel their wealth.  They've taken over the sports leagues and replaced entertainment with sermons from the perpetually aggrieved.  They have the backing of the Chamber of Commerce, an organization that prefers Wall Street to Main Street and cashing checks from Chinese communists to aiding American workers.  And the Democrats are Hollywood.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best steps down, claims cuts left her 'destined to fail'.  Carmen Best, the first Black police chief in Seattle's history, left her post Wednesday, saying on her way out that the city council's police budget cuts had put her in a "position destined to fail," according to a report.  Best, 55, announced her resignation Aug 10, after the council made good on its promise to approve sweeping proposals that would slash the police department budget by $4 million and cut as many as 100 officers from the force.  "I believe 100% that they were putting me in a position destined to fail.  Cutting a police department that already had low staffing numbers, that was already struggling to keep up with the demand," Best told NPR on Wednesday.  "How are we going to provide for adequate public safety in that environment?"

The coming blue-city exodus.  While the election isn't until November 3, it looks like lots of people and businesses are, in a sense, "voting" early — with their feet.  In pre-pandemic January, I wrote here about the blue-state exodus in which thousands of blue-state residents, fed up with high taxes, heavy regulations and "woker-than-thou" policies, are fleeing the sinking blue ships and moving to red states.  Now it appears we are seeing a blue-city exodus as well.  Begin with the fact that virtually every large city in the country is run by liberals.  World Population Review lists the 20 most liberal U.S. cities, with San Francisco leading the way, followed by Washington, DC, Seattle, Oakland, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit and New York City.  Chicago comes in at 11 and Portland at 12.

Must See Video Shows Democrats Continually Called for Uprisings and Violence.  Democrats and the media have made a sudden turn the last few days.  After months of excusing the riots and even actively encouraging them, the new narrative is that it's all Trump's fault.  They ignore that Trump has offered assistance to Portland, for example, and has been viciously rebuffed even as the city continues to suffer chaos.  They also ignore that when Gov. Evers did accept Trump's help in Kenosha, the violence dwindled almost immediately.  No matter, though.  The media believe they are the vanguards of information and the Democrats know they have them in their pocket.  So you get insanity like this must-see video which succinctly shows just who has really been stoking the flames.  [Video clip]

Cultural Suicide Is Painless.  It is not all that hard to blow up a culture.  You can do it in a summer if you haven't much worry about others.  When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.  You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive.  But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.  You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour.  But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins — to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Eviction Moratoriums Cause Big Problems for Mom-and-Pop Landlords.  Mom-and-pop landlords across the United States are coming under increasing pressure as a patchwork of regulations and eviction moratoriums passed by the federal government, states, counties, and municipalities in the wake of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus crisis have strongly curtailed their ability to enforce their property rights.  In addition, The Epoch Times has received reports that a small number of tenants are abusing moratoriums by choosing to withhold payment of their rent — and in some cases without claiming coronavirus-related hardship.

Portland mayor piously turns down Trump's offer of police aid, finds his apartment's lobby overrun by protestors.  Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler, has already made his city a punchline internationally, vacuously mouthing the platitudes of Black Lives Matter, and watching mobs riot and burn his city for 92 days straight, with no effort to contain it.  Democrats bristle at Republican efforts to pin rioting on poor Democrat rule, but are cut off at the pass when Portland is brought up.  Nobody can argue about the incompetence there.  Even the people in Minneapolis console themselves with the thought that as bad as their city is, at least it's not Portland.

New Yorkers keep moving out of the city to suburbs, other states.  The move is on — to leave New York City.  The exodus that began at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, with many New Yorkers departing to their beach and country homes, has continued unabated as more leave for good, according to city moving companies overwhelmed by the avalanche of would-be expats.  "People are fleeing the city in droves," says Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, who has been working nonstop since the city began Phase 1 of its reopening in June.  Salahie said 90 percent of the moves are to the suburbs and mostly families with kids worried about the school year.  He's packed people out of neighborhoods all over Manhattan.

California Apocalypto.  Note the synergism of the California postmodern apocalypse:  The hotter it gets, the more fires burn on ecological fuel and hillside natural "compost," the smokier the air becomes, the less efficiently California's solar pathway to the future generates, the more power outages ensue, the more real people are put in danger from either being incinerated by fire or suffocated by smoke or boiled inside without air conditioning.  Last week, I asked an elderly patient at the allergy clinic whether, in the 108-degree heat, he preferred to stay outside to breathe smoke and haze, or stay inside his uncooled apartment.  He gave a novel answer:  He didn't care about the power outages since he couldn't pay the exorbitant electricity charges anyway to turn on his air conditioner.  And he added that, in California these days, you can't tell whether mask wearers are fighting the virus, the smoke, or the police.

Portlanders in Need Had to Fend for Themselves, and You Won't Believe Just One Night's Crime.  You've seen the violence in Portland.  You've witnessed the chaos caught on tape.  The cops have their hands full.  So what happens, then, when people outside the chaos need police?  It turns out they have to go it alone.  As reported by The Daily Caller, on Sunday night, 35 officers had to abandon patrol duty after a riot was declared.  That led to 80 other emergency calls being put on hold.  [Video clip]  On Monday [8/24/2020], the Portland Police Bureau issued a statement detailing the night's insanity.  Twenty-three people ages 19 [to] 44 were arrested, for crimes including assaulting a public safety officer, interfering with a peace officer, and escape in the third degree.

Why I Am No Longer a Social Worker.  A social worker who wants to continue working had better understand that he or she has to support all aspects of LGBT platforms, has to facilitate partial-birth abortions, and has to eliminate any and all references to God — no matter what he or she believes.  Alternative therapies are acceptable so long as they are goddess-driven and support mandatory vaccination.  All therapies have to pass their "ethical" (i.e. political) means testing... and they all revolve around the exaltation of the Self, even when that "self" has the emotional stability of packing peanuts.  The essential problem is this:  the Self can only be exalted in this manner once the Creator Himself has been ejected.  And that is precisely what has happened... slowly and cunningly, but steadily.

Reclaiming Our Culture from the Left.  [Scroll down]  But the education most of the rioters have received has made them abjectly incapable of thinking rationally and evaluating claims on the basis of their logical coherence and supporting evidence.  No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of evidence is going to convince most of the rioters that their rage is based on false premises, because they have been carefully educated throughout their lives to feel rather than think, and to believe that America is a nation of deep injustice with a shameful history and an equally condemnable present.  It doesn't matter that the claims that the rioters and their defenders are making are false.  It doesn't matter that police brutality affects people of all races.  It doesn't matter that thoroughgoing civil rights legislation has made "systemic racism" a thing of the distant past.  The rioters know America is evil because they have been taught it all their lives by virtually every authority they have encountered, and those authorities have also taught them that those who tell them otherwise are stupid, contemptible, and operating out of ulterior motives.  This is true of the establishment media as well as the educational system — not to mention the corporate culture, the entertainment industry, and more.

Multiple Portland companies plan to move out of downtown office spaces because ongoing BLM protests have made the area 'unsafe'.  A number of companies based in downtown Portland are set to vacate or sell their offices because on-going protests in the city against police brutality have led to 'unsafe' conditions in the area, reports suggest.  Activists have taken to the city streets for the last 82 consecutive nights to demonstrate under the banner of Black Lives Matter, but some of the rallies have descended into chaos, resulting in violent clashes with police or widespread acts of vandalism.

The Thin Veneer of American Civilization.  Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis.  It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.  The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb.  Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America.  Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.  At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation's aneurysm.  That is, after the "recovery," it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

New York City is 'dead forever,' according to this proud New Yorker.  Will the city that never sleeps ever wake up?  Not according to James Altucher, a best-selling author and former hedge-fund manager (and a former MarketWatch columnist), who says that New York City is "dead forever" as its residents come to grips with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic and what it means for the fate of the Big Apple.  "I love NYC.  When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true.  Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me.  So much personality, so many stories," he wrote in a blog post explaining why his temporary relocation might become more permanent.

How Race Politics Burns Out.  [Scroll down]  The kind of racialized violence now taking place reflects what historian Fred Siegel called "the riot ideology", which has been deleterious to the progress of African Americans.  The rioting in the 1960s weakened urban economies and led to devastating losses for minority property owners and businesses.  Even today many areas burned down in the 1960s in Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have never recovered.  Indeed despite massive expenditures to redress huge past inequities, high-poverty areas in cities have grown steadily, doubling in population between 1980 and 2018.  Looting and mayhem, long-term, don't work.  After the 1992 riots, there were pledges of massive corporate and government support for south Los Angeles.  Now, almost three decades later, the area, site of two of the worst riots in American history, has experienced a growing gap with the rest of the county in terms of homeownership, income and educational attainment.  The more recent disorders also are unlikely to spark much long-term inner-city investment.

Hollywood Apocalypse.  Gold's Gym has become synonymous with the Hollywood Dream. [...] Yet today Gold's sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.  A makeshift tent city made up of flapping tarpaulins and cardboard boxes surrounds the gym on all sides.  Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies — all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.  Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes.  TV bulletins are filled with horror stories from across the city; of women being attacked during their morning jog or residents returning home to find strangers defecating in their front gardens.

The State of Our Cities That Our Media Is Hiding From You.  [Quoting Mike Doran:]  I've been exchanging messages with friends about what what's happening in our cities:  NY, Philadelphia and LA especially.  A lot of disturbing things are not making the news.  Even Republicans aren't drawing attention to it.  Here's a message from a friend about life in NY today:  "Here's my neighborhood, Mike:  An elderly man, enjoying dinner w/his wife at an outdoor restaurant, punched in the face.  A woman waiting for the subway to come stabbed in the back.  An older neighbor pausing to catch his breath told to pay two dollars in protection money or get [...] off that particular street corner.  This is just the ten block radius from where I live in the last six days."  Other friends from NY talk about shattered business districts, drugstores with locked shelves, and hundreds of homeless people and parolees, including sex offenders, being moved into hotels on the Upper West Side adjacent to schools and playgrounds, which are filled with needles again like in the 1970s.  Friends in Philadelphia report large homeless encampments in the city center and being robbed at gunpoint.  Friends in LA talk about squatters taking over empty homes in professional class neighborhoods whose residents fantasize about emigrating to Canada.

Retail and Restaurants Flee Democrat-Run New York Forever.  Crime, taxes, disease, and an anti-science approach to social distancing have chased a number of big retailers and restaurateurs out of New York forever, reports the far-left New York Times.  "In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good," per the Times, which adds other big box retailers, like Victoria's Secret and the Gap, have chosen to reopen in other states while their Manhattan locations remain shuttered.

New York City's Downward Spiral.  On a return visit this weekend to the Upper West Side neighborhood where I've lived for more than a quarter of a century, the fear in the air was palpable.  The population seemed to be reduced by about half.  New Yorkers steer around each other on the sidewalks, some of them walking in the street to avoid passing near a stranger.  A lady declined to ride the elevator with me and my children.  People are especially terrified of the subway, whose ridership is down 80 percent from normal levels.  Friday night, at a time when there would ordinarily be 50 or more people riding on any given car of the 1 train, there were about seven.  Downtown was morose, grim, broken.  Graffiti was much in evidence.

A mad rush for the exits as New York City goes down the tubes.  It's not just a few Upper West Siders who are fleeing New York:  Moving companies say they're swamped with calls from residents looking to ditch the city — even though the COVID crisis has waned.  One likely reason:  The virus was but the last straw; New Yorkers are fed up with the shootings and lootings, homelessness on the streets, sub-par online schools, sky-high taxes and the sheer obliviousness of pols like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  On Sunday [8/9/2020], The [New York] Post highlighted families who've given up on the Upper West Side — now teeming with junkies, the homeless, convicts and others — and are headed for greener pastures outside Gotham.

In Colorado, the police are canceling themselves.  The state of Colorado has been experiencing the same twin dilemmas that have been plaguing much of the country for the past several months and this has had a rather drastic impact on police forces across the board.  They're dealing with the pandemic like everyone else, and police officers have jobs that put them in constant contact with the public.  At the same time, protests and demonstrations blaming the police for many of society's ills have led the state to eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement officers.  This puts them a greater personal risk of civil suits or criminal charges if an arrest of an uncooperative suspect goes awry.  What's the upshot of all of this been?  Far fewer interactions with the public and a significant increase in police officers retiring early or simply quitting and seeking new types of employment.

When Government Encourages Victimhood, You Have an Alternative.  According to a report from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department has been reduced 10 percent since May and the department "could lose as much as a third of its workforce by the end of the year."  Some on the city council have sought to abolish the police department.  With this development, there has been a corresponding spike in violent crime.  Minnesota Public Radio reported that as of August 4 Minneapolis had experienced more than twice as many homicides in 2020 as during the same period in 2019.  Local CBS affiliate WCCO reported that through July 26 robberies in 2020 were up 36 percent over the same time period in 2019.

Insurance payouts fall far short of what's needed to rebuild Twin Cities.  Though Gov. Tim Walz has estimated that total losses will exceed $500 million, insurance companies have informed the Minnesota Department of Commerce that they will be covering a maximum of $240 million in riot-related damage.  In the 5-mile stretch of Minneapolis that sustained the heaviest destruction, uninsured losses among local small-business owners are at least $200 million, according to the Lake Street Council.

How Therapists Became Gods.  [Scroll down]  The youth suicide rate — 14.6 per 100,000 — appears to be the highest it's been since the government began collecting such statistics in 1960.  How can that be when we are surrounded with opportunities for self-gratification and encouraged by countless "authorities" to avail ourselves of them?  Why are we so sad, so lonely and isolated when there are so many socialization programs in our schools and everyone is so "connected" over social media?  Why the misery when you can even choose a new gender?  Or even marry your own pet?  (Truly, in California "whatever" has taken on a fantastical new meaning.)  If there is no longer a God, if His moral code is irrelevant, and if self-esteem boosting therapy is the answer (and the self-actualized therapist the oracle), why do so many people feel so empty even after years and years on the couch?

De Blasio's plan to destroy New York City is working wonderfully.  It's no longer news that, once the Wuhan virus descended on New York City, the rich did what rich people always have down when plague appears:  they packed up their goods and their money and left for comfortable country homes where they could wait out the disease.  The New Yorkers who remained in the city ranged from the upper-middle-class down to the homeless.  Mayor Bill de Blasio then had the bright idea to bring these two classes together, something that's working out about as well as you would expect.  It's also a preview of coming attractions for the rest of America should Biden win the White House and Democrats take full control of Congress.

Democrats Are Destroying Their Own Cities, and it all Makes Perfect Sense.  America's cities are dying, and no one in the Democrat Party seems to want to do anything to stop it from happening.  In fact, it is Democrats who are actively managing the chaos and destruction.  Ask yourselves why that is the case.  After all, the big cities represent almost the entire base of power for the Democrat Party.  That's why the county-by-county presidential election maps always look like a sea of red with little blue islands sprinkled onto it.  Most of those islands are the counties where the big cities are.  The sea of red is where they aren't.  This isn't complicated.  Yet, right now, as we sit isolated in our homes today thinking about which useless, virtue-signaling mask we will wear when we venture out to the grocery store, Democrat mayors and city councils all over the country are willingly presiding over the complete destruction of their centers of power.

Trucking Company Owner:  Cities That Defund Police Are in for a Big Surprise.  Cities that decide to cut their police funding could be cutting their own supply lines, too.  That was the message a trucking executive carried to "Fox & Friends First" on Wednesday [8/5/2020], and it's something urban politicians — in the thrall of Black Lives Matter rioters and antifa anarchists — should be seriously considering unless they think citizens can start growing their own food.  Because if it's not safe for truckers to carry goods — they just might not do it.  And trucking companies won't be willing to risk the business.

Minneapolis Downtown Council says up to 10,000 jobs could be lost over 'public safety concerns'.  Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, told [KSTP] concerns over public safety and the future of the city's police department have some companies looking to leave downtown.  "Almost overnight the brakes went on in downtown," Cramer said.  "The point where it all started to change was the day the City Council announced it supported defunding the police department."  Cramer said in a six-week period from that day there were 45 companies that indicated they were either moving out of downtown or were a business that was no longer moving downtown, and there were 13 companies in that group with 100 or more employees and one with 600.

Dozens Of Minneapolis Businesses Consider Leaving, Cite Possibility Of Police Being Dismantled.  Dozens of Minneapolis businesses are considering leaving downtown, citing concerns about the possibility of the police department being dismantled, CBS Minnesota reported.  A survey by the Downtown Council shows 45 business owners say they are considering leaving downtown Minneapolis because of the lack of people working and socializing in the area and also the idea that the police department could be dismantled, CBS reported.  One of the surveyed businesses that is considering leaving employs 600 people, deepening fears that the city could take another major blow to employment, which was hit by the coronavirus pandemic.  The Council did not divulge which businesses are considering leaving.

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong.  I spoke last week to executives, TV hosts and election analysts across leading American newsrooms, and I was struck by the blithe confidence among some top managers and hosts, who generally said they've handled complicated elections before and can do so again.  And I was alarmed by the near panic among some of the people paying the closest attention — the analysts and producers trying, and often failing, to get answers from state election officials about how and when they will count the ballots and report results.  "The nerds are freaking out," said Brandon Finnigan, the founder of Decision Desk HQ, which delivers election results to media outlets.  "I don't think it's penetrated enough in the average viewer's mind that there's not going to be an election night.  The usual razzmatazz of a panel sitting around discussing election results — that's dead," he said.

Woke Mobs Demand You Must Now Explain Why You Stand For The Anthem.  Kneeling for the national anthem at sporting events used to be the occasional episode of player activism protesting the United States as an evil racist empire.  Amid the new 21st century woke revolution however, kneeling has become a key signifier for players and teams to declare which side of the culture wars one sits on.  It's those who love America versus those who hate it, the latter of which despises the American flag and all that it represents as a relic of white supremacy that must be condemned.  Those who still stand out of respect for the nation's ideals and the uniformed men and women who protect it are now the outliers forced to defend themselves in a new age of no dissent, because dissent is racist, racism is oppression, oppression is violence, and violence is not to be tolerated, even if it isn't real.

Antifa Is the Natural Product of Our Educational System.  [Scroll down]  For decades, our schools have been self-replicating machines, preaching to college students, directly or indirectly, the left-wing gospel according to Howard Zinn (and the Frankfurt School and so forth) and sending them out in turn to preach this junior varsity, critical theory Marxism themselves as teachers at whatever level at all manner of institutions throughout the country.  The youngest of those levels is perhaps the most dangerous because it's the most impressionable.  Antifa members are therefore only doing what they have been taught all along, getting rid of a cancer called the United States.  This connection between Antifa and the teaching profession is so profound that some insist the majority of those hidden behind the black masks are indeed teachers.  Others, needless to say including the liberal media, have denied this.  It's impossible to know for certain.  Antifa, like some Islamic terror groups, doesn't have a formal leadership structure; why would they need it?  They also don't keep records.  This, however, is probably a case where the cliché about smoke and fire applies.  Whether Antifa is 50 percent teachers or 20 percent teachers, it's a lot of teachers.

The Bus Never Stops.  First they told us that homosexuality was normal and that there was no need for anyone to be afraid of the ramifications of treating them as normal, even though only about 2 percent of the population are homosexual — giving new meaning to the word "normal."  About 1 percent of babies are born with a heart defect, but we don't call that normal.  Doubters said that treating as normal people as different as homosexuals would have consequences.  First thing — or maybe second thing — they would want to get "married" and have their "marriages" treated as normal. [...] What's next?  What's wrong, really, with having children watch pornography?  It's everywhere, and there's essentially no effort to eliminate it.  How do we know that?  Because there is no serious effort by Republicans to stop it.  And if children can watch it, why shouldn't they do it?  What's the effective difference?  And what's wrong, really, with sex with children, so long as there's an adult in the room?  "Don't be absurd," you say.  But you said that years ago when homosexuality was normalized.  And again when homosexual marriage was normalized.  Now when polyamorous relationships are normalized, are you saying that we have reached the terminus:  that the bus stops here?  Please.  The bus never stops.  Unless someone stops it.

This did not happen to America overnight.  These days, one of the most frequent laments of conservatives is that so much damage has been inflicted on our nation in such a short amount of time.  With the economy humming along and the nation brimming with optimism as recently as the spring of this year, it seems that our world has been transformed almost overnight into an unrecognizable cauldron of chaos, despair, and even death.  However, while the Wuhan virus, the riots, and the raging lawlessness of the last five months are a major calamity, they are really only the inevitable culmination of attacks being waged against America for several decades.  The level of these attacks has been increasing in intensity and audacity the entire time.  But although Americans found it too easy to retreat from the mayhem for much of that period, the boldness and extent of the leftist onslaught have increased to the point that no more room for surrender exists.

The Trans Cult.  A few years ago, three things happened in the course of a single week in my life.  First, a friend told me about a letter her daughter, then 11, had received from her closest summer-camp friend.  The girl had some big news:  She was now a boy.  Then, another mother told me she and her daughter were sitting at a synagogue lunch when they were joined by a man who "presented" as a woman.  And I received a lengthy email from my daughter's swim coach at the local YWCA — a man whose missives had never included anything besides practice times and requests for volunteer timers — explaining that someone on the team had come out as transgender; the coach attached an entire Washington Post article explaining how we should treat the child and the proper pronouns we should use to refer to "them."

Nearly half of 258 surveyed police agencies' budgets [have been] cut: report.  A soon to be released survey of 258 police departments nationwide shows almost half have had their budgets cut amid calls for police to be defunded despite increases in gun violence and otherwise violent crime in some parts of the country, according to USA Today.  The outlet was first to report that the Police Executive Research Forum publication, which is expected to be released in the coming days, shows cuts in the police budgets are largely being made to training, equipment.  Protesters are pushing to "defund the police" over the death of George Floyd and other Black Americans killed by law enforcement.

Let Portland and Seattle burn.  [Scroll down]  My theory regarding this flight from reality in Portland and Seattle (where I lived for a couple of years) is that those cities have long suffered from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis San Francisco.  The big city to the south makes Portland and Seattle feel like a timber mill and a fishing harbor.  Every policy decision is consequently animated with the unspoken sentiment, "What would San Fran do?  Let's outdo that!"  Congratulations, Portland and Seattle, you've managed to outdo even San Francisco in violence, vagrancy and anarchy.  Now you can live in the festering filth and feces of sociopaths who have nothing but cynical contempt for your self-indulgent self-righteousness.  But at least you feel really good about yourselves.

We're at War.  Attacking Trump's Tweet in the NYT While the Democrats Foment Riots & Ruin to Defeat Him is Treason.  [Scroll down]  The people trying to destroy us stopped caring about the rules ages ago.  They faked Russian cyber-espionage against the Clinton Campaign to discredit WikiLeaks revelations about her corruption and incompetence.  They tried to frame Trump as part of their phony Russian plot.  They used the FBI to illegally spy on Trump's campaign.  They gave Robert Mueller power and an unlimited budget to destroy Trump and as many of his allies as possible.  They organized and promoted Christine Blasey Ford's perjurous hoax.  They tried to remove Trump from office for his patently reasonable attempt to get Ukrainian authorities to investigate Joe Biden's obvious corruption.  They've caused an economic catastrophe that could very well wind up being worse than the Great Depression, gaslit the entire nation into months of debilitating fear and panic, and caused the deaths of countless Americans by lying and withholding information about a virus that all the data literally says is less harmful than the flu.  They've fomented riots across the nation and caused the murder of American police officers and ordinary citizens alike by promoting the poisonous false narrative that American cops start their day fervently hoping they'll get a chance to kill someone who isn't white.  And that's just the egregious, defamatory and destructive mass deceptions the Democrats and their allies in the corporate press have perpetrated.

The Implosion of the Left's Language Circus.  Right now, the left's power consists mostly of power over the English language.  The left has sway over education, the media, law, arts, and entertainment, especially in English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand.  Liberal-dominated industries shape the understanding and use of words.  Since the English-speaking world defines discourse for the whole world and the English-speaking left defines English words, the left now has global hegemony.  For two reasons, I believe that this will not last very long.  First, the history of Spanish, French, and German shows that language communities reach their downfall when one party's prevalence distorts communication.  Second, the three most prominent left-wing slogans in recent history — "it gets better," "me too," and "black lives matter" — cancel each other.  Eventually, skeptics will notice, or the folly will cause a social disaster.

Seattle police chief:  New limits on anti-protest gear will mean 'adjusted' law enforcement.  Seattle's police officers will now respond to protests and rioting through "adjusted deployment" methods because of a new city law that bans them from using some crowd-control tools, the city's police chief said Friday [7/24/2020].  The new law, which takes effect Sunday, "bans Seattle Police officers the use of less lethal tools, including pepper spray that is commonly used to disperse crowds that have turned violent," police Chief Carmen Best said in a statement.  "Simply put," Best added, "the legislation gives officers NO ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large, violent crowd."

Downtown Portland businesses, derailed by pandemic, say protests present a new challenge.  Restaurants and retailers throughout Oregon have struggled to stay afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic.  Some businesses have already closed permanently.  Others say their futures are uncertain.  But downtown Portland business owners say they are facing unique challenges as they try to recover from the economic devastation brought on by the pandemic.  Many point to the raucous protests downtown and the controversial federal response, which have put the city atop national headlines.  While most of downtown is tranquil, and nearly all confrontations between protestors and police take place late at night, the nightly protests have given Portland a reputation for upheaval that businesses say is keeping shoppers away.  Office buildings remain empty because of the pandemic and tourists have yet to return, taking away a large customer base for many downtown businesses.

The Editor says...
The tourism industry in Portland and Seattle is finished, for at least a decade.  The governors and the mayors should have thought of that possibility before letting rioters have their way in the streets, night after night, week after week.

These are the innocuous words progressives want to ban you from using.  Trying desperately not to get canceled, bosses are trying to think ahead about what words might create a fake Duraflame firestorm of anger, and preemptively ruling ordinary words out of bounds.  At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word "looters," which has been used many times in the paper, now has "a pejorative and racist connotation" and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should "talk to your immediate supervisor."  Translation:  Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed.  So what to call looters?  Non-paying shoppers?  That doesn't quite tell the story:  Ordinary shoplifters don't usually bust up all the windows.  How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos?  Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

Cancel Culture's Dual Meaning Is a War for America's Soul.  The rabid Left is actively rewriting American history as being inherently bad from the start, as it has no excuse to change our culture if there is anything arguably good about it.  Therefore, our values, historical narrative, monuments, and anything that makes us uniquely American must be disparaged and destroyed.  Tyrants throughout history have practiced cancel culture by forcibly suppressing opposition to their authoritarianism with methods similar to what the American Left is using today.  In 2001, Americans were horrified when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues along Afghanistan's silk road despite objections from 54 Islamic countries.  Equal outrage occurred in 2015 when ISIS destroyed statues and other irreplaceable artifacts dating back to Iraq's seventh-century BC culture.  Nazis stole countless billions in art, historical, and religious treasures from Jewish families to eliminate Jewish culture.

The cleanup from the riots in Denver isn't going quickly, or cheaply.  We've spent plenty of time over the past month or two looking at the seemingly endless series of riots consuming many of the nation's larger cities.  While the violence, injuries, assaults and even deaths capture many of the headlines, the staggering amount of property damage taking place is also a part of the equation.  The question is, what do these cities do in the aftermath when downtown storefront windows have all been replaced with graffiti-covered plywood sheets, walls and roads are festooned with paint and lights, statues and other public property has been destroyed?  That's a problem that the City of Denver has been wrestling with for quite a while now.  When the worst of the riots first broke out in the Mile High City, the community and the government teamed up to try to keep up with repairs.  They no doubt hoped that the worst of the rioting would fade quickly and order would be restored.  That hasn't happened, however.  Cleanup efforts have been stymied by repeating offenses and the costs have been spiraling out of control.

Goodbye, Washington DC.  [Scroll down]  I did my part, too.  My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money.  Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay.  And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees.  I paid taxes on things the government deemed "bad" for me, like alcohol and cigarettes; taxes on services which organized labor deemed "bad" for them, like rideshare.  I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax.  Lots of income tax.  All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city.  City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others.  That was the tacit pact.  And DC broke it.

Why This Revolution Isn't Like the '60s.  The '60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music, and high divorce rates to the war on poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action, and race/gender/ethnic college curricula. [...] A half-century after the earlier revolution, today's cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous.  Government and debt have grown.  Social activism is already institutionalized in hundreds of newer federal programs.  The "Great Society" inaugurated a multitrillion-dollar investment in the welfare state.  Divorce rates soared.  The nuclear family waned.  Immigration, both legal and illegal, skyrocketed.  Thus, America is far less resilient, and a far more divided, indebted, and vulnerable target than it was in 1965.

The accelerating collapse of St. Louis, the most violent city in America.  St. Louis, famously known as the Gateway to the West, has become America's reigning murder capital and a symbol of urban decay — trends accelerated in recent years by a soft-on-crime mayor and a social justice-minded prosecutor.  Last month, the images of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both armed, confronting protesters in front of their restored mansion in the historic Central West End district of downtown St. Louis previewed what a defund-the-police era may look like.  In the aftermath of George Floyd's death in police custody in Minneapolis, St. Louis, like other American cities, faced a crisis of public order.  Businesses were burned to the ground, and looters roamed freely.  Four St. Louis police officers were shot in one night.  Civic unrest was so widespread that first responders took nearly 30 minutes to reach a 7-Eleven set aflame by rioters.  The city's elected leaders have seemingly abandoned the police.  St. Louis's current condition reflects a decades-long tumble from growth and prosperity to decline and disorder.

Harris Faulkner presses Marie Harf to name a single GOP-run city in chaos: 'It's a yes or no question'.  Fox News' Harris Faulkner challenged network contributor Marie Harf to name a Republican-run city that is currently under siege by rioters during an "Outnumbered" segment on Thursday [7/23/2020].  The discussion began with co-host Dagen McDowell ticking off a list of shootings in Chicago, long a Democratic stronghold, just in the past few days as the panel discussed Mayor Lori Lightfoot's decision to accept federal assistance in bringing order to chaotic parts of the city, a reversal of her earlier position.  "What if it works in Chicago?  What if the police in that city can stop the daily murders?" McDowell said before ticking off a list of shootings and killings in just the past few days.  "What if this partnership actually works?" she added, decrying the use by some so-called "peaceful protesters" who "carry Molotov cocktails, metal pipes and hammers — is that where we are in this nation?"

One Nation Under Anarcho-Tyranny.  The America you grew up in is not the America we live in now. [...] It's not "socialism" or "communism" under which we suffer.  Our dangerously chaotic, selectively oppressive predicament is more accurately described as "anarcho-tyranny."  The late conservative columnist Sam Francis first coined the term in 1992 to diagnose a condition of "both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes."  The "criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent," Francis expounded, is achieved in such a state through: "exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation; the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through 'sensitivity training' and multiculturalist curricula; 'hate crime' laws; gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally; and a vast labyrinth of other measures."

Chicago Police Statistics Destroy Black Lives Matter Narrative.  Last week in Chicago, a protest of sorts obediently marched to the tune of hackneyed charges of systemic injustice.  The tired narrative droned on about bad policing, police targeting of the black community, and too much jail or prison time.  This kept the crowd from considering alternatives to their afternoon work, such as offering a token of gratitude to thankless peacekeepers in their own backyard, the murder capital of America.  One wonders if they know that out of the 560 homicides, 475 victims were black, killed not by the police or whites, but by other blacks.  By all means, protest.  But when people complain about the system being rigged, they need to remember they voted for their system, and they've been voting for the same system for quite a while.  The mayoral offices have been run by Democrats since before the Great Depression, which means only about 2 million out of 350 million total Americans were alive the last time the city voted for a Republican.  Most recently, Obama acolyte Rahm Emanuel helmed the city between 2011 and 2019, and currently a woman by the name of Lori Lightfoot, whose sole victory in the role comes from being the first openly gay, black mayor of the town, presides over the carnage.

Trump Has Already Won the 2020 Election.  Given the polls, you would think anyone positing Donald Trump has already won the 2020 election was some kind of blithering idiot — and maybe I am.  (I've been called worse.)  But I can't help but think that in current conditions the polls are not only not worth the paper they're printed on, digital or otherwise, they're about as accurate as a thermometer run over by a six-wheeler.  No one sensible is talking about their political allegiance these days in public — especially to an anonymous pollster.  Instead, they're buying guns, in record numbers.  Why wouldn't they?  Calling 911 has become about as useful as calling tech support for a transistor radio run over by the same six-wheeler.  The destroyed statues are the least of it.  They're inanimate.  The actual people of Seattle, Portland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and on and on are living a nightmare.  Violence stalks the streets of all our major cities whose murder rates are going up stratospherically.  (As I type this, the news is reporting 9 more shot in D.C.)  Have there ever been remotely as many stores and businesses smashed, many still not operating, from the Atlantic to the Pacific?  America isn't in the midst of a civil war.  It's in the midst of a national meltdown with the banana-brained neo-Marxists of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, stoned like sophomores (if that) on Foucault or some other self-important "critical theorist," leading the way to oblivion and mutual hatred (actually a return to tribalism).

Portland Goes To Hell:  The Death Of An American City.  Portland, Oregon, was once known as the quintessentially nice Northwestern city.  Its nickname, "The Rose City," was given to it by a Baptist group that held a convention there over a century ago.  Sadly, today, riot-riven Portland smells like anything but roses.  The city has been the locus of nonstop violent protests for 51 days and counting.  And really, calling them protests is incorrect:  They are acts of outright rebellion, with many participants openly calling for the dismantling of the United States. [...] Who's behind all this?  Antifa and Black Lives Matter, of course.  But they aren't the only ones.  There are lots of other leftists of various affiliations agitating the crowds. [...] This is part of a pattern of how the left works:  Destroy the rule of law, the backbone of our free republic.  Intimidate ordinary citizens into silence.  Then support and elevate rule by power of unelected street thugs in Antifa and BLM.

Here's what I saw in the first half of 2020.  [Scroll down] 
8. Liberals worked hard to manufacture "social unrest," report on it as if it were spontaneous, and "defund the police."  Libs think the solution to a breakdown in law & order is less law & order.
9. Liberals evidently figured out this "social unrest" they were manufacturing from nothing, had an effect on the election in their favor.  They may have figured this out before they started manufacturing it.  At any rate, the places run by liberals began to make silly concessions to the protestor-terrorists, that the protestor-terrorists never even requested.  Statues, dairy company emblems, rice brands, syrup brands, etc.  Evidently these apologies, changes and removals were supposed to deter the protestor-terrorists from protesting and terrorizing.  They did not.
10. Places run by liberals also had more violence, more COVID infections, more COVID casualties, more deaths and injuries from protests, and more unemployment.  These places run by liberals also had less freedom.  Their lockdowns were more stringent and the harm done to their business communities were much greater.
11. While all this was going on, our mainstream media, run by liberals, began hemorrhaging its credibility even faster than it had been hemorrhaging it in recent years... which is really saying a lot.  They began to use the phrase "mostly peaceful protests" to excess, applying it in places where it clearly didn't apply.  One anchorman even waxed lyrically about these "peaceful protests" in front of a burning liquor store.  This proves the media thinks we're all stupid.  Well who can blame them.
12. Liberals don't have a clue what all this looks like to grown ups because they never have doubts about anything and can't be told anything.

Can a Whole Country Go Mad?  This is what happens when God has been evicted from a culture.  It is indeed a strange thing that is happening to western civilization.  In the earlier stages of our culture, the existence of things unseen was hardly questioned.  Today, if you don't see it, it doesn't exist at all.  The locus of control has moved from a universe of the Divine to the essential singularity:  One's Self.  As a result of this tectonic shift, there are things happening in our culture that are truly insane.  Period.  As a result of this increasing insanity I have resigned from the National Association of Social Workers.  I am taking down the shingle that used to stand for compassion and righteousness, but now stands for nothing more than social indoctrination and lunacy, an organization that protests against the death penalty for serial killers but rallies in favor of partial birth abortion.

The Big Apple Is Being Destroyed, and Billy De Blasio Is More Concerned About a BLM Mural.  Like the Dallas Cowboys, you just need to give it time; they'll disappoint. [...] In politics, the same mindset can be applied to Democrats; give it time — they'll destroy whatever they takeover.  The Left took over the cities, and nothing has changed for residents, especially black Americans.  These cities are now nothing more than Democratic powerbases that lie, cheat, and steal from residents who keep voting leftists into power.  In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is doing his part in destroying the city.  [Paywall]

It's not just police:  Public servants of all stripes are now under assault.  'Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?" So asks Joaquin Phoenix's Joker while meeting his social worker, motioning to Gotham outside the window.  It isn't just you or the stuff of superhero thrillers.  Gotham — the real Gotham — is in chaos, and disrespect for authority, and not just police authority, is sinking it deeper.  New York is suffering a serious slide in livability.  Those who can have already fled the city, and it's a big question mark whether they are coming back.  Each day brings a new barrage of online-message-board pleas, from people wondering if they can get out.

Are We In The First Days Of A Lawless Era?  A nation founded on the rule of law appears to be yielding to the rule of the mob.  Not everyone has surrendered.  The trend, though, is worrisome.  Too many of our "leaders" and institutions are failing us.  In 2020, law enforcement officers in this country are being treated not just with disrespect but in many instances are being abused verbally and physically.  Rioters and looters are going unpunished, not because they can't be identified or the cases against them are weak but because prosecutors (several of them backed by George Soros) refuse to uphold the law and charge the offenders.  Violent gangs have been allowed, almost encouraged, to take over city streets, sidewalks, and private property; shut down the free movement of others; and topple public monuments.

Death of a Nation.  America and Britain are under attack by anarchists and thugs, while media pimps and opportunistic politicians are excusing the mobs.  Worse, the media is in cahoots with those who say that words are a form of violence that has to be regulated.  Who would have thought it would come to this?  Our First Amendment, our most precious freedom of speech, challenged by smear artists who lust for power and control.  Unlike what Hollywood depicts as wartime Berlin, Germans bitched to high heaven over the bombing and lack of food, as did Russians during Stalin's time.  But just try to not kneel nowadays and watch your career fly out the window quicker than you can say "BLM."  Is this why we fought the wars, to not to be able to say out loud what we believe?  To be silenced by unelected street thugs, dandruff-covered academics, and spittle-flecked media leftists?

Descending into Chaos.  [Scroll down]  We have remarked the gradual, now accelerated encroachment of the socialist nightmare on the American dream, the rapid breakdown of public order following the COVID pandemic so egregiously mismanaged by our political and medical classes, the destructive riots of various groups of domestic terrorists joined by the unproductive elements of society, and the racist hysteria leading to the eruption of social violence and hatred of whites.  We have watched good people being "cancelled" by their moral inferiors.  And we have seen our political authorities either foment the mayhem or retreat into their bunkers of silence and inactivity.  These are the people descending the chain of being into the terrain occupied by the rabble, sinking from the realm of communal order into the realm of turbid misrule.

Why It [is Bad] to be a Democrat in 2020.  The Democratic Party is the oldest voter-based political party globally and the longest existing one in the United States.  You'd think wisdom would come with time.  Instead, look at them.  All you see is negativity. [...] Democrats destroy everything they touch.  Consider their accomplishments:  They banned school prayer, legalized abortion and support infanticide.  They've secularized society, replaced God with government and personal charity with social justice.  They've substituted religion for reason, blurred the lines between males and females and destroyed the nuclear family.  They've lorded over the destruction of America's youth, brainwashing kids to the point they hate America, their parents and themselves.  Look at their cities:  Democrats' cities burn as the stench of human feces fills the air.  During the pandemic, pot shops thrive while businesses and churches stay closed.  Lawlessness prevails as mobs mete out a perverted form of justice where good people get punished and criminals get rewarded.  Black-on-black murders rise.  Babies get shot without a whisper, while anarchists decimate whole city blocks because of the murder of one man.

Nightmare in New York.  This Nightmare in New York is brought to you courtesy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo; Mayor Bill de Blasio; and a cast of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters, anarchists, and street thugs.  The once vibrant city is turning into a virtual no-go zone of looted shops, shuttered store windows, and skyrocketing murder rates.  The number of shooting victims is up 51% this year so far, and that tragic trend is accelerating.  In June of this year, there were 250 shootings, as opposed to 97 in June of 2019.  New York was already reeling from the highest coronavirus death toll in the (formerly) United States, due in large part to Gov. Cuomo approving the transfer of thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients to nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.  Then the rioting began, and Mayor de Blasio's response was to shame cops and propose cutting his city's police department budget by more than one billion dollars.

NYPD limits retirement applications amid 400 percent surge this week.  New York's Finest are putting in for retirement faster than the NYPD can handle — while citing a lack of respect and the loss of overtime pay, The [New York] Post has learned.  A surge of city cops filing papers during the past week more than quadrupled last year's number — as the city grapples with a surge of shootings — and the stampede caused a bottleneck that's forcing others to delay putting in their papers, officials and sources said.  The NYPD said Wednesday that 179 cops filed for retirement between June 29 and Monday, an astounding 411-percent increase over the 35 who filed during the same time period in 2019.

Lawlessness, the Murder of Our Children, and the Soul of America.  BLM, Inc., Joe Biden and the DNC own the death and destruction of this past weekend, in cities like, Atlanta, New York and Cleveland!  Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have surrendered to the Radical Left (Black Lives Matter, Inc., Antifa, etc.).  The Democratic Party(DNC) has had decades to fulfill its promises to black Americans, but all it's delivered is crime-ridden cities bereft of economic opportunity.  It's time to shake things up, show the extent of DNC failure and expose BLM, Inc. for the fraud it is.  For weeks Americans have watched radical leftist anarchists and Antifa thugs engage in extreme violence and murder that will haunt many people for the rest of their lives.  Dozens of innocent civilians and police officers have been killed, hundreds of civilians brutally beaten, and more than 700 police officers were injured nationwide.  Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed as businesses and communities in more than 42 states were devastated by arson, looting, and mayhem that activists quickly followed with a call to defund the police.

BLM's Violence & the Death of America's Cities.  The police-hating rhetoric of the openly and proudly Marxist "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement is doing exactly what it did five years ago — creating a massive increase in violent crime and homicide throughout urban America.  You may recall that back in 2015-16, BLM's anti-police protests and riots — particularly in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — intimidated officers nationwide into becoming much less proactive in dealing with criminal suspects.  A Pew Research Center report titled "Behind the Badge" — which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that was sent to thousands of officers — confirmed that 85 to 95 percent of law-enforcement officers in large police departments became highly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary.  The consequences of the new timidity of law-enforcement were monumental:
  •   In 2015, America's 56 largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides.
  •   Twelve cities with large black populations saw their murder totals spike even more dramatically — e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland.
  •   Robberies surged in America's 81 largest cities during the 12 months that followed the shooting of Michael Brown.
  •   During the first quarter of 2016, homicides in America's 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings were up 21%.

Could IT Happen Here?  [Scroll down]  One reason Hitler wasn't taken seriously during the early 1930s was because the world media presented Hitler (and Mussolini) as caricatures to be laughed at more than feared. [...] Most law-abiding Americans shake their heads in disgust at what is happening.  Some view anarchist antics as more comical than threatening.  For instance:
  •   Weirdly designed pink [...] hats that look like props from a 1950s sci-fi movie.
  •   Garage door pull that had been used for months suddenly seen as a KKK noose.
  •   Bizarrely named autonomous zones that are declared separate countries.
  •   Young white girls yelling at older black cops that the black cops do not understand racism.

Six Weeks, Six Cities, 600 Murders.  The single most important issue, affecting some of the largest swaths of populations in America, is the scandal the media ignores even as it explodes in our faces.  In only six weeks, city after city operated by entrenched Democrats have seen a massive expansion in lawlessness, violence, and murder.  Stunningly, many news outlets seem gobsmacked and mystified at how or why such an explosion of lawlessness has occurred. [...] So why did all of these cities take such violent turns?  Is it because their leadership capitulated to the anger of the mobs as opposed to thinking clearly and strategically about an effective response?  Or do these Democrat-run towns literally operate with denial in good and evil?  How else can you explain that in the city of Minneapolis (where a nation watched in horror and subsequently responded to the murder of an innocent man) that within 30 days they would record 1,600 shots fired?  But then respond by voting to dismantle its police operations all together?

The Devil's Pitchfork:  Seeking the Origin of Our Present Troubles.  The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil's pitchfork, namely:  de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I'm tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one's physical property).  In other words, it is a war against three intimately related phenomena:  self-governing personhood, historical memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual or private property as understood by John Locke.  Thus our ideas are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership is the prerogative of the state.  It is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses like democratic socialism, "social justice," postmodern relativism and radical feminism, but of the "Information Revolution" and its carrier, the Internet, in particular the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs.

Saving America From the Mob.  In just six weeks, violence has increased in many cities throughout the nation.  This is the result of police officers either resigning, taking sick days, or showing less interest in challenging the criminal element.  It is an exceedingly difficult time for anyone to be a police officer today.  Police recruitment has become extremely challenging in an environment where violence toward police is increasing and police are not supported by weak politicians following the orders from the mob.  It is not only police that activists are trying to destroy.  In the past six weeks, movies have been removed, police shows have been cancelled, even cartoons have been adjusted.  In addition, countless monuments have been toppled, flags have been changed, amusement rides have been altered, product packages are undergoing a politically correct overhaul.  Other products are changing their supposedly offensive names, all to satisfy the mob.

Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted.  Two bullet-ridden bodies lay sprawled on bloodstained concrete steps.  Alongside, relatives of the victims are wailing and collapse to the ground.  In another part of the city, a gang of youths use spray paint to disable security cameras before robbing a corner store.  Later, video footage captures police officers sitting helplessly in their patrol car as a baying crowd hurls glass bottles at them.  This is lawless New York — a city that was once America's glittering crown jewel but which risks descending into mob rule.  Murder figures have skyrocketed and a combination of the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and weak political leadership is in danger of achieving what Osama Bin Laden never could: bringing the Big Apple to its knees.

CNN: Shootings, Murder Surge in Democrat-Controlled Cities.  Shootings and murder are surging in Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York City, and Philadelphia, all of which are Democrat-controlled cities.  CNN reports murders in Milwaukee are up 95 percent this year.  They note murders in Philadelphia rose 24 percent as shootings rose 57 percent, and Los Angeles witnessed a 250 percent increase in murders during the first week of June alone.  Shootings have surged by 44 percent in NYC, compared to the number of shootings at this same point in time last year, and murder is up 23 percent.

Yoga studio implodes in brutal, yet classic case of 'progressives' eating their own.  Yoga is officially canceled.  Or at least it is at Kindness Yoga, a set of yoga studios in Denver that had striven so diligently to cater to left-wing extremists but has since been eaten alive by those same zealots.  Prior to its cancellation, owner Patrick Harrington's Kindness Yoga had offered far-left zealots a utopia of so-called "progressive" ideals, according to The Colorado Sun.  "Kindness Yoga, which began in 2001 with one Cherry Creek studio called Yoga Energi, had an outward reputation of inclusivity — with its earthy studios in Capitol Hill and Hilltop, gender-neutral bathrooms and person-of-color yoga nights where 'white friends and allies' were asked to 'respectfully refrain from attending.' Kindness held an LGBTQ yoga workshop just weeks before the pandemic forced the studios to close," the Sun reported Monday. [...] Yet despite all the hoops that Harrington had jumped through to build and maintain his rep with left-wing extremists, it wasn't enough for yoga teachers Jordan Smiley, who's reportedly indigenous and transgender, and Davidia Turner, who's black.  According to them, Harrington still wasn't doing enough to bring about so-called meaningful racial "change."

Calling Racism a Public Health Crisis Can Kill Black People.  Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh are among the cities that have officially declared that racism is a public health crisis.  A number of states are also moving in that direction.  Senator Sherrod Brown intends to push a similar resolution in the Senate.  The medicalization of racism has been backed by the American Medical Association, whose heads have called on "health institutions and physician organizations to explicitly denounce police violence" and urged "clinics, hospital and healthcare providers to review and reconsider their policies and relationships with law enforcement".  Considering the already fraught state of emergency rooms in urban areas where the victims and perpetrators of gang violence show up every weekend, that would be catastrophic.  It would lead to fewer doctors, fewer ERs, and worse outcomes for black patients in urban areas.

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.

The Coming Collapse of the Republic.  [Scroll down]  As I warned in 2012, there no longer is a culture war.  "What is occurring now is a pacification effort."  Its progress is why corporate America, including the now-absorbed Chick-fil-A and NASCAR, has turned decidedly to the dark side (shifted "left").  It's why prominent people, including Republicans such as Indiana senator Mike Braun, are bowing before terrorist group Black Lives Matter.  It's why mobs are enabled and good people hobbled for defending themselves from the mobs.  It's why we're seeing a complete cultural collapse — portending a political collapse.  This is partially due to a new "woke" generation having entered the corporate sphere and others of influence.  But what did you expect?  The apocryphal saying (no, it's not Lincoln's) informs, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."  Did you really think the Left could completely control academia for generations and that, somehow, it all would "stay in college"?

Breakdown.  [Scroll down]  To be sure, the first manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement had a mouthpiece in the Oval Office, lacking now.  It doesn't matter.  Presidential imprimatur or no, the reborn Black Lives Matter has gained billions of dollars in corporate support, more billions in free round-the-clock media promotion, and a ruthless power to crush dissent from the now-universal narrative about murderous police bigots.  During the two weeks of national anarchy that followed the death of George Floyd, cops were shot, slashed, and assaulted; their vehicles and station houses were firebombed and destroyed.  American elites stayed silent.  Since then, police have continued to be shot at and attacked; the elites remain silent.  Monuments to America's greatest leaders are being defaced with impunity; anarchists took over a significant swathe of a major American city, including a police precinct, without resistance from the authorities.  And a push to defund the police gains traction by the day.

Get Ready to Be Canceled.  If you thought you could evade the tentacles of political correctness by avoiding a campus or classroom, steering clear of political protests, or self-censoring your Facebook posts, think again. [...] The label of "white privilege" is currently used by leftists and progressives to discount or deny speech and data that contradict the narrative of whatever movement they seek to justify.  Recently, it has been used to dispel the criticism of the violent looting and riots that followed peaceful protests decrying the murder of George Floyd.  One Minneapolis councilwoman used it to justify dismantling the police, even when private homes are broken into.  It is now a basis for dismantling statues and desecrating historical monuments.  Whether seeking to silence whites or even hurt successful communities as a means to balance or make reparations for perceived injustices, this social weapon is gaining strength and credibility.

Apocalyptic science:  How the West is destroying itself.  The most serious threat to the West is not China or Russia but its visceral disgust with itself.  A growing proportion of people — in universities, the media, politics and corporate structures — now reject the premises upon which their own thriving societies are built.  Critical Theory opposes everything that makes the West work.  Unlike traditional academic inquiry, which seeks to explain and understand with logic, analysis and the scientific method, these doctrines are less theories than programs.  Their purpose is to condemn cultural norms, tear down existing orders and transform society.  It all starts with Marx.

Violence rises in Minneapolis, as debate over role of police rages.  Minneapolis officials have described an unprecedented burst of violence following George Floyd's Memorial Day death, after an officer held him down with a knee to his neck, sparking worldwide fury and massive protests.  At least 113 people have been shot since May 25, eight fatally, according to Minneapolis police, with hundreds of reports of gunfire across the city, including several shootings in broad daylight.  The spike in violence has come amid a raging debate over the role the Minneapolis Police Department should play in addressing crime in this city.  Public confidence has so deteriorated that a majority of the City Council has pledged to dismantle the agency.  Some residents have accused officers of purposefully curbing response to crime, which police deny.  Others have decided to stop using the agency's services altogether.

Nearly 300 NYPD Officers File for Retirement as Violent Crime Surges.  Close to 300 New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers have filed for retirement over the last month amid riots against the police and as violent crime keeps surging.  According to figures released to the New York Post, about 272 NYPD uniformed officers have filed for retirement since riots over the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd began in late May.  At the same time last year, about 183 officers had filed for retirement, indicating a nearly 50 percent spike in retirements this year.

Conservatives Are Treated like Second-Class Citizens, and That's Dangerous.  What use is a federal government that refuses to protect our basic constitutional rights? [...] Democrat mayors and governors are bankrupting American citizens by preventing them from engaging in simple commerce, and they're getting away with it.  Street mobs across America are causing millions of dollars in property damage, destroying priceless historical monuments; killing police officers; and targeting random, unlucky citizens based on the color of their skin, and the press cheerlead the madness and defend the murderers and arsonists as heroes.  John Kerry just the other day threatened the United States by declaring that if Democrats don't win the election in November, they will insist on "revolution."  Revolution?  How else can you describe this incendiary cocktail of mob violence and flagrant denial of conservatives' constitutional rights, aided and abetted and kept volatile by Democrat mayors who applaud the mayhem, Democrat prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law, and Democrat-aligned corporations who happily treat conservatives as second-class citizens?

De Blasio's performance grows worse by the day, making NYC unlivable.  The New York that survived 9/11 and bounced back stronger than ever is now being brought to its knees.  The coronavirus, the economic shutdowns and the frequent street protests, mixed with pillaging and vandalism, are no ordinary hurdles, but they are surmountable — with courageous leadership.  Tragically, that's exactly what New York doesn't have.  The crises pile up like dead leaves, but leadership is nowhere to be found.  Without it, the city is fast becoming unlivable.  The slow exodus of recent years has quickened in recent months, with natives, long-timers and recent arrivals clogging the exits.

NYPD retirement filings surged 49 percent amid protests.  The New York City Police Department has experienced a significant surge in the number of officers looking to retire following the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minnesota that sparked national protests and calls for police reform.  The NYPD told Fox News that 272 of New York's finest have filed for retirement during the period between Floyd's death and June 23, a number that the outlet said represents a 49 percent jump compared to the same timeframe in 2019.  While retirements so far this year have been about the same — 135 in 2020 compared to 131 over the same timespan in 2019 — the department indicated to Fox that the recent cluster of retirement filings still awaits processing.

272 uniformed NYPD cops file for retirement after George Floyd death.  Cops are hanging up their handcuffs in huge numbers.  The flurry of Finest farewells began after the police-involved killing of George Floyd on May 25, with 272 uniformed cops putting in retirement papers from then through June 24, the NYPD says.  That's a 49 percent spike from the 183 officers who filed during the same period last year, according to the department.  An NYPD source suggested the recent departures could signal a coming crisis for the 36,000-member department, which also faces a $1 billion budget reduction amid the "defund the police" furor.

Washington Post:  It doesn't matter that the most violent cities in America are run by Democrats.  Usually, we elect mayors to do the job of running things and one of the most important parts of their job is public safety.  Especially in cities with higher crime rates, crime reduction is often a major point of discussion during election season.  For instance, Memphis, Tennessee is at the top of the per capita crime list. [...] Why would the fact that the winner is almost always going to be a Democrat not matter?  Don't Democrats tend to have certain specific views about crime, policing, mass incarceration, etc.?  Don't Republicans have a reputation for being tougher on crime, more friendly to police and prosecutors, etc.?  How can this not matter?

Anarchists and Trump's Reelection.  I love my country.  America is the greatest land of opportunity on the planet for all who choose to pursue their dreams.  The BLM movement has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with empowering blacks.  Leftists are exploiting blacks as useful idiots to implement their transformation of America away from the divinely inspired vision of our Founding Fathers.  For decades, public education, Hollywood, Democrats and fake news media have infected youths with a poisonous lie that America is a hellhole of racism and the greatest source of evil on the planet.  Our passivity allowed leftists to transform our kids into their social-justice army of anarchists.

2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry.  For nearly a month, the nation has been consumed by massive protests and chronic riots, looting, and arson.  The catalyst for the demonstrations — the violent and wrongful death of African American George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police — is itself fading from connections with the ensuing upheavals.  Statues are toppled.  Names are abruptly changed.  Careers canceled.  Police are both reviled — and walking off the job.  Retired generals are no longer seen as conservative traditionalists but radicals themselves who dare to take on the commander-in-chief.  Downtown Seattle is no longer in the control of the city government.  The internet is aflame with self-appointed sleuths.  They scour hours of video and millions of words, searching for an indiscreet past remark — as fodder to take out a political opponent, a rival for a job, or a personal enemy.

Liberalism is dangerous to your wallet and your health.  The most recent jobs report found that nine of the 10 states with unemployment rates above 14% are in liberal blue states.  Ranked from highest to lowest, they are Nevada (25.3%), Hawaii (22.6%), Michigan (21.2%), California (16.3%), Rhode Island (16.3%), Massachusetts (16.3%), Delaware (15.8%), Illinois (15.2%), New Jersey (15.2%), and Washington state (15.1%).  I call this the "blue state jobs depression." [...] It is hardly shocking news.  Liberals are anti-business, and their policies are especially hostile to small businesses.

Why Are We Letting Democrats Steal from Us?  Brainwashed, radicalized liberals have been using Trump's election as a reason to take over our streets, college campuses, corporate America, and other traditional American institutions in ways we could not have imagined.  Putting aside the Resistance movement, which began the day Trump won, these frustrated anarchists are now acting like rabid dogs let loose on innocent populations who wish to live and prosper in peace.  They have stolen livelihoods from the same people they purportedly care so much about.  They have stolen the lives of officers and individuals who seek only to instill law and order in the midst of chaos.  They are pilfering much of what has made America unique and special — including our glorious history and traditions.  From Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth's, Uncle Ben's, Cream of Wheat, and Eskimo Pie to Land O'Lakes, corporate logos that existed for over a century are now gone or soon to be removed from grocery store shelves.  When leftists see racism in Snap, Crackle and Pop, where does the insanity end?

RNC ad puts a spotlight on Dem tactics that bolster 'Marxist' attack on America.  The Republican National Committee released a new ad this Tuesday designed to highlight how "left-wing anarchists are using chaos to destroy America" as Democrats watch sometimes with tacit approval and other times with beaming support. [...] [T]he video links the ongoing madness being perpetrated across the country by Black Lives Matter extremists — think police cruisers being burnt, police officers being run down, statues being toppled, etc. — with the incendiary rhetoric of Democrat political figures ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

The Movement to Destroy a Nation.  Nation-wide protests weeks after George Floyd's murder turned into a movement to destroy a nation.  Parading as an attack on racial injustice, the movement has turned into an obliteration of history.  This week that devastation set its eyes on faith.  Less than one week ago, protesters rekindled the call for removing confederate statues.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in a show of solidarity with the protest mob, removed two portraits of former House speakers who were part of the Confederacy.  From there, the momentum quickly shifted to anyone whose statue is seen as offensive, who may have held racist or politically incorrect views of another era, or who may (or may not) have owned slaves or supported slavery at any time.  Never mind that the qualifiers of what constitutes "offensive" is blurred; the momentum of eradicating history is ruled by emotion, not reason.

2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry.  For nearly a month, the nation has been consumed by massive protests and chronic riots, looting and arson.  The catalyst for the demonstrations — the violent and wrongful death of an African American man, George Floyd, while in the custody of Minneapolis police — is itself fading from connections with the ensuing upheavals.  Statues are toppled.  Names are abruptly changed.  Careers are canceled.  Police are both reviled — and walking off the job.  Retired generals are no longer seen as conservative traditionalists but radicals themselves who dare to take on the commander-in-chief.  Downtown Seattle is no longer in the control of the city government.  The internet is aflame with self-appointed sleuths.  They scour hours of video and millions of words, searching for an indiscreet past remark — as fodder to take out a political opponent, a rival for a job or a personal enemy.  The people's energy, tranquilized by a two-month national quarantine and the terror of the coronavirus, has suddenly exploded in both massive protests and silent seething at the lawlessness.  The result is that for good or evil, the 2020 election is no longer really about Biden and Trump, Democratic or Republican policies, or progressive and conservative agendas.

Minneapolis Police Department Reports Increased Hostility Toward Officers.  The Minneapolis Police Department says officers are routinely walking into hostile situations and crime scenes where they are not welcome.  It happened at least twice last night [6/21/2020] alone.  Now, police officers are pleading for cooperation, as others double down asking for systematic change.  When Minneapolis police were called to a shooting near the George Floyd memorial Friday night, officers were met with resistance, and had trouble getting to the man who needed help.  And police say this is not an isolated incident.

America's Jews and Christians Are Failing the Test of Their Lives.  America is being taken over by violent mobs; a vast amount of destruction and stealing has taken place (with little police intervention and the apathy of our political leaders).  Why aren't all clergy delivering thundering sermons about the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal"?  Does it now come with an asterisk?  A central part of a major American city has been seized and occupied by people who hate America and its values, including its Judeo-Christian values.  Heard any clergy (aside from some evangelical Christians) speaking out against it?  And most ominous by far, for the first time in American history, free speech — the mother of all freedoms — is being widely suppressed, not by the government but by the press, the universities, the high schools, the elementary schools, all the giant internet media, Hollywood and virtually every major business in America.  Christians and Jews place repentance at the center of their theologies, yet there is no place for repentance if you did or said one insensitive thing — real or alleged — even if it was 20 or more years ago.  Yet all we get from American religious leaders on this matter is ... silence.

Obeying The Law Is For Suckers.  If you watch the news, national or local, there is a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans doing whatever [...] they want to do with little or no concern for the law.  And the law has little or no concern for itself, at least when it comes to those charged with enforcing it.  Across the country, charges are being dropped against rioters and looters.  Why?  Many of those people in position to prosecute the guilty have no interest in doing so.  [Indeed], many of them ran on the idea of not prosecuting people.  What kind of idiot would vote for a district attorney who promised to let people get away with more?  Well, from San Francisco to St. Louis, they did just that.

'If Brooklyn Can't Sleep, Bill de Blasio Can't Sleep,' New Yorkers Hold Noise Demo Near Mayor's Mansion Over Fireworks and Lawlessness.  New Yorkers are fed up with Mayor Bill de Blasio allowing the lawlessness continue on their streets, which includes shooting off fireworks at all hours of the night.  To enact their revenge, protesters lined up their cars and held down their horns for a noise demonstration near the Gracie Mansion late Monday night.

NYC sees staggering shooting numbers; top cops warn of 'storm on the horizon'.  The New York Police Department has reported a staggering increase in shooting numbers, and injuries, as officials warn there's "a storm on the horizon" — and say changes must be made.  An estimated 72 people were wounded in 53 shootings citywide from June 15 through Sunday night, an NYPD spokesperson said Monday morning.  The department saw 14 shooting victims in 12 shootings for the same time period last year, data shows.

What Happens When the Madness Ends?  At some point, tonight's hero on YouTube torching Wendy's or kicking a downed policeman on CNN, becomes tomorrow's commonplace, unnoticed felon — with a new warrant issued out on his head, and about whose fate and lengthy CV no one other than his parents much cares.  Governors and mayors can demand masks and all sorts of social distancing measures.  But once they declared that only those not demonstrating — the non-looting and nonviolent — were subject to their rules, while millions both peacefully protesting and violently looting were exempt, then their words meant nothing.  It will be impossible for them ever to be seen as credible again.  Virus or no virus, crowded freeways, and busy malls will soon be referenda on the bond of governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer.

Thoughtcrimes Now Prosecuted in the Land of the Free.  [Scroll down]  Practically anything, any piece of fact, statistics, sentiments like "all lives matter," any picture, any opinion expressed as civilly as possible, may cost you your job, reputation, and even life.  "Social justice warriors" are torching traditional liberal beliefs about free speech and tolerance with ideas so toxic and destructive that they shut the debate down, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation — all while calling for a "discussion" about race.  Evidently, only unarguable support is allowed. [...] We're witnessing organization after organization being bullied into searching out thoughtcrime.  We're talking about not some KKK proclamations, but cases where people were punished for common sense that was found offensive.  Even a UCLA professor may be placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to his students, or his colleague could be suspended from his job after refusing a student's request to effectively cancel final exams for black students amid protests over the death of George Floyd.  There's a data scientist who once worked for President Obama's re-election campaign who was fired from a research firm for retweeting an academic study suggesting that nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones.  We're seeing conservative media — Zero Hedge and the Federalist — being pressed by Google to censor their content by barring them from Google's ad platform.  We're seeing corporations changing logos of their products dubbed racist on Twitter.

The City They Voted For.  Thousands of kids awaken in Crown Heights terrified & traumatized from 2 weeks of nonstop fireworks at night.  Seniors haven't slept in weeks.  Residents don't walk Eastern Parkway past 10pm to avoid being hit by fireworks.  [Video clip]

The 'cancel' crew will come for you someday soon.  A moral panic is sweeping the nation.  How we react to the pitchfork hordes will determine the fate of our country for a generation or longer.  We call what the hordes do to our fellow citizens "cancel culture," but the term is far too cute to capture the cruel, mindless and life-destroying process taking place all around us in the name of "fighting racism."  The tendency has been with us for some time, but the current, extra-crazed moment has accelerated its malignant energies:  Locked in for months due to COVID-19, we re-emerged into a society more enraged and at war with itself than ever before.  Then the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis took the ideological madness to the next level.  The great majority of Americans agreed that Floyd's death was horrific and that the police officers responsible for it must be held to account.  But that sane consensus wasn't enough, as far as the cancel left was concerned:  Enemies had to be found and eradicated.  And if there weren't enough racist enemies, then more of them had to be invented.

Flyers call for NYPD strike on July 4 so cops can show city what 'independence' from police looks like.  The chasm between the NYPD and a mayor and city who have sided with Black Lives Matter and other Left-wing groups seeking to "defund" or "disband" them has grown wider since the death of George Floyd, as police officers around the country suddenly feel under siege like never before.  Cops in New York may be planning a department-wide strike on July 4 to give the city and its pandering Democratic leaders a look at what it's like to have their 'independence' from police, as many have said they want, according to the New York Post.  The news outlet reports that cops have said flyers that are being circulated among NYPD rank-and-file officers are urging them to call in sick en masse on Independence Day as pushback against Mayor Bill de Blasio's pledge to scale back police funding amid a growing anti-law enforcement environment both in the city and around the country.

The Silent Majority can be silent no more.  This year has been one body blow after another to the nation we love.  First, there was the coronavirus, and we thought, "How can this get any worse?"  Then came the economic shutdown and the incalculable pain and suffering it brought.  Next were the riots, the radicals' unopposed seizure of a section of Seattle and the maniacal efforts throughout the country to defund the police.  Now a series of rulings from the "conservative" Supreme Court are wreaking untold havoc on the Constitution and the rule of law.  It wouldn't take a Christian fanatic or an excitable conspiracist to conclude that America is now the target of an intense spiritual onslaught — brought on by its own rampant descent into decadence.  The left has been at war with America as founded for decades, and it has made great progress in transforming our culture and institutions.

Democrats Have Failed the Black Community for Too Long.  In recent weeks, Americans have watched radical leftist anarchists and Antifa thugs engage in extreme violence and murder that will haunt many people for the rest of their lives.  Fifteen innocent civilians and two police officers were shot and killed, hundreds of civilians were savagely and brutally beaten, and more than 700 police officers were injured nationwide.  Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed as businesses and communities in more than 42 states were devastated by arson, looting, and mayhem that activists quickly followed with a call to defund the police.  With each passing day, both of us asked ourselves the same question: where are the governors and mayors of these cities who took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States and keep residents safe from harm?  Instead of upholding law and order — also known as doing their jobs — they turned a blind eye to the violence while praising the demonstrations that the radicals were using as cover.

Free Speech is Under Full Assault.  Increasingly, we see people holding unpopular views being attacked and refused a forum in which to speak.  Through the threat of force and censorship to control people's speech, free speech is under full assault.  History is replete with others using similar tactics.  As in the times before the Nazi rise to power, the Soviet gulag era, and Mao's revolution, similar trends are prevalent today.  Freedom of speech is engaging in unrestricted speaking of one's mind without fear of retaliation or censorship.  It is the freedom to use one's natural rights to engage in complex thought and speech.  This is not a new concept.  Freedom of speech has a history centuries old, long predating the founding of this country.  Some want to control these natural abilities.  This is where the dispute lies.  One does not have to look far to find multiple examples of the threat of violence and censorship.  This ranges from online mobs to technology company and media censorship and peer attacks.  Those with differing opinions are blackballed, blacklisted, attacked, and censored out of existence.

What Type of Fool Shoots a Cop With a Taser or Wrestles Him for His Gun?  [Scroll down]  Something is very wrong and broken in America.  It is not "systemic racism" because the System is not racist.  But it is Systemic Left Propaganda.  That systemic plague endangers our culture, our values, and our civilization — and it endangers Black lives, too.  Any leftist narrative that makes heroes and icons of people who break loose from peacefully arresting cops and then shoot tasers at them, or that idolizes thugs who wrestle police officers for their guns, endangers impressionable people who believe the lies and falsehoods so propagated.  Forty-two years ago The Deerhunter, a movie set in the era of the Vietnam War, contributed to scores of accidental suicides caused by idiots playing Russian roulette after watching the film.  Today the Left media advances a new insanity, inspiring fools and idiots to shoot at cops and wrestle them for their guns, offering instant fame and martyrdom.

We Must Stop the Great Unraveling.  Across the United States, a great unraveling is in progress.  A rolling crime wave, under the guise of social activism, has left city after American city shattered and smoldering. [...] Social-justice mobs have taken aim at freedom of expression, inventing new heresies daily and ruining the lives of those who unwittingly give voice to them.  Forced confessions and language proscriptions are the order of the day.  Poetry, fiction, movies, and television shows — including children's cartoons — are canceled and excised from history.  Indeed, all art and opinion are now subject to the chopping block lest they prove insufficiently propagandistic.  To rewrite the present, the mob has rewritten the past.  They have forced upon us a distorted and grotesque version of American history.  With the support of corporations and education boards, school textbooks and curricula tell of an unredeemable America founded not on the promise of human liberty but human bondage.  What's more, this history discounts the transformative progress on racial equality for which Americans — black and white — have given their lives.

The Democrats' Corruption of America's Inner Cities.  What are the real problems in America's inner cities?  Is it all about racism, or could it be a combination of several factors?  According to a survey of Chicago parents by the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, poverty, violence, and crime are also some of the biggest concerns in their neighborhoods.  Good jobs and capitalism could solve the poverty part of the problem, but if cities make it hard for businesses to come into town or for a local person to start a small business, citizens with little mobility stay poor.  Why wouldn't these cities want the freest, most business-friendly laws and policies imaginable for their citizens?  The answer is often that politicians care very little about their constituents but care deeply about their own power and money.  High taxes, crony capitalism (meaning favors for politicians and others who have the power to give the "right" companies the contracts), excessive regulations, and a culture of "it's who you know" combine to crush entrepreneurs and small business owners who are not among those favored by the powers that be.

At Least 7 Minneapolis Police Officers Resign — 7 More in Process of Resigning.  Leftists rioted and looted over 270 businesses in Minneapolis in the last three weeks following the death of George Floyd during an arrest in the city last month.  The Minneapolis City Council voted to replace the police department last week with a "community-led public safety system."  The Minneapolis police have been abused by city officials and violent protesters.  So it should come as no surprise that seven police officers have resigned and several more are in the process of leaving.

Detroit's recent move to defund police had serious consequences, reporter finds: 'Children are dying'.  Over the last week, following the May 25 police custody killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, communities nationwide have faced calls from critics to disband police agencies or redirect funding from law enforcement operations to community development programs.  Detroit, according to a report, has seen this decade an uptick in crime because of defunding the city's police department.  The city cut back its police force and funding during a historic bankruptcy in 2014.  Funding for the police department has fallen 20 percent in the last six years.  Starting salary is $40,000 a year.  Wages for cops were cut 10 percent and have never recovered, accounting for inflation.  Health benefits for retired cops were stopped and pension payments postponed.

The Summer of our Discontent.  We are entering the summer of our discontent.  The season promises to be a long, hot struggle to maintain the integrity of our founding principles that are increasingly compromised with the best and worst of intentions.  The worst intentions are those of the rabble whose objectives we shouldn't underestimate.  They will instigate and inflame chaos and anarchy to achieve what a former president promised: "to fundamentally transform America."  They will opportunistically take advantage of the nation's weakened status from overreaction by government to COVID-19, compounded by the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive flood of trillions of dollars in "temporary" cash benefits.  The street scenes of Minneapolis and Seattle promise to play out across the country all summer, leading to November's election.

Baltimore Residents Blame Record-High Murder Rate On Lower Police Presence.  For the third year in a row, Baltimore, Md., has had more than 300 murders, reaching a new record of murders per number of residents in 2017.  Some residents attribute the high murder rate to relaxed police patrols in the city following high-profile cases of police brutality.  Officers have backed off in neighborhoods, like the one where Freddie Gray was arrested.  The Rev. Kinji Scott, a pastor in Baltimore who's held positions in local city government, says the opposite needs to happen.  "We wanted the police there," Scott says.

Atlanta riot shows the left's downhill in slide in racializing police incidents.  As tragic as officer-involved shootings of anyone is, not all of them are worth burning down a Wendy's for.  For radical activists and their enablers, this act is getting old fast. [...] [I]n contrast to the George Floyd case, where the victim died pleading to breathe on video with a bad cop's knee on his neck for 8 minutes, we now have someone who was driving while intoxicated (hello, MADD), sleeping on the grounds of a fast food joint, grabbing an officer's taser while under arrest, and using the taser against police.  And Wendy's is the bad guy?  Police are the bad guys?  This looks like the sort of nonsense that goes on at every fast food joint in inner cities every week.  Transients and drug users are often found at these establishments because of the low-cost food and availability of public restrooms.  Just read the Yelp! reviews of any inner-city McDonald's or In-N-Out burger, there will always be mentions of homeless as part of the user experience.

Anarchy, Seattle, and All That CHAZ.  Three cities, all supremely liberal, represent an American descent into anarchy against which no one is standing.  After New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he wanted to slash the police budget, the New York City Council is going about cutting $1 billion from that budget, about 16%. That will inevitably cause a reduction of police presence around the city and, with equal inevitability, result in an increase in crime.  President Trump has said that if Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Mayor Durkan didn't restore order in Seattle, he would.  But he has done precisely nothing.  In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed in police custody on May 25, the city council plans to disband its police force entirely.  On Friday, the city council voted to replace the police with a "community-led public safety system."  What [...] is a "community-led public safety system"?  And then there's Seattle.

The Protests May Have Started Out Legitimate, but They've Been Hijacked.  This mayhem has thus far taken the lives of at least 11 people, many of whom are black Americans.  Hundreds of others have been injured in the chaos, with police officers getting shot and protesters struck with rubber bullets.  As the carnage, looting, arson, and assaults have been allowed to continue in Democrat-controlled states and municipalities, it has become undeniably evident that the wrongful death of George Floyd has morphed into anarchism.  As lives, businesses, and personal property have been driven asunder, the criminal perpetrators are buoyed by pusillanimous Democrat politicians too timid to take back their own streets.  Whether it be Crown Heights, August 1991; Rodney King, May 1992; Ferguson Missouri, August 2014; Baltimore, April 2015; or one of many others, the script has remained the same.  In concordance with fawning state and local officials, a legitimate protest is hijacked by a throng of anarchists.

Where Black Lives Don't Matter.  Milwaukee and every other big blue city in America have been marked by a decades-long murder merry-go-round that has nothing to do with the police.  The overwhelming majority of the murdered — and the murderers — in America's cities are young black men who were cheated out of a decent education by the inexcusably substandard Democrat-run public schools they had no choice but to attend.  Because many were functionally illiterate and afflicted with arrested psychological development, they lacked the skills to hold down even the most basic entry-level job.  So what did these frustrated and angry young men do?  Most turned to a life of drugs and crime, with many ending up dead or in prison before reaching their 20th birthdays.  For generations on end, black-on-black homicides in Democrat-run cities have been an ongoing calamity for the black community.  On May 31, Chicago experienced a record 18 homicides in a single day.  Year to date, the city has chalked up 264 murders, with young black men a solid majority of the victims, which raises the question: are those black lives any less important than George Floyd's, any less deserving of our outrage?  Chicago is the poster child for urban carnage, but every big blue city in America has overseen a breeding ground for black-on-black havoc, and they've done it for the last half-century.

The True Plight of Black Americans.  While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called "systemic racism." Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.  Some of the most dangerous big cities are:  St.  Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia.  The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats.  Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century.  On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools. [...] The bottom line is that today's black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government.  Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?  Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets.  Consider Baltimore, Maryland.  In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's math exam.  In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math.  Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state's English test. [...] It's the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.

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.

Obama to the Rescue.  For three years, Resistance Media and a set of political operatives who tag-team with their allies inside the federal bureaucracy have laid siege to the American public through their proxy war against the president they hate — and the country elected.  What the resistance yearned for was the kind of imagery that galvanizes resistance movements from Latin America to the Middle East:  a spectacular act of martyrdom that would crown their campaign of new age political warfare, which began with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was followed by a fraudulent impeachment process staged by the same political operatives, CIA officers, and media personalities who pushed "collusion" into the public sphere, to the three-month-long coronavirus lockdowns that were portrayed as matters of life and death only to be magically lifted to combat racism, after leaving nearly 20 million Americans jobless.  The successive failures of the campaign to destroy Donald Trump and undo the 2016 election have only made the American left angrier and more willing to take desperate measures[.]

Why You No Longer Recognize Your Country.  Mass looting throughout the nation.  Police precincts burned to the ground.  Murdered cops.  An historic church in Lafayette Park set on fire.  Video after horrifying video of innocent Americans being beaten senseless by gangs of thugs, as one political party demands:  "DEFUND THE POLICE!"  Everyone is saying it:  I no longer recognize my country.  You don't recognize your country because it's not the same country.  What you're seeing is the third-world hellhole the left has been quietly assembling for us since 1970.  Minnesota, the crucible of the riots, has gone from having 2.6% foreign-born in 1990 to nearly 10% foreign-born today — and that's not including their children or illegals.  Instead of liberal but non-rioting Scandinavians and Germans, the new immigrants are overwhelmingly African, Asian and Hispanic.  In fact, Minnesota now has a much larger proportion of Asian and African immigrants than the nation as a whole.  Although the state has always leaned Democratic, thanks to its German and Scandinavian immigrants (Ben Franklin was right about them), the Norsemen elected Walter Mondale.  Recent immigrants elected Rep. Ilhan Omar.  Hey, Republicans!  Tell me again that immigration is just a "single issue."

Democrat Cities:  Fourth-World Scourges.  When the terrorists become bored and cease terrorizing, when the flames are extinguished, when those who died in the riots are buried and cremated, when the shards of glass from storefronts are disposed of, and when livelihoods are permanently lost, Democrats will still run the vast majority of the deadliest and most dangerous cities in the U.S.  Death and destruction always follow Democrat policies and culture.  Stagnant local economies.  Unsafe streets for children.  Gun crime.  Failing schools.  Breathtaking corruption.  Problems with the police.  Property crime.  Poverty.  Poor public health.  Single- or no-parent homes.  All are found in abundance in Democrat-run cities, and found overwhelmingly in majority-black neighborhoods.  So who are the true "racists"?  By every objective measure and metric, Democrat-run cities are the unequivocal worst places in America to live.

Shaun King:  Democrats Run The Cities With [the] Worst Police Brutality.  As debates about police brutality and systemic racism rock the country in the wake of George Floyd's horrific death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King let himself utter an uncomfortable truth that other activists have been ignoring:  Democrats control all the major cities where black people are experiencing the most police brutality and systemic racism.  In a tweet on Friday [6/5/2020], the activist scolded those who tell black Americans to affect change through voting, asserting that such blind thinking may not exactly be the panacea people are talking about.

What Do They Really Want?  [Scroll down]  The New York Times reports that Minneapolis, like all the other places on fire, is one of the most liberal cities in the nation.  Surpassing even Seattle, Minneapolis has black people on the City Council.  Two of these black council members are transgender.  None of them is a Republican.  Juneteenth gets a yearly parade, and the police chief, until this week, was a black man.  They're so devoted to fighting racism that you can't zone for single-family housing anymore — ostensibly to make the housing cheaper for blacks and to keep richer whites from having better neighborhoods to move to.  This means that Minneapolis and all the other left-wing cities on fire already do everything they can to police the police — and if they go any farther, they'll have to get rid of them altogether.

Democrats Want to Abolish the Police and Confiscate Our Guns.  [T]o those of you who think this idea of abolishing the police and the Second Amendment is insane and can therefore never happen, you need to remove your head from the sand.  Here are some more facts:
  •   We went from zero to gay marriage in less than ten years.
  •   We went from zero to drag queen story hour in about ten seconds.
  •   The left is blacklisting us for referring to biological men as "he."
  •   The corporate media are now describing the burning and looting of cities as "political speech."
  •   This same media are describing peaceful protests by Tea Partiers and those ravaged by anti-science lockdowns as "dangerous" and "violent."
  •   Lego is blacklisting its own toys.
  •   The NFL just committed suicide.
  •   Drew Brees is now on his third 1984-ish public confession, a full-blown grovel tour, for the sin of expressing respect for the American flag.
  •   Legions of white people are kneeling to ask forgiveness for something they had no part of.
  •   Healthcare "experts" are telling us the coronavirus is lethal if you want to go to work, school, or your grandmother's funeral, but not so lethal if you are out en masse to support "approved" causes.
The Democrat Party has been completely radicalized, emboldened, and is currently eating itself alive in the kind of cultish moral panic we have not seen since McCarthyism or the McMartin preschool scandal.

Minneapolis Mayor Asks Trump For Aid After Riots Cause At Least $55 million In Damage.  The Minneapolis mayor is asking for federal help cleaning up and rebuilding his city after rioters caused at least $55 million worth of damage through looting, burning, and defacing public and private property.  That cost estimate is likely to increase in the coming days as government officials continue to tally the damage done in the wake of George Floyd's death, Mayor Jacob Frey said according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state's congressional delegation are also pushing the Trump administration and Congress for funding.

The Editor says...
If the mayor had done everything in his power to quench the riots and incarcerate the perpetrators, he might have a case.  Instead, he is asking the federal government to clean up his mess.  Let the city of Minneapolis rot!

Minneapolis Mayor Now Asking Trump for Relief Money After He Let His City Burn.  You've gotta admire the brazenness someone has to operate with to not protect their own city from riots, trash the President in the process, and then go running to the federal government for money.  Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who bears a striking resemblance to Canada's Justin Trudeau, has managed it though.  According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the damages are already at $55 million and climbing. [...] Yeah, that's not what FEMA is for, as evidenced by the fact that Maryland was denied such assistance by the Obama administration in 2015 after the Baltimore riots.  These politicians sat idly by and let their cities be destroyed.  They need to be the ones to pay for it.  These people had ample opporutnity, including usage of the National Guard, to stop the rioting, burning of buildings, and looting.  They instead chose to appease the mob for purely political reasons.  That's on them.

Liberal Mayors, Racial Politics, and Fake News.  There are three things you need to know about the unrest associated with the killing of George Floyd.  First, almost all major cities these days are governed by Democrats, usually liberal Democrats.  Second, black Americans have suffered because of the public policies these cities have adopted.  Third, the reason why city governments adopt policies harmful to black families is not because they are racists; it's because they are liberal.  In city after city, all too often black families are forced to send their children to the worst schools; they are forced to live in the worst housing; they receive the worst city services (including policing); and they are subject to the worst environmental harms.  The politicians who run these cities are Democrats.  Many of them are black themselves.  Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, is an example.

During This Spate of Racial Outrage, Here Are Some Deeply Uncomfortable Facts for the Press, the Activists, and Even Ben & Jerry's.  [Scroll down]  This is the language we normally see attached to the messaging of "Systemic racism".  The problem, however, is one of location.  While it sounds great to attribute Floyd's death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture.  So why don't we look into the system where this crime took place?  To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders.  The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957.  The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official.  The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison.  Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?  Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader.  These would be the people operating the "racist and prejudicial system and culture".

Bill De Blasio Is A Cowardly Tyrant Fueling New York's Demise.  The grave injustice inflicted upon one person is now being compounded into a grave injustice for millions of New Yorkers.  It took decades to bring New York City back from the brink — facing crime, squalor, and bankruptcy — to the peace and prosperity that has marked it since Mayor Rudy Giuliani's tenure.  Today, Mayor Bill de Blasio seems intent on sending the city back to the bad old days, threatening to undo decades of progress while operating under the banner of "progressivism."  The twin crises of the Chinese coronavirus and the present rioting and looting have created the perfect storm for the city's demise.

Riots, Brought To You By District Attorneys Who Won't Prosecute.  adicalized district attorneys in cities across America are putting violent rioters and looters back on the streets, and letting other hardened criminals walk.  More than anyone, one man is responsible for this outrage:  Billionaire socialist George Soros.  St. Louis is a case in point.  There, prosecutor Kim Gardner let 36 people arrested for looting and rioting go scot-free, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Gardner's office used the pathetic excuse that it needed "essential evidence" from the police, implying it had none.  One wonders how people caught in flagrante delicto could simply be released.  The answer is, Gardner is a far-left acolyte of Soros, having been the recipient during her 2016 election of no fewer than three separate donations from a Soros-backed political-action committee.

The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country.  I haven't had much time to reflect on the looting and riots that swept mostly (but not exclusively) large Democrat cities.  It was a wilding on a scale we've never seen.  It was a bloodletting and release of criminal fury.  We should be clear what is happening.  It is not protest over the death of George Floyd.  That is the spark, but not the fire.  This has been a long time coming.  At least a generation, maybe two.  The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.  You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes 'black and brown bodies,' while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair.  It's all a lie, but it's a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power.  The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.  When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don't recognize them anymore.

NYC Arsonists to Be Instantly Freed from Jail Thanks to 'Bail Reform' Law.  Arsonists who set fires in New York City, New York, during multiple nights of riots will be instantly freed from jail if ever arrested thanks to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (D-NY) bail reform law.  For many nights now, arsonists have set ablaze New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles, city dumpsters, and rubble on the streets of New York City.  Those arrested for arson, if arrests are made, will spend less than 24 hours in jail.

Nearly All Rioters Freed from Jail in D.C., Most Avoid Felony Riot Charges.  Nearly all rioters have been freed from jail in Washington, D.C. and most have had felony riot charges dropped against them, and now they are only facing burglary, destruction of property, and curfew violation charges.  Arrest records obtained by WUSA 9 reveal that hundreds of rioters have been arrested over the last week in riots and looting sprees across the nation's capital.

Riots, looting and America burning — the end of the progressive dream.  There is a big debate about designating Antifa a terrorist group and what if any steps the federal government can take to stop the rioting.  But we all know who the real culprits are for turning America's streets into a war zone:  progressives and liberals.  They have filled the mind of America's youth with ideological nitroglycerine that is now exploding in our streets, while also setting the conditions that make it almost impossible to stop it.  The terrible events that have unfolded in the wake of the death of George Floyd represent the systematic failure of five decades of progressivism and liberalism.  The end of the progressive dream has now brought us all to the brink in three ways. [...]

How to destroy civilization.  The violence that is exploding across the country now has almost nothing to doing with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman.  That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.  The moral is:  ideas matter.  For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our grades schools) have been preaching a gospel of cultural self-hatred.  America, according to this gospel, is evil.  The country is inextricably racist and beholden to an irredeemably exploitative economic system.  The latest retelling of this creation myth is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning '1619 Project' whose fundamental message is that America was started as a 'slavocracy.'  According to this malignant fantasy, the Revolutionary War was fought primarily 'to protect the institution of slavery.'  At last count, elements of this disgusting bit of historical revisionism were being adopted in the curricula of some 4,000 school districts.

Democrats' Chickens Come Home to Roost.  Conservatives have been warning about the dangers of Antifa and other left-wing groups for years.  No one in the Democrat media listened.  More than that, they cheered them on; defended them.  Why not?  After all, they were chanting the right things and targeting the right people, from the left's perspective.  No progressive group would condemn them:  Black Lives Matter didn't, the Women's March didn't, CNN didn't.  They were helpful in beefing up numbers and energy at protests and marches Democrats deemed helpful.  What did it matter if they threw a few rocks or Molotov cocktails?  They were throwing them at police, a group those silent partner groups had declared the enemy[.]

How do we explain the many thousands of Americans who believe they are entitled to steal?  Night after night, we have watched thieving thugs break windows of small and large businesses, charge into them, and run out with as much merchandise as they can carry.  They stuff their booty into large SUVs, many of which have the license plates removed.  They are wearing masks so [they] do not fear facial recognition software.  These riots seem to prove that, despite our protestations to the contrary, we do live in something of a third-world nation.  When that many people in as many cities that are under siege right now feel no allegiance to the law, to their families, to their neighbors, to civil society, we are indeed a nation in need of a reboot.  Fifty-plus years of the left's smearing of American values, their opposition to the nuclear family, the promotion of the idea that out-of-wedlock births are just another lifestyle choice have, as we see now, made for a population sullied by the acceptance of abject criminality.  That is what we are all seeing on our TV screens.  This is not about race; it is all about respect or the lack of it and values.

What's Trump Got To Do With The George Floyd Riots?  Almost everything connected George Floyd's tragic death and the subsequent riots involve Democratic leaders.  So naturally, President Donald Trump is taking the blame.  Start at the beginning.  George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, a liberal city (the New York Times calls it "one of America's most liberal cities") in a liberal state (that hasn't voted for a Republican for president since 1972).  In 2017, Larry Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, observed that "In Minneapolis, we have one of the most liberal activist agendas in the U.S.  They are seeking to accomplish at the municipal level what isn't being done at the federal level."  Even that wasn't liberal enough for city dwellers, who booted out a liberal mayor in November 2017 for an even more leftist mayor, Jacob Frey.  He ran promising more affordable housing and, if you can believe it, improved police-community relations.

Who is recruiting, moving and paying the professional anarcho-rioters?  [Scroll down]  Is it really the citizens of Minneapolis who have set the city on fire, burning down small businesses as well as the police precinct building, libraries, etc.?  Who are those masked men in black with secret-service quality ear-pieces, military grade gas masks and backpacks full of Molotov cocktails?  They are very likely professional rioters, recruited, transported and paid by the likes of some George Soros front group or other anonymous Cloward-Piven devotees who share Soros' hatred of America and want to see this nation bought to its knees. [...] These are not protests.  What we are seeing is mass thievery under color of protest.  Chances are if the looters in Los Angeles were asked "who was George Floyd," they would not have a clue nor would they care.  Democrat-run cities have long valued "social justice" (different standards for different groups) and identity politics over lawfulness and basic values.  This is what you get when deviancy has been defined down so egregiously that we have citizens behaving like animals.

This is a Result of Democrat Governance.  The outrage we are seeing manifested over the past few days, is focused on the wrong target(s).  We are getting wall to wall coverage of the aftermath of the in-custody death of George Floyd.  Riots in major cities, property damage and even a few deaths are just part of that aftermath.  Innocent people are being harmed, while at the same time, some are attempting to affix cause and blame for Mr. Floyd's death on the wrong parties.  As usual, using admittedly disturbing video, there are some who in a rush to judgement and to take advantage of this terrible tragedy for their own political ends, cannot seem to wait for the facts to come out.  Instead, they instigate violence and property damage and actually harm the very folks they purport to care about.  Also as usual, the more time that passes, the more information comes out that increases our knowledge and subsequently alters our perception of exactly what happened.  Two critical pieces of such information have just come to light.

Big City Schools:  Where America's Most Vulnerable Kids Languish.  In 2010-2011, public schools in the nation's capital spent $29,345 per pupil — nearly $600,000 per each classroom of 20 students — yet the District's 8th graders finished dead last in a nationwide proficiency test in math and reading.  According to a 2015 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 96 percent of 8th graders in Detroit's public schools tested not proficient in math, and 93 percent tested not proficient in reading.  According to a 2017 investigation by Project Baltimore, 13 of the city's 39 public high schools had zero students who tested proficient in math.  Zero!  Of the 3,841 students in the remaining 26 high schools, only 14 tested at or above proficiency in math, less than one-third of one percent.  For a half-century running, Democrat-run urban schools have robbed minority children of a realistic chance for a decent education.

California's Budget Bust-Up.  Every state and municipal budget in America will take a big hit because of the coronavirus lockdowns, but no public purse is in as much trouble as California's.  Its Department of Finance recently estimated that the Golden State could face a $54 billion shortfall in the fiscal year beginning July 1, which surely must be the largest deficit any state has ever accumulated, surpassing the $40 billion hole that nearly swallowed Sacramento in 2008.  Still, though Governor Gavin Newsome said last weekend that the staggering deficit was "a direct result of Covid-19," that's clearly not true.  Critics have long warned that the state's tax base is volatile, being increasingly reliant on wealthy residents and vulnerable to sharp contraction in the next recession.  Combine that with California's spending spree — including expenditures to fix problems that the state's own bad policies have worsened — and the swing from prosperity to penury isn't hard to understand.

Nurses give inside look at 'nightmare' NYC-run adult-care center.  Out-of-state nurses brought to Manhattan to fight the coronavirus say they found hellish conditions at the city-run adult-care center on Roosevelt Island — from patients with horrific bed sores to feces-smeared walls.  "It was just heartbreaking," said one of the RNs, a mom of four from Wisconsin who spent about 17 days at the Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center.  "Patients were in deplorable conditions — very, very dirty, bed sores, terrible odors," the FEMA-contracted nurse, 38, told The [New York] Post.

A tale of two governors.  Alas, the early "science," the early facts and analysis of COVID-19 suggests that those states controlled by the urban left are flunking by any fair mark up.  A New York (D) versus Florida (R) comparison, blue versus red, provides an early template for judging who gets high marks for crisis management.  By any measure New York is not just the national Covid hot spot, it is an international disaster area.  Andrew Cuomo's (D) state leads the nation in all statistical categories from infection to morbidity rates.  New York City (D) is now the toxic nexus for the nation.  The Big Apple is hands down the necrotic 2020 spoiler in the larger American barrel.  Badgering Washington for more of everything from the start, it turns out that team Mario miscalculated the need for damn near everything, including beds, hospitals, rescue ships, and respirators.  Mario Cuomo pushed city mayor de Blasio (D) aside and seized control of metro policy with hype and bombast, if not hysteria.  Incredibly, Cuomo was lionized by the media as "the only adult" in the room as he presided over the worst state or city medical crisis in America, if not the world.

Common Sense and Self-Evident Truth in a Post-Truth World.  Many Americans today go far beyond simply rejecting the ideas of the American founders, the claims of the Declaration, and the Constitution.  They reject the very idea of truth.  These Americans were taught in American universities that there is no such thing as truth, that truth is an outmoded concept, that we now live in a post-truth reality.  The belief that the concept of truth is outmoded is no longer confined to academia.  It has invaded the world outside academia and won a great victory there; the Oxford Dictionaries selected "post-truth" as the Word of the Year for 2016.  And a great victory it is.  Convincing Americans that there is no such thing as truth defeats the very foundation of the American idea.

Democrats seem to be enjoying this authoritarian moment.  Various Democrat politicians are competing to be the most proactive in enforcing social distancing in their communities, so the internet is awash with stories of decidedly anti-American government behavior.  This post will bring you up to date on some of the more egregious things that are happening in Democrat-run communities across America.  For sheer shock value, there's really nothing to equal a short video that's come out of Philadelphia.  The video, which has been viewed almost five million times, shows a rider being forcibly torn from a bus in Philadelphia, although not arrested, because he was not wearing a mask [...] The Daily Caller notes the irony that this violent attack "comes after Philadelphia police announced that due to coronavirus, they would stop arresting people for 'non-violent' crimes including burglary and drug offenses."  Within a short while of the video going viral, Philadelphia's Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority announced that it was no longer enforcing its short-lived mask policy.  Philadelphia is a Democrat-run city.

Did Trump Ruin Our Economy for Nothing?  Except for foreign travel, Trump didn't shut down anything.  Where did this economic halt come from?  It started in states and cities with Democratic elected officials.  Perhaps they were influenced by the fake news media during "Trump is ignoring the crisis" and overreacted themselves, or perhaps they wanted to show up Trump by taking action.  Either way, they used their favorite tool, the power of government, without any regard as to what it might do to their people.  It should be obvious from their focus on Trump, but Democrats care only about power, and so they focus on those in power.

Bet Your Life — Vote for Democrats.  New York City and California's loony politicos are hooked on identity politics and see racism everywhere, ignoring objective science.  The consequences of ignoring reality: overwhelmed medical facilities, lack of proper medical equipment, and soaring death rates. [...] In brief, Mayor de Blasio's City Health Commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, is a radical who previously served as Health Commissioner of Baltimore where she "had given the city's race rioters 'space to destroy.'"  Space which continues after her move to New York to result in a soaring murder rate.  She boasted of seeing health policy through a "racial equity lens," a lens so fogged that she concentrated on discouraging those arriving from Wuhan from going into self-quarantine and encouraging New Yorkers to attend the Lunar New Year celebrations in the city.

What the left is destroying goes far beyond politics and the economy.  It is clear that reconciliation with the left is a pipedream!  They reject reciprocal respect, based on a mutual agreement about human nature.  They can't have it both ways.  They can't demand our politeness while we are insulted by them.  They can't fabricate "crimes", knock together "evidence" and call it "justice", as Sidney Powell exposes. [...] They can't butcher the record to fit in with their slanted ideology and pretend it's "history".  They can't stake out adolescent absurdity as the correct response to the world, and expect us not to interrogate their wisdom.  If honorableness in communication is the shining standard we aim for between human beings, it has suffered the same fate as every other aspect of culture the left touches.  It's been destroyed.

Another Pandemic Known as Social Justice.  To achieve their aims, universities are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities.  This portends "disastrous [repercussions] for scientific innovation and American competitiveness" not to mention the care of sick people.  Consequently, [a recent National Association of Scholars] report asserts that "social justice movement's political goals include increased federal and state taxation; increased minimum wage; increased environmental regulation; increased government health care spending and regulation; restrictions on free speech; restrictions on due process protections; maximizing the number of legislative districts that will elect racial minorities; support for the Black Lives Matter movement; mass release of criminals from prison; decriminalizing drugs; ending enforcement of our immigration laws; amnesty for illegal aliens; open borders; race and sex preferences in education and employment..." to name only a few.  Support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement is also part of their movement and mob violence is advocated to enforce any and all of these objectives.  The traditional mode of teaching students how to think has been replaced with teaching them what to think.

Not enough hospital beds in New Hampshire?  Blame needless regulations.  One regulation forces anyone who wants to open a hospital to have a 24 hour per day, seven day per week emergency department.  Given that emergency departments are the most expensive and toughest to staff part of any hospital, this is a huge barrier to opening a new facility.  And, like most cronyism, existing hospitals made sure this requirement doesn't apply to any hospital that had its license before the law was passed.  Another regulation forces any new hospital to take reimbursement from all payers, regardless of whether doing so makes sense for that hospital's business model.  Across the country, cash-only facilities are thriving, providing lower cost alternatives to patients.  But, under state law, they can't operate in the Granite State.  Finally, one state regulation provides for a 15-mile radius monopoly zone around smaller hospitals in more rural areas.  This guarantees that anyone outside of the southeastern part of New Hampshire will never see another hospital being built in their community, or anywhere near them.

Life in the Time of Wuhan.  [Scroll down]  Mayors who let thousands of homeless people tent out on their streets where they relieved themselves daily amid piles of rat-ridden heaps of trash and drug paraphernalia, will learn some lessons about public health.  Nancy Pelosi, who for three and a half years accused the president of treason and exceeding his constitutional powers, now begs him to assume dictatorial powers.  The mainstream media is almost entirely discounted as a source of reliable news and is reduced to posing ignorantly framed gotcha questions at the conclusions of transparent first-class White House briefings.  The notion that cities like Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, whose leaders have undermined the rule of law and law enforcement, will suddenly be able to get the will and manpower to enforce lockdown of the residents defies all probability.

Left's Pet Issues Like Mass Transit, Reusable Bags Prove Deadly During Coronavirus Crisis.  With some experts predicting, at a minimum, anywhere from 480,000 to 1.6 million American deaths from the coronavirus over the next three to 18 months, how smart does urban living, mass transit, open borders, reusable straws, reusable grocery bags, reusable water bottles, gun restrictions, over-regulated housing, using the Centers for Disease Control to fight gun violence, and outsourcing to China look now?

Greening Our Way to Infection.  The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those "sustainable" shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public.  These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses — and spread the viruses throughout the store.  Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.  In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers' reusable cups — a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.

Also posted under Banning plastic bags.

Major crimes in NYC unexpectedly surge after bail reform law.  We recently looked at some new proposals for fixing New York's disastrous new "bail reform" law or at least mitigating some of the damage it's causing.  They may want to get off the stick and start looking at those suggestions in a hurry because a newly released report shows that major crimes in New York City took a very sharp turn upward in February as compared to the same period of time last year.  And the police have the data to show that the bail reform policies are playing a significant role in this very bad development.

America's Declining Sexual Morality.  Today's "sexual revolution" is expressed by our being told by the highest court in the land that homosexual marriage can and must be married and by women being encouraged to abort children as a "right."  In today's society, drag queens reading to little children in libraries is considered delightful by many.  Further, vast numbers of people consider one's sex designation psychological and not biological, and, increasingly, parents encourage their little children to "choose" which sex/gender they want to be.  As additional evidence of the "sexual revolution," the overall percentage of children born out of wedlock has risen from 5% in 1960 to about 40% the last three or four years (albeit much higher among black and Hispanic persons).

The Law That Ate the Constitution.  The Civil Rights Act passed under President Lyndon Johnson was meant to address an emergency situation that most Americans, even most white Americans, recognized as a national disgrace.  Over the following decades, those emergency measures would be revealed as a permanent apparatus combining "surveillance by volunteers, litigation by lawyers, and enforcement by bureaucrats."  Civil rights offered "new grounds for overruling and overriding legislatures and voters on any question that could be cast as a matter of discrimination.  That was coming to mean all questions."  If you doubt the infinite adaptability of civil rights to any subject under the sun, consider the multifarious uses to which it has been put. [...] There are pavilion-sized homeless encampments on the streets of Los Angeles, employers can hire illegal immigrants with relative impunity, gay marriage is the law of the land — all because of civil rights law, directly or indirectly.

California's Gig Law Comes For the Scooters, Destroys Independent "Juicers".  California's "gig economy" law — AB5 — continues to have disastrous consequences across the state.  The list of jobs affected or outright destroyed is huge and growing every day.  The wedding industry is collapsing.  Festivals are closing.  Theaters and music venues are closing.  A nursing shortage is now upon us because qualified nurses can no longer pick up extra side-jobs in areas like hospice care.  The law has even killed Christmas:  mall Santas can no longer contract their services.

Progressive Big Lies.  These days, fake news is the first draft of fake history.  Worse yet, today's progressives believe lies to be true despite their egregious falsehood.  Then progressive state governments act on beliefs that biological sex can be changed by choice, that an aborted human being isn't a human being, that infants surviving abortion can still be killed, that the modern industrial world can run on solar panels and windmills, that money can be endlessly appropriated and redistributed, that a region like California should dump precious water to protect a bait fish, that hordes of bums and hobos polluting public spaces require no action, and that our enemies can be mollified by soothing words and foreign aid rather than by mind-concentrating deeds.  These lies and their dangers have been worsened over the last few decades by the degeneration of education from grammar school to university.

As Trump wins praise for effective coronavirus response, blue cities do opposite, threatening its spread it through homelessness.  The left's blue cities do all they can to encourage and reward homelessness, amounting to the country's great enabler of homelessness as a lifestyle.  Blue cities employ and are expanding gargantuan bureaucracies dedicated to "servicing" the homelessness, which encourages a hunt for more "clients."  San Francisco alone spends $77,000 per homeless "client."  They also refuse to enforce quality of life laws, such as those against vagrancy, public camping, drug use, public alcohol consumption, prostitution, and public urination and defecation, promoting homelessness even more.  Some are encouraging squatting on private property.  Others are permitting the homeless to take over public parks and spaces.  Some, such as Bill de Blasio's New York, are secretly busing the homeless to other cities to keep them from creating problems in their own cities.  It's a massive tax on those who own the overpriced homes in those cities, but taxes are the left's bread and butter.  It's a money merry-go-round, all done in the name of "compassion."

Black-on-Jewish attacks in NY, black-on-Asian attacks in SF: Same progressive rule.  [Scroll down]  The second thing we see is that this person has no fear of the police, no fear of the feds, and no fear of punishment, no matter what he does.  That's the work of leftist politics that in San Francisco now requires a dollar value of $951 in thievery before any police action can take place.  Thieves know they get the first $950 free in that city.  Cash bail has been eliminated, and San Francisco's district attorney has a pinned tweet praising Bernie Sanders for praising that.  That crazed leftist "serving" as district attorney, one Chesa Boudin, is the son of a terrorist killer, raised by Bill Ayers, last seen "serving" as Hugo Chávez's translator, whose big selling point is "decarceration," and ending "mass incarceration," and who refuses to prosecute quality-of-life crimes such as public urination.  The cops in that city are throwing up their hands at having this creep at the prosecutorial helm, effectively making all street crimes get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Sorry, Democrats:  Party's Over.  It makes me smile to know that fewer people are watching CNN than have fled from California in the last few years.  These days even Jed Clampett wouldn't be convinced that Californy is the place he ought to be.  He would have the sense to take his money to Texas where the taxes are reasonable and you won't be flash-mobbed by SJWs chanting that you're an eco-criminal for striking it rich in the energy sector.  Modest as Jed's education may have been, I think he would have understood that energy is a good thing and letting junkies poop in the aisle at Costco is a bad thing.  Even cousin Jethro would have winced at the mountain of filth that Pelosi and her party have made.

Canada:  A Dead Country Walking.  Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration.  A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or "climate change," radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation.  Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.  Canada is now reaping the whirlwind.  The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country.  The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc — and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem.

On Leaving the Golden State.  [Scroll down]  Let us talk about the authorities for a moment.  What exactly are they doing to help?  First, they threw open the borders and created sanctuary cities so that people that do not belong here can not be molested by law enforcement.  Next, they decriminalized camping in public.  People camping in public need something to do to while away the hours so they decriminalized drugs even going so far as to give away free needles.  If that were not enough, they decriminalized theft up to $950 per day.  This way any homeless person can walk into any business and brazenly steal whatever they wish without any fear of being sent to jail.  Finally, they've arranged things such that the police will no longer respond to 911 calls pertaining to vandalism or burglary.  You can watch from your bedroom window as a homeless person smashes your car windshield with a rock so as to ransack your car and if you call 911 it will be YOU that is in trouble for tying up their emergency line as someone vandalizing and robbing your car is a non-emergency and not worthy of any kind of response.

Bright Lights, Blighted City.  [Scroll down]  New Yorkers didn't bargain for what they're seeing these days.  They don't want the subways to break down so often or to spot a rat scurrying along with a pizza crust or to get slugged on the platform or shoved on the tracks by some mumbling paranoid nut.  They don't want to hurry under the construction platforms that leave the sidewalks permanently in gloom, and they don't want pieces of buildings to fall on them or their grandchildren.  They don't want to be confronted by a phalanx of panhandlers on the prime shopping blocks of Fifth Avenue or groped by a moocher costumed as Captain America in Times Square.  Or see men peeing on the sidewalk. [...] Other cities have bigger problems.  Homelessness is now endemic in Los Angeles and, especially, San Francisco.  Violent crime rates in St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, and other places dwarf New York's.

Heightening the Contradictions.  How often does the Left come up with ideas that, on the face of it, appear absurd, irrational, or utterly insane?  The answer, is, of course, all the time.  The general response is bewilderment or incomprehension — a shrug and an assertion that "those lefties are crazy."  But in truth, they're no such thing.  There's nothing irrational about it.  It's all part of the program. [...] The same is true of any other "senseless" or "irrational" leftist program.  None of them, whether they involve introducing transsexualism to schools or placing jihadis in Congress, occurred by accident.  They were meant to happen exactly the way they did, to heighten the contradictions.

As the media focuses on Democrat candidates, Democrats are looking at Trump.  Democrats will no doubt be distressed to learn that the progressive habit of politicizing absolutely everything is giving new weight to the law of unintended consequences.  A New Hampshire woman, horrified by the uproar in the knitting world a few months ago when woke knitters went on a rampage, found herself at the Trump rally in New Hampshire and went public about the pleasant surprises she found there. [...] People who were enjoying their craft were suddenly lambasted as racist cultural appropriators and worse.  Conservative knitters fled the knitting sites, and they were joined by Independent and Democrat knitters who found it offensive to have politics invade their peaceful, creative hobby.

Decriminalization of drugs fueling meth and homelessness in California.  The same people who demand that Congress and state governments spend even more money to "combat" the twin drug and homelessness crises never seem to connect the dots back to their decriminalization policies or admit that they are causing a rise in crime.  One journalist in California is not scared to pin the tail on the donkey — in the case of the Golden State, the infamous Prop 47.  Right around 2014-2015 is when the drug crisis exploded nationwide, including in California, roughly around the same time homelessness soared, particularly in the Golden State, along with the rise in theft and other crimes.  What else happened around the same time?  California passed Prop 47, which downgraded drug and theft crimes.  The result was a logical consequence to an illogical policy.  Bill Lamb, VP and general manager of Fox 11 in Los Angeles, delivered a TV commentary last week pinning the blame for the homeless and drug problems squarely on Prop 47.

Trump's Presidency Reveals 7 Undeniable Facts About The Swamp.  [#6] Identity politics and the legislation of social justice policies have stifled the rights of free speech and freedom of association throughout the democratic nations of the western world.  And they materialized as the result of language manipulation.  Remember when gender used to represent male or female?  Yet, in that example, the word "identity" was added after "gender" thus opening a verifiable Pandora's Box of Orwellian Newspeak.  Today in formerly free societies, men and women are forced to navigate Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities, consisting of an entirely new lexicon including neo-designations such as Agender, Cisgender, Ceterosexual, Ceteroromantic, Demigender, Enby, and Epicene; just to name a few.  Political Correctness is a means of thought control in the bubble, designed to protect imaginary victims from the societal sins of xenophobia, sexism, homophobism, and racism.

Number of THC positive drivers in fatal crashes has doubled in Wash. state.  A new study shows the number of Washington state drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for THC has doubled.  According to research by AAA between 2008 and 2012, an estimated eight percent of Washington drivers involved in fatal crashes were positive for THC.  That rate now is more than double since weed became legal in Washington.  In the five years before legislation, an average of 56 Washington drivers involved in fatal crashes each year were THC positive.  In the five years after legislation, that average jumped to 130.

Democrats Don't Care About American Lives.  Democrats' vision for the perfect America includes transforming her into a wild, wild west of sex, a society in which every perversion is legalized and citizens are forced to celebrate.  A memo exposed Obama's DoJ plan to legalize 12 perversions including pedophilia and bestiality.  Colleges are laying the groundwork by scolding us about our bigoted intolerance of pedophiles.  Democrats are sexualizing children beginning in pre-k with a mandatory LGBTQ curriculum.  I Am Jazz, a book about a boy whose parents began his so-called sex change at age three, is required reading.  Once you realize that Democrats only care about furthering their agenda and American lives do-not- matter, you understand their behavior.  U.S. students are sick with strange diseases due to untested illegal alien children being sent to public schools.  Transsexuals who regret having sex change surgery are blocked from media.

Guess the State:  Democrat-Run Fiasco Edition.  The last time Republicans held a majority on this state's Supreme Court was in the 1920s.  Its Court of Appeals has never had a Republican majority.  The last time Republicans held a majority in both houses of the state Legislature at the same time was 1930.  In the 89 years from 1931 to the present, Democrats have held a majority of both houses of the state Legislature for 79 of the 89 years.  Since 1931, Democrats have held the governor's office for 69 of the 89 years.  Even when a Republican has been governor, his powers have been greatly limited because he has never held a majority in both houses of the state legislature while in office.  What state am I?  If you guessed CA, IL, NY, NJ, or MA, you're wrong.  If you guessed NM, go to the head of the class.  Since 1931, no other state has had single-party Dem rule at the state level as long as New Mexico.  And how has New Mexico fared under the stewardship of single party Democrat rule?  As we shall see, not so well.

Liberalism Causes Achievement Gaps.  This report by Chris Stewart of Brightbeam is a blockbuster.  It is titled:  "The Secret Shame:  How America's Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All."  Stewart is a liberal activist from Minnesota who undertook to find out why the Twin Cities' left-wing public schools have some of the country's worst achievement gaps between white and minority (black and Indian) students.  Stewart compared achievement by race in a number of cities that he classified as progressive or conservative.  The results didn't surprise me, but they shocked Stewart.  Conservative cities (as ranked by political scientists used as a reference for the study) consistently did a better job of closing student achievement gaps — sometimes, to zero — than progressive cities.

A Peek at America before 1950 and the Assault by the Left.  Picture a neighborhood composed of low and middle income families, each with two parents, no homeless people, no street drugs, safe to walk the streets at night.  Is this the figment of an overactive imagination? [...] This typical school of 1940s New York City had higher standards and grade profile than any counterpart today and operated on a budget far smaller in equivalent dollars than any current public school budget.  In these "backward" times, the schools were free of substance abuse problems, sexual promiscuity, and identity problems.  There was an abiding respect for the authority of teachers and parents and for the dignity of every person regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.  There were clubs in my school for religion, for foreign languages (including Latin).  A Reporters' Club recorded significant events for the school paper.  There were toy drives for a local hospital...  The list of extracurricular engagements was long.

We Have Miseducated Boys and Girls Alike.  [Scroll down]  Why wouldn't a culture that worships promiscuous sex send the message to young men that their entire value revolves around sex?  And consider the stated — and hidden — messages that young men get every day:  Women should be able to sleep with as many men as possible.  (Your girlfriend won't be faithful to you.)  Divorce should be easy.  (If your own father left and you're hurt by that, who cares?  Men won't stay in a marriage.  You shouldn't expect to stay in a marriage.)  Dads are "deadbeats" or buffoons.  (Mothers are more important than fathers.)  Abortion is a constitutional right, and men should have no say.  (Your children shouldn't mean anything to you.  They can be destroyed whether you want that or not.  You don't matter.)  It isn't that every negative, oppressive trend affecting American boys is an after-effect of the sexual revolution.  Some problems Orenstein mentions — difficulty expressing emotions; fear of failure; "jock culture," with its bullying and vicious coaches — have been around much longer.

San Francisco, solid blue city of — empty storefronts and missing young people.  San Francisco is getting to be a hellhole and not just because crooks are having a field day, or a vast homeless army has prompted new tech 'innovations' in poop-map apps.  It's actually becoming a city with a hollowed out look, redolent of some place like Steubenville, Ohio or maybe Utica, New York, during the bad years, empty storefronts and missing young people.  So much for the trope that leftwing cities, with their walkable boulevards full of food trucks, handmade crafts, knitting shops, bookstores, artisan cheese shops, gourmet restaurants, and cafes are more lively and liveable than rightwing places.  For awhile, that did seem to be the story.  But it's coming to an end.  Sure, there's vast wealth.  But despite California being in an economic boom, the place is starting to look like Venezuela.

The Left's Endless Commercial Has Weaponized Popular Culture.  American consumers understand that most forms of popular culture have become nothing more than commercials for the Democrat party.  Movies, television, and music focus less on entertainment than on influencing the next election.  They have gone beyond mere leftist bias.  Artists, writers, and musicians subordinate their craft in order to present one endless Democrat commercial.  This trend is equally egregious in the case of books.  In modern bookstores, the Democrat commercial spreads far beyond the "politics" shelf.  "The gardening books advocate hiring illegal aliens.  The sports books reminisce about Vietnam."  A telling example of this trend appears in a 2018 book about the design of General Motors automobiles from the 1920s through the 1950s.  Fins, by William Knoedelseder, appears to be credible, informative, and interesting until it reaches Chapter 9.  In Chapter 9, the author apparently loses interest in classic cars and decides, instead, to tell the reader that President Trump is just like Hitler.

Democrats Have Become a Disfigured Reflection of the Party They Once Were.  [Scroll down]  We see in their contempt for federal marijuana laws, the institution of sanctuary cities, and their hostility to border enforcement a deranged lack of perspective regarding the health of our citizens, many of whom are struggling with or dying from drug usage.  The opioid epidemic we face is clearly connected to the opioid supply, and that, in turn, is clearly a border issue.  Yet they put aside the well-being of so many poor souls caught by the hook of addiction into ignoring border enforcement in order to score political hate points against the president.  Instead of looking at border issues in terms of law and national health, they turn enforcement into an ugly, defamatory argument about American and Trumpian racism.  Only 14 years ago, they were able to agree with Republicans on the need for stronger border enforcement, whereas now they try to block every Trump attempt — mandated by the American people — to bring order out of chaos on our southern border.

Chile's Collapse Foreshadows America's If Dems Win.  America's economic growth under Barack Obama was anemic, and the economy would have been even worse had the Democrats enjoyed control over Congress during his two terms.  Were the Democrats to return to the White House in 2020, all the economic gains under Trump would vanish.  All of the potential Democratic presidential nominees favor flirtations with economy-sapping socialism of one kind or another.  In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Axel Kaiser, a scholar at Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago, warned Americans that Chile's collapse could be theirs if they too consume socialism's poisonous cocktail of high taxes, increased government spending, and excessive regulation.

Guess Who Runs the Rudest Cities in America.  Recently, an oft-cited Business Insider survey ranked the rudest cities in America.  The top 10 are all bastions of misguided liberalism.  They are sanctuaries to illegal aliens and often hostile towards law-abiding citizens by imposing oppressive taxes and silly regulations and by encouraging lawlessness by handcuffing law enforcement.

Mayhem on the Streets of NY.  Beginning on the first of this year, New York's "no bail no jail" law, enacted by the Democratic legislature and put into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo went into effect. [...] It may be true that some low-level crimes for which poorer arrestees cannot afford bail, means they languish in jail until trial, but this law is so poorly crafted that it includes crimes for which bail is warranted no matter what the economic condition of the person arrested, for otherwise there is no penalty for immediately repeating the criminal acts.  Criminals learn there are no consequences for their actions.  Of course, it won't much affect the rich, who glide about in chauffeured cars and live in gated communities or buildings guarded by doormen, but the middle class surely are impacted.  Once, again these misguided efforts to coddle the underclass have the effect of remaking our cities and states on a feudal model where the rich are protected and serfs who work and pay taxes are in constant danger from brigands and murderers.

Man accused of driving drunk, killing pedestrian freed due to new criminal justice reforms.  A man who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian while driving drunk in East Harlem is back on the streets for now — thanks to the state's new criminal justice reforms, authorities said Thursday [1/2/2020].  Farkell Hopkins, 23, was arrested on charges of vehicular manslaughter and DWI at the scene of the deadly New Year's Eve collision, but was cut loose before he was even arraigned.  The Manhattan District Attorney's office said prosecutors still intend to pursue the case, but they now have to ensure they're able to turn over all their evidence to Hopkins' defense team within a tight 15-day time-frame, thanks to new soft-on-crime laws that went into effect Jan. 1.

Topics We Aren't Allowed to Talk About.  Baltimore may be the most depressing big city on the eastern seaboard.  Have you been there?  Everyone in Washington has.  If you want to take a train from Washington to New York, you have to pass through Baltimore.  This summer, the president told the rest of the world what it's like.  Baltimore, he said, is "rodent infested, not to mention a corrupt mess."  Why is Baltimore so bad?  How did it get so poor and hopeless?  Part of the answer is 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule.  But saying that would be embarrassing to the Democratic Party, so the party's apologists don't want to have the conversation.

Back to the pre-Giuliani era:  Serious crime up 31% in NYC's Central Park this year.  NYPD crime stats recently reported by the New York Post show that violent crime incidents in Central Park, Manhattan, have spiked 31 percent in 2018. [...] The cleanup of Central Park was one of the milestones of the era of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York that jump-started a two-decade decline in crime throughout the city.  Those gains are now being reduced due to the abolishing of pretrial bail, reduced sentencing, early release, and almost no deterrent against juvenile criminals.  The subways have already returned to pre-Giuliani-era crime levels.  According to NYPD data, there were 1,185 transit misdemeanor assaults citywide from Jan. 1 to Nov. 17, which reflects a 10.9 percent increase from the same time last year.

American Society and the Stretched Rubber Band.  [Scroll down]  Regressives have been successful in fostering a censored, politically correct environment in politics and entertainment.  They've accomplished this by resorting to character assassinations, engaging in identity politics on the basis of one's external traits, deplatforming media and entertainment personalities, and rioting in the streets in order to enforce their new code of ethics and engrain their postmodern ideology into the fabric of American culture.  Naturally, this oppressive behavior has led to a counterculture that rejects what Regressives laud and embraces what they hate.  This includes distrust of the media elite, which is intentionally dishonest, self-censoring, and heavily biased; a desire to promote patriotism and protect national heritage; and, most importantly, a yearning for politicians to fire from the hip and not worry about the laws of political correctness that devalue freedom of speech.  This brings us to President Trump, who may appear like a buffoon whose presidency is a fluke.  However, his ascendency is no accident — Trump correctly identified this counterculture as a sleeping giant waiting to be riled up.

A Liberal Order That Seeks To Shut Down Christian Charities Doesn't Deserve To Survive.  Even without full control over the government, the left has been aggressive in its use of government power against Christians who believe traditional teachings on human sexuality.  The left seems to target particularly those engaged in charitable work, rather than protecting them on account of their good works.  The left's legal wing is trying to compel Christian hospitals to perform abortions and sex-change surgeries, Christian schools to affirm same-sex relationships, and Christian charities such as women's shelters to pretend men can be women.  A purportedly serious Democratic presidential candidate wanted to tax dissenting Christian organizations, including churches, into oblivion.  The left won't even spare elderly nuns.  When the Trump administration ended Barack Obama's legal campaign against the Little Sisters of the Poor, various Democratic attorneys general made a point of continuing that unholy effort.

The Destructiveness of the Liberal Child Mind.  The Left's takeover of our schools and media has brainwashed a whole generation.  We've got millions of befuddled biological adults walking about with the minds of kids, cheering on the likes of foolish teen Greta, who should be at home practicing for her soccer meet or piano recital.  Give any of these kinderlings or their kind the reins of adult power, and what you get is an utter economic and societal wreckage.  You get the squalor, poverty, and degradation of the socialism of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and now Venezuela.  You do get nice slogans and cool tee-shirts emblazoned with "Health Care Is a Human Right" and "Medicare for All," but such things won't put food, let alone an MRI scanner or anti-cancer drug, on the table.

How Social Work Became the Pit of Despair It Is Today.  [Scroll down]  Without a "fundamental transformation" of the mass media's constant condemnation of personal moral judgments — without a drastic change in its lionizing of hedonistic pursuits that "push the envelope" beyond every prior boundary of decency — without a rejection of its reflexive division of society into privileged and victim groups — without a massive intellectual and moral shift on the part of educators, the entertainment industry, prominent intellectuals, and folks in electronic communications, the prospect for significant improvement in the culture at large, including its ever expanding social services arena, seems bleak.

Cook County Christmas shopping, Kim Foxx style.  When state's attorney Kim Foxx announced no prosecution for shoplifting under a thousand dollars, the results were fully predictable.  Chicago and Cook County, Illinois are leading the headlong American rush toward lawlessness and the loss of civil order.  The election of Kim Foxx as Cook County state's attorney, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in backing by George Soros, has been a further disaster — with not just the scandalously lenient treatment of Jussie Smollett after convulsing Chicago and the entire country with a fake hate crime caper, but the virtual abolition of laws against felony shoplifting under one thousand dollars.

Operation Mockingbird's Racial Destructive Lies.  In a recent article, I explained that Operation Mockingbird is a program founded by the CIA in the 1950s to use journalists and front groups to spread propaganda.  Today's version of Operation Mockingbird uses intelligence agencies, academia, Hollywood, and the Democratic party to spread hatred for Christians, traditional values, law-abiding gun owners, straight white men, pro-lifers, police and the 63 million who voted for Trump.  I am encouraged that a growing number of young Americans realize they are being propagandized 24/7.  Young people are fed up with SJWs (social justice warriors) demonizing whites, anyone who is happy, successful, thin, and enjoying life.  Youths are angry for being branded an "ist" or "phobe" for everything they say or do.  These three Operation Mockingbird lies continue to wreak havoc, igniting racial hatred, division and violence.

Will Dems Leave Their Irreligious Party?  The average Democrat I know does not believe that infanticide is a right nor do they accept the nonsense that there are more than two genders.  They do not believe that open borders that allow drugs and murderous gangs into our country should be our policy.  Those that have jobs do not approve of their wages taxed to give benefits to those who are here unlawfully.  They are also outraged that children are being subjected to progressive stunts like having drag queens read to them in public while exposing their crotches.  (Don't believe this?  Google it).  They do not approve of grown men being allowed to use women's bathrooms especially when they are being occupied by young girls.  Yet all of that is being pushed by the Democrats running for president in 2020.

America's real disease is toxic ignorance.  Many factors have combined over the last 50 years to remove the moral scaffolding into which we fit incoming information and prioritize it.  Judeo-Christian values have been demonized and replaced with relativism.  Relativism implies that nothing is all good or all bad, all wrong or all right.  There are no justified priorities.  Live and let live.  Once this took hold, toxic education stepped into the breach and indoctrinated students with substitutes for what used to be "right" and "wrong."  The only truth is your own personal well-being.  So teachers set about redefining history and interpreting ideas with which the left disagrees as harm to one's person.  This makes it a small step to say "speech is violence."

New York Times puts bad light on murdered Barnard teen and exculpates the city.  The disturbingly horrible stabbing murder of Barnard freshman Tessa Majors over a cheap robbery by one-to-three thugs is an awful story.  The victim was an 18 year old female freshman, a very young-looking teenager, walking to campus around 7 or 8 p.m. when it would have been dark. [...] Unpopular Mayor Bill de Blasio, who's excused these kinds of crimes in the past has made the right noises, but it remains to be seen if he's serious.  But the Times seems to be eager to minimize the crime, cast a negative light on the victim, and exculpate the now-socialist city. [...] In any case, the Times has a big problem now that the reality of blue-city politics has hit New York in a dramatic turnaround from the Giuliani era — kids are now being murdered.  That's why they're doing their best within decency to put the victim down and insist that the city remains safe even with crime now a free for all in New York.

A Safe Space Society Is A Totalitarian Nightmare.  As the undisputed star of the new film No Safe Spaces — the hit documentary on academia's descent into Orwellian tyranny features a quick shot of a lawyer letter I wrote to some collegiate gulag apparatchiks — I wholeheartedly recommend that you go see it.  Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager take you on a guided tour of the insanity and evil that has gripped academia, and it's utterly terrifying.  You need to see it not merely to gape at the freak show but to learn what's coming for society as a whole.  The dreary conformity factories that pretend to be providing our next generation of leaders with a higher education have instead embarked on a campaign of indoctrination designed to manufacture a generation of goose-stepping creeps who use their bizarre collection of buzzwords and fetishes as weapons to suppress any kind of dissent.  And the problem is that this PC Nazism is not just limited to academia.  Eventually, these daddy-issue cadres are going to get out into the world and contaminate all of our institutions even worse than they are contaminated now.

Why Is Our Society Degrading So Badly, So Fast?  On a local level in many cities and communities, Democrats in power are by their actions undermining the rule of law.  For example, expected compliance with the law in several of our leading cities run by Democratic Party leaders, including most notably New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, is now often based on a person's economic and immigration status, race, sex, sexual orientation, and increasingly an indication of a person's political and religious affiliations.  The reason for these exemptions being granted is based on the dual ideologies of identity politics and social justice.  The creation of an implied multi-tier justice system expressly violates our fundamental value of the law applying equally to citizens from all walks of life and most importantly results in the increasingly intolerable and dangerous conditions existing on the streets of these cities and an overall perception of communities in decline.

Republicans Will Live to Regret Joining Climate Alarmists.  [Scroll down]  The data are overwhelming that implementing the proposals of climate alarmists — i.e., drastically cutting down or eliminating fossil fuels — will devastate Western economies.  According to a recent report by the conservative American Action Forum, the Green New Deal will cost up to $93 trillion.  Canada has instituted policies that severely constricted the ability of Western Canada to market its oil and gas.  Eric Denhoff, a former deputy minister of Alberta wrote:  "With more than 150,000 unemployed in a persistent, unbelievably long-running recession, Alberta has faced thousands of bankruptcies, a huge increase in suicides, and a tremendous loss of long-term capital investment that scares the bejesus out of the business community." Kevin O'Leary, founder of the O'Leary financial group, said Alberta and the West "don't have their engine of growth anymore" because "Trudeau hates energy."  Canada, he notes, has been the the poorest place of all the G7 countries to invest your money over the last four years.

Millennials Are Fleeing Cities For Refuge From Democrats' Disasters.  [Scroll down]  My home city of Philadelphia is a prime example.  Here, 60,000 residents leave per year, and half of them are 18 to 34 years old.  The reason?  Urban centers like Philadelphia are bent on destroying the very conveniences that drew millennials to the city in the first place.  Here, the combined effect of sky-high taxes and outdated regulations add up to an all-out war on millennials.  Or at least a war on the things they love the most.  Brunch, for example.  In Pennsylvania, where I live, the number of available liquor licenses is restricted by our state liquor monopoly.  These restrictions and the fact that licenses are sold at auction (seriously!) make selling booze way too expensive for business owners.

The obsessive, intolerant, despicable do-nothing-but-obstruct Democrats.  It is the Left that has undone the tenets of Martin Luther King.  It is the Left that has branded any words they don't like as hate speech and destroyed higher education in America with trigger warnings and safe spaces.  Universities have infantilized college students for a couple of decades now.  Our pseudo-professorial class has indoctrinated its students and taught them nothing but intolerance for the slightest word of opposition to their prescribed, permitted speech with which they've been inculcated.  They have severely handicapped many thousands of young people.  Ask one of them who Mao was?  Stalin?  The Holocaust?  Socialism?  About America's founding?  They know nothing, by design and what they think they know is so wrong.  But ask them about transgenderism, institutional racism, homosexuality, white privilege, etc.  They will wax rhapsodic with their infinite knowledge of those topics, each of which is relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of this once great nation.

Revolution as a Mental Disease.  Illegal immigration has a negative impact on the labor market, especially low-income Americans, by keeping wages down.  Nevertheless, half of our fellow citizens believe that any action taken against illegals is tantamount to sending them to concentration camps.  Medicare for all would lead to long waiting times, with the problem being compound by the coverage provided to an undetermined number of illegals.  In a country where 85% of people have access to quality health care, this would represent a major downgrade.  Socialism is another major electoral theme, and rejecting it in an affluent society would normally be a matter of common sense.  However, part of the secular pietist mission is to fight inequality, even if that leads to worse living conditions for the majority, provided that the object of their envy is also harmed.

After the Impeachment.  [I]f the Democrats win this sham of an impeachment proceeding and the 2020 election, we should be very frightened, because a victory will usher in an era of governance that will lead to a timeline similar to what happened to Venezuela. [...] Many of today's advocates for socialism have no recollection of Venezuela in 1992 as the third-richest country in the world.  Nor do they understand that Venezuela's socialist president ran on "income inequality" in 2001 and shortly afterward put into place the same list of "reforms" as the ones now being advocated by today's Democratic candidates and some of their more radical allies — healthcare under government control, free higher education, guns confiscated, opposition leaders imprisoned, elections suspended, etc.

Trump is 100% on His Game.  I thank God that President Trump is not like other Republicans. [...] If Trump is not reelected in 2020, Democrats will kill healthy babies even after they are born.  Sixteen-year-old girls will have double mastectomies without parental consent or knowledge in absurd attempts to become men.  Democrats will roll out the red carpet to drug dealing, murderous illegals along with illegal alien children carrying strange diseases being admitted into our schools.  The Democrats' Green New Deal promises to stop air travel, kill the fossil fuel industry, and implement a long list of insane job-killing and economy crushing initiatives.  You cannot imagine the huge number of jobs Democrats will kill or force overseas.  Trump has our economy booming.  Black unemployment has hit a new historic low.  All of Trump's unprecedented remarkable successes for America will be flushed down the toilet if Democrats take the White House.

Liberals and the Moral Compass.  [Scroll down]  All of this wandering around the darkened moral landscape is simply an inevitable consequence of tying one's values to one fashionably righteous cause after another.  In the early part of the 20th century, the progenitors of today's progressives were all for eugenics and forced sterilization.  Now they like androgyny and political censorship.  Tomorrow, perhaps pedophilia and concentration camps will be all the rage.  It depends on what novelty proves the most expedient.  Ultimately, the essence of the Left is a cynical and unaccountable leadership leading people around by their desire to feel good about themselves — as cheaply and as painlessly as possible.  It thrives on intellectual laziness and low standards of integrity.  While it is nothing really new, and these people have always been with us, there are more of them now than any healthy society can possibly support.

Report: Hollywood Adds More LGBT Characters to TV, Cable, Streaming — Now 488 Total.  GLAAD, an organization that seeks to accelerate "acceptance of the LGBT community" in American culture, released its 2019 report, Where We Are on TV, and applauded the TV and cable entertainment industries for adding more LGBT characters to their programs.  "Of the 879 regular characters scheduled to appear on broadcast scripted primetime television this season, 90 (10.2 percent) are LGBTQ," states the report.  There are also some 30 recurring LGBTQ characters, making a total of 120.  That's up from last year's 113 regular and recurring LGBTQ roles.

The Editor says...
If you haven't done so already, you should take all of the television sets out of your house and leave them at the curb for the next garbage truck.  When I got rid of my last TV in 1980, it was the programming was boring, shallow, insipid, and a waste of time.  Now, almost 40 years later, the programming is offensive, demeaning, pernicious, blasphemous, and destructive.  The commercials are nearly as bad, and the so-called "local news" is nothing but an infomercial for big government.

Feeding the Fat Green Pigs.  Land that once fed horses is now used to produce biodiesel and ethanol for cars, so food prices must go up.  Forests are felled to burn in green power stations and for green-tick buildings while grasslands are invaded by feral pests and woody weeds from the ever-growing parks and Kyoto Protocol Forests.  Birds and bats are being sliced by wind turbines, flatlands are being smothered by solar panels, access roads and transmission lines.  But electricity costs soar, supply is rationed while reliability crashes.  Behind every one of these modern maladies are troughs of Big Green Pigs getting fatter on market mandates, subsidies from consumers or tax payers, and special tax treatments.  In the background, governments fund an academic/media industry promoting climate alarmism, energy rationing and intermittent energy.  Electric cars and penny farthings were pushed off the roads by Henry Ford's petrol engines, but politicians are trying to put them back — a Tesla for the rich and a bicycle for the poor.  Consumers and industry don't count and taxpayers are there to be milked.  In this Greentopia no one needs miners, farmers or fishermen.  All are lost for a fake global warming Emergency.

Why Trump is the Black Voters' Clear Choice in 2020.  Tragically, blacks have voted monolithically for Democrats for 60 years with nothing to show for it.  Baltimore, Washington D.C., Chicago, and every other city controlled by Democrats are hellholes of black misery; black-on-black homicides, out-of-wedlock births (fatherless households), high incarceration, genocidal numbers of abortions, and school dropouts.  And yet, Democrats are still deceiving blacks with their tired old lie that every issue plaguing black Americans is the result of white racism.  My stomach turned upon hearing Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren promising to end environmental racism.  I thought, "Here we go again with another Democrat attempting to fill blacks with more victim nonsense while trashing America, claiming that even the weather in the U.S. victimizes blacks."

No Safe Spaces:  What Happens When Common Sense and Values Disappear.  The new documentary No Safe Spaces, starring conservative thinker, radio host, and writer Dennis Prager and liberal, comedian, and podcast host Adam Carolla, is a must-see for anyone concerned with the long-term viability of the First Amendment's free speech protections.  While primarily focusing on the hostility to free speech laying siege to America's college campuses, vividly illustrated with compelling clips of violent protests and civil unrest by students from Berkeley to Yale, No Safe Spaces powerfully illustrates how the movement to limit speech has moved into mainstream arenas as well.  Prager and Carolla recognize that "common sense and values" are disappearing for the first time since our country's founding.

The Source of the Media's Post-Truth Analysis.  The source of the left-liberal bias in journalism is no mystery.  You need look no further than the faculty of any journalism or communications department at any American university.  But what really needs to be understood is how the people in the fake news business came to be liberated from feeling any obligation to tell the truth. [...] For some time now, something called postmodernism has ruled on American campuses, and a core idea of the postmodernists is that claims to truth are meaningless.

Reclaiming Common Sense.  How has it come to pass that in America, a man can identify as a woman, and his linguistic affirmation by itself, at least in New York City, obligates others to refer to him as "her"?  And why is it increasingly considered mandatory to declare that men taking female hormones can compete against women in sporting events?  What aberrant philosophical doctrine, you may ask, is behind the assertion that there are sixty-three genders or that marriage must no longer be considered the union of a man and a woman?  The answer to these and other absurdities can be found in Robert Curry's new book, Reclaiming Common Sense:  Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World.

A Great Awakening to the Fight is Upon Us.  [Scroll down]  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship.  Republicans have been outfoxed on that score every time. [...] The old liberal promises of compromise and conciliation were and are false (remember the pledge that when we get same-sex marriage we'll be done with sex and gender issues?).  Barack Obama's reasonableness was a disguise, Joe Biden's Scranton liberalism a pose.  Obergefell was but a step in the never-ending reduction of traditional sex roles.  The inclusion of minority literature and history in the curriculum during the 1970s and '80s wasn't to serve the ideals of diversity.  It was to redefine America as a racist creation from 1619 to the present.  The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  But it's been a war nonetheless, and a successful one because conservative leaders and intellectuals have failed to assess the other side.

Lies catch up with Democrats.  For years, Democrats brushed aside concerns that by giving them an inch they would seek a mile.  But Obamacare did lead to a demand for Government Health Care For All.  Gay civil unions did lead to gay marriage and now transgendering (castrating) boys.  Beto O'Rourke wants to use gay marriage to regulate religions via the tax code.  His call for gun confiscation drew calls to shut up and not give the store away.  Democrats lie about their goals.

Fairfax County, Virginia Presents Dire Warning to America.  Fairfax's descent into its current state started with a wave immigration, much of it illegal, into the area which washed away Republican political viability.  Fairfax County became a nullification (sanctuary) county in 2018 and now puts a significant chunk of money into its budget to defend noncitizens from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although the problem started long before that.  By 2015, 30% of the county was foreign-born.  MI-13, [sic] a brutal criminal gang, is now more active than ever, and the once marquee schools have started what will be a long slide through mediocrity to abysmal.  Fairfax just ranked seventh among the highest-crime sanctuary jurisdictions, ranking just below Chicago and tied with a nearby Maryland county that has had at least nine illegal alien sexual assaults since its sanctuary policy was declared in late July.  That's staggering.  Fairfax County now is on a list of shame with Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.

We need to fight for the values that made America great.  The left railed against our soldiers during the Vietnam War.  The left calls those who believe in a supreme being or the commitment of marriage uninformed and anachronistic.  They're now openly saying that churches that hold traditional values should lose their tax-exempt status.  The Left doesn't care about our enormous debt, pushes for socialism, and criticizes the Boy Scouts.  The Left thinks it's OK that our schools don't teach about the founding fathers or free markets.  They want you to think America was never great.  To a degree, the pressure from the Left is working.  Americans under 30 are less interested in joining the military.  Church attendance is at an all-time-low, participation in the Boy Scouts, even after allowing girls in, has shrunk, and many are choosing not to have families.  Socialism, the single most discredited idea of the last century, an idea that led millions into poverty and tyranny around the globe, has gained a foothold in one of our two political parties.

How to Bring Down the Ideology of the Left.  The ideology of the Left is integral to the Left's power.  Democrats seek to codify political correctness into legislation as settled verities admitting no further debate.  This is despite the abject failure of their policies to solve the problems they contend need fixing.  The welfare state has spawned intergenerational dependence and misery as well as national debt.  Their self-appointed victims have not been healed by un-gendered bathrooms.

Trickle-Down Bureaucracy Is Destroying Vermont.  So much money is spent on reports, studies, and employment for state workers that Vermont's property tax rates are some of the highest in the nation.  To the extent that any of the money does come back down, it is indeed a mere trickle.  Vermont demonstrates the government bloat that plagues many states, and the effects are becoming apparent.  Vermont now has fewer than 700 conventional dairy farms — but the Vermont Department of Agriculture and the UVM Extension Service steadily increase employees, and salaries.  This is quite typical of the virus-like quality of the Vermont bureaucracy — it grows, and citizens lose wealth or leave.  Vermont has nearly twice as many full-time state employees per 10,000 residents as New Hampshire, yet Vermonters are struggling much more than their thriving neighbors.  There is no growth, and the governor has infamously offered $10,000 bribes to out-of-state earners to reside in Vermont.

Eco madness may be reason for disastrous Boeing 737 MAX safety issues.  Air travel, which accounts for 2 percent of global emissions, has become the great bogeyman for climate alarmists, sparking a backlash against airlines.  Punitive eco-taxes, aviation regulations, activist investors, green NGOs and climate-aware passengers conspire to force airlines and manufacturers to lower CO2 emissions by using less fuel, which accounts for 99 percent of aviation's carbon footprint.  No one has said it explicitly yet, but this relentless pressure to reduce emissions appears to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two fatal crashes in the past year, claiming 346 lives.  The warning from Boeing's catastrophes is that climate ideology can have fatal consequences.

The Derangement Syndromes of Our Time.  Who doesn't feel compassion?  Who wouldn't do whatever they can to help someone in need?  But there are intractable problems with compassion gone wild.  In practice, misguided compassion breeds debauchery and dependence.  Anyone wishing to see the former is invited to drive the streets of San Francisco, where they may smell human excrement, tons of which are deposited each week on the sidewalks and gutters by the city's nearly 10,000 homeless.  They may witness thousands of intravenous drug addicts buying and injecting this poison in state-sanctioned acts of slow-motion suicide.  Anyone wishing to see the latter is invited to tour pretty much any legacy housing project in America, where welfare checks and free rent made the presence of a father not merely unnecessary but economically disadvantageous.

NYC is 'Spiraling Down to Chaos' Following Attack on 20-Year-Old EMT Worker.  A union boss representing First Responders across New York City slammed Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio Wednesday [10/23/2019]; saying his policies have led to "chaos" that is nearing "the point of no return."  "Mayor Bill de Blasio is being asked to do more to protect first responders in the wake of an attack on a 20-year-old emergency medical technician as he was transporting an emotional disturbed person to the hospital," reports CBS New York.

Moral Relativism Taking Over Everything:  Sports, Politics, Libraries.  Portland liberals are so far removed from the truth that they've decided to ban urinals in their $195-million remodel of the Portland Building, which houses the city's administrative offices.  In an email to city employees explaining this ignorant decision, Portland chief administrative officer Tom Rinehart said, "I am convinced that this is the right way to ensure success as your employer, remove arbitrary barriers in our community, and provide leadership that is reflective of our shared values."  Similar perverse "leadership" and "values" recently led insurance giant Kaiser Permanente to promote the evil "Drag Queen Story Time."  The television ad shows a grown man dressed as a woman laughing and dancing with small children.  As Tyler O'Neil rightly notes, this is a "clear attempt to normalize Drag Queen Story Hour.  The smiling, laughing children are a subliminal message that full-grown men dressing up like women and acting sexual around children is fun, not disturbing."

Of Electricity and Ideology.  [Scroll down]  "For decades," [Kay] Grimes wrote, "traditional forest management was scientific and successful — that is until ideological, preservationist zealots wormed their way into government and began the overhaul of sound federal forest management through abuse of the Endangered Species Act and the 're-wilding, no-use movement.'"  U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, whose Northern California district includes the Yosemite Valley and the Tahoe National Forest, told Grimes that the U.S. Forest Service 40 years ago departed from "well-established and time-tested forest management practices."  "We replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect," McClintock explained.  "Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to 'save the environment.'  The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts, and our federal agencies ever since."

Political correctness versus common sense.  Not long ago, everyone understood the unchanging commonsense reality that human beings are either male or female.  Today in New York City, the rules have been changed — and failure to keep up can have dire consequences.  New York City's special 31 genders are surrounded by special legal protections.  Businesses can now be fined as much as $250,000 for refusing to address someone by his preferred pronoun.  As we have seen in the news, even in cities that have not yet have caught up with New York City in terms of imposing legal penalties, failing a test of political correctness about genders can result in public shaming or the loss of a job. [...] The important thing to understand is that the masters of political correctness are not done yet.  They have given us a glimpse of the future they have planned for us.  If they continue to have their way, more and more will be required of us, and the penalties will eventually go beyond mere fines and public humiliation.

Social and Political Disintegration Is Accelerating.  In 1960, 5% of the nation's children were born out of wedlock; but in the last few years, the percentage is hovering around 40%.  Sexual immorality is further intensified by promotion of sexual activity in our public schools.  Free condoms are regularly distributed in our educational institutions.  Some states have clinics where, after a ten-minute interview, young girls are given referrals to get an abortion (no parental or caregiver consent, for example, is needed in New York State as well as other states).  In many states, at least one parent must be informed, but consent is not required.  Little children are sitting on the laps of drag queens in library "readings" and some of those drag queens have records of pedophilia.  Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land.  Trashy exhibitionists are singing on youtube.com and throughout the media.  A million babies are aborted a year, not for "women's health" in 90+% of the cases, but because of women's priorities.  These changes in our sexual mores have led to the disintegration of the family.

Air Canada to stop announcing 'ladies and gentlemen' in recognition of gender fluidity.  Employees aboard Air Canada flights will no longer greet guests by referring to them as "ladies and gentlemen" or "mesdames et messieurs," which has been typical protocol for years, in an effort to be conscious of gender fluidity.  Flight attendants and other staff will not use the language in boarding announcements, and the company instead plans to replace the standard greetings with neutral words, such as "everybody" or "tout le monde."

Crazy and Woke on the Western Front of Progressive Insanity.  Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and "permanent supportive housing;" you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.  Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world.  An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town.  They almost never use actual toilets.

Disposable Humans and the Downfall of Civilization.  How has the progressive movement made evil a common occurrence?  Lack of morality, ethics, and the inability to determine what is a valued life; and what is viewed a mere inconvenience, to be removed, much like a dermatological imperfection.  Over the years I have watched the erosion of society, and the uprising of "wokeness."  Nothing has prepared me for the utter lack of regard for life as we currently see in today's world.  Serial abortion as a form of birth control, and in some cases an appalling sexual fetish is being seen more as society degrades and crumbles, before our very eyes, each passing day.

Imagining Chelsea Clinton's America.  [Scroll down]  In city after city, draconian ordinances overrode zoning laws with decades of precedence.  Investors could demolish single family homes and erect fourplexes, or more units, where one household had previously stood.  Rent control laws, combined with mandated conservation retrofits (to prevent climate change), made it hard for anyone apart from large institutional investors to maintain rental properties.  Single family homes became worth more to buyers if they were demolished and replaced with apartments.  New laws made it obligatory to accept Section 8 renters whose rent would be paid by taxpayers.  Corporate behemoths busted block after block, in city after city, turning communities into government housing projects.  Those who objected were branded as racists, deniers, xenophobes, and NIMBYs.  They were silenced.  Chelsea Clinton, of course, along with all the politically connected, well fed animals in this new Animal Farm called America, resided in a gated community.

Can we keep our Republic?  Starting with Woodrow Wilson, and continuing through FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society programs, and Barack Obama's further expansion of entitlement programs and take-over of the health care industry, the country has been moving relentlessly toward more and more centralization of federal power, expansion of the federal regulatory regime, and encroachment on the freedom of states, civil society, families, and individuals.  And don't forget, along the way Republican elites have supported and abetted this weakening of the Republic.  They have created or expanded intrusive regulatory agencies like the EPA and the Department of Education, illiberal programs like race-conscious set-asides, and increased the number and scope of redistributionist programs like Medicaid and Social Security.  More recently they have joined forces with the identity-politics left to support amnesty for illegal aliens and laxer immigration protocols.  Worse yet, they have frequently endorsed and legitimized the politicized, illiberal ideology of race, "gender," ethnicity, and sexual identity that provides Democrats with tools for leveraging political power and influence in order to achieve "social justice."

Dismaying Dumbed-down Discourse.  I see the crowds cheering the 2020 Democrat candidates and wonder if they're being paid to appear, or are they really, really ignorant about what this party had become?  It is now the party of open borders, socialism, atheism, infanticide and is offering lots of free stuff that's being paid by taxpayers.  It is also the party that is completely committed to everything the "alphabet people" espouse.  The LGBQT, aka the alphabet people (dubbed by the brave comedian Dave Chapelle), has the Left convinced that there are more than two genders and thus it is perfectly fine that men claiming to be women can now compete against women in sports events and can use women's toilets — where little girls can no longer feel safe.  This is pure insanity but if the progressive left certifies it, the mentally deficient will accept it.

Progressing toward Extinction.  [Scroll down]  Many young people live in random little groups — making a semi-permanent lifestyle of the arrangements one finds in college dorms.  In our particular brave new world, people are free to lavish their attention either on themselves or, if they have some nagging concerns about posterity, on the latest attempt to save the planet.  Banning of plastic straws is both easier and apparently more noble than nurturing new human beings.  Though still shackled to some semblance of their animal desires through myriad and faddish varieties of sex, today's young people are, at least, unshackled from the animal consequences.  This is what is now called progress.  People can hope to binge-watch some anesthetic pablum to the end of their days, uninterrupted by the squeal of their progenies' voices or the irritating patter of their tiny unshod feet.  Children are an inconvenience, and grandchildren are worse.

The Left to America's Children:  Your Past Is Terrible, and Your Future Is Terrible.  A rule of life is that everything the left touches it ruins: art, music, Christianity, Judaism, race relations, male-female relations, universities, high schools, elementary schools, late-night comedy, sports, liberty, journalism, the Boy Scouts, national economies, language and everything else it influences. [...] To this list, we can now add childhood and children.

Portland Bans Urinals In $195M 'Gender-Neutral' Remodel of Government Building.  The City of Portland has banned urinals in the $195 million remodel of the Portland Building, which houses administrative offices for the city.  While urinals use less water than toilets, they are a relic of a bygone era when men and women were recognized as biologically different.  A spokeswoman told NBC affiliate KGW News that she could not estimate how much it will cost to remove the urinals, which have been a feature of the building since its construction in 1982.  Chief Administrative Officer Tom Rinehart explained the urinal ban in an email to employees last February.

'The Leprosy of Unreality' and the Demise of the Left.  Evidence of the splintering social fabric is already apparent.  Rumors of crimes at the hands of the Democrat-controlled Deep State abound and undermine public trust.  Snowflakes demand places safe from the real world.  Children are recruited into the fairy tale of rescuing the planet from an imaginary dragon.  Through childish games of dressing up as boys when they are women and wearing lipstick despite being men, our youths are indoctrinated into insanity.

The 50 most miserable cities in America.  Not the worst, just the most miserable.  We've identified the 50 most miserable cities in the US, using census data from 1,000 cities across the country, taking into consideration population change (because if people are leaving it's usually for a good reason), the percentage of people working, median household incomes, the percentage of people without healthcare, median commute times, and the number of people living in poverty.  Often, these cities have been devastated by natural disasters.  They've had to deal with blight, and with high crime rates.  Economies have struggled after industry has collapsed.  These cities also tend to have high rates of addiction.  The state with the most miserable cities was California, with 10 in the top 50.  New Jersey was second with nine, and Florida had six.

California Shocked To Find Bill Decriminalizing Retail Theft Resulted In... More Retail Theft.  A few years ago, California passed one in a series of bills aimed at emptying the jails and prisons.  Proposition 47 carried the disingenuous name of "the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act and its stated purpose was to keep non-violent offenders out of jail.  To achieve this goal, the state decriminalized a number of lesser offenses, including retail theft.  The law raised the value of the amount of merchandise someone could steal while still only being charged with a misdemeanor to nearly one thousand dollars.  To the great surprise of the government, people noticed this change and began taking advantage of it.  They have now recorded multiple years of steadily increasing, organized robbery.  These plots are known as "mass grab and dash" thefts and they generally involve large numbers of young people all entering a store at the same time, grabbing armfuls of merchandise and dashing back out to their vehicles and hitting the highway.  Not only are robberies on the rise, but arrests and prosecutions are down.  Who could possibly have predicted this?

Gun Control:  Wrong Solution to the Wrong Problem.  When liberals spend years telling people that life isn't sacred, should they really be surprised that more people treat life as not being sacred?  There have been more than 61 million abortions since Roe v.  Wade in 1973. Every single Democrat candidate in contention is applying the Pete Buttigieg "breath" standard, meaning they all support abortion up to, and perhaps beyond, birth.  When you make an effort to devalue life in the interest of political expedience, people will be affected in tragic, horrible, and surprising ways.  Mother Teresa once said "the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.  And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"  That's a mighty good question.

The American Left Is Completely Insane.  It isn't just elected Democrats at the national level.  Cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles and San Francisco — run by Democratic mayors and city councils — have high rates of crime and homelessness.  San Francisco and Los Angeles have growing cases of typhoid fever, tuberculosis and other diseases borne by fleas and human feces, piles of which coat the streets.  California's legislature has not been able to solve those grave problems.  But it has banned plastic straws in restaurants.

The Broken Promise of American Cities.  Hope for a better future in California is rapidly becoming a stillborn dream, as the connection between decay and the politics of progressivism becomes painfully clear.  The proponents of this secular theology may be getting a wakeup call soon, as the Golden State's cities teeter on the edge of bubonic oblivion, with rats teeming through the streets of Los Angeles, even forcing temporary, partial closures of City Hall.  Skid Row has unfurled its filthy tendrils into the halls of the Los Angeles Police Department's Central Division station, with officers falling ill as vermin lay siege to their precinct.  But the explosion of the rat population, catalyzed by the feculence of homeless encampments across the state, has not deterred lawmakers from advancing a bill to ban rat poison in the name of human health and environmental concerns.  In the progressive mind, even mentioning the risk of disease caused by these policies is somehow tantamount to racist dog-whistling.  San Francisco, the rainbow flagship of our brave new world, even has a "no-kill, catch-and-release" policy for rodents.

Bill would require gender 'X' option on all state documents.  Advocates for a gender "X" designation on state documentation say making people chose male or female is akin to making them lie, while opponents argue that a person's sex is a biological fact.  "If you look at your Massachusetts driver's license, it lists 'sex,' not 'gender,'" Andrew Beckwith of Massachusetts Family Institute told the Herald.  "The concept of 'gender identity' is based on internal feelings, but sex is binary (male or female) and grounded in biology, and we believe that a state ID should reflect that objective fact."  A bill that would require an "X" option on all state documents that ask for gender identification, including driver's licenses, birth certificates and voter registration, went before the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight on Tuesday [9/10/2019].

On Destroying America.  We are lied to, deceived, and manipulated constantly to believe what isn't so. [...] I can remember several generations back when common sense was common.  No longer.  Criminals are treated as victims.  White people are labeled as oppressors and must apologize for it.  Deranged people who need help are ignored, treated as normal, or just doing their thing.  And they are everywhere, creating chaos, as designed and expected.

The Left's determination to destroy us from within.  [Governor Newsom of California], and the rest of the Democrat governors and mayors that destroyed their own states and cities, have not only ruined the municipalities that they control, but have destroyed countless lives — namely, of those who barely subsist on the streets of these cities:  Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle, Baltimore, Chicago.  (Chicago and Baltimore are the murder capitals of the nation.  Both have among the strictest gun control laws in the nation.)  They willingly promulgate the drug use of their homeless (they pass out free syringes) and seem to tolerate the vast homeless encampments and all they entail:  discarded needles, public defecation, crime, disease — in short, the destruction of the cities they've been allowed to take over and ruin.

Criminologists Mislead Us.  There is significant bias among criminologists.  The reason for that bias is that political leanings of academic criminologists are liberal.  Liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 30-to-1. Ideology almost perfectly predicts the position of criminologists on issues from gun control to capital punishment to harsh sentencing.  Liberal criminologists march in step for gun control, oppose punitive prison sentences, and are vehemently against the death penalty.  In 2012, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study on the growth of incarceration.  It showed that from 1928 until 1960, crime rates rose slowly each year.  After the 1960s, crime rates exploded to unprecedented levels of violence until the 1990s.

The Ferguson Effect comes to New York:  NYPD arrests plummet in wake of officer firing in Garner case.  What is it about the Left that fails to understand that painting cops as racists has consequences?  In the wake of the firing of a police officer over the death of black cigarette street seller Eric Garner, New York's police are focused now on just playing it safe.

Countering Progressive Nihilism.  America's homeless epidemic, along with a shocking rise in deaths from drug overdoses, stem from the same root cause:  liberal progressive ideology.  The seductive power of this ideology, which brims in equal measure with overwrought compassion for the less fortunate alongside fuming resentment towards the "privileged," has earned it a dominant position in American culture. [...] While countless critical issues are being ignored or made worse thanks to the influence of progressives, two of them, homelessness and drug related deaths, stand out.

25 common sense truths that you're no longer supposed to say. 
  [#14]   Just because a white person criticizes or gets into a conflict with a minority doesn't mean it has anything to do with race.  In fact, the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
  [#15]   Drag queens are deviants and shouldn't be allowed near children, much less allowed to be part of story times for kids.
  [#16]   There are only two genders.
  [#17]   If America were oppressive for minorities, they'd be leaving the country, not coming here in droves.

The Left's Neverland.  Now, over 150 years after the Civil War, we find ourselves living in a world that has tucked reality away in a locked cupboard and our schools, our media, and many of our churches don't want it to get out.  We live in a TV-Internet-Smartphone world where our music is mostly canned, our connections with people are at least once-removed, and our children never look up.  The virtual has taken over to a point where people actually think we can alter history by removing statues and painting over murals, and they have to change history because Neverland has to have its own annals, its own chronicles.  Neverland is not America.  This explains why both Obama and Hillary could talk with such disdain about half of the population.  We aren't their people.  They were running to be president of Neverland, not of traditional America.

Vermont Is Going Insane.  Will the Rest of America Follow?  [Scroll down]  Thirty-plus years later, our youths have been corrupted by unhealthy food, limitless violence in television and pornography, phone and internet obsession that leaves them anxious and stressed, and Facebook that feeds toxicity. [...] Studies have found that 30% of college students don't know how to boil an egg; 52% of high school students don't know how to change a tire; 70% of young people have no clue how to sew on a button.  Yet we grown-up adolescents are yoking them with responsibility to "lead" us to solve our social ills while they can't find jobs, many require psychiatric medications, and the national deficit has exceeded the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.

Transgender insanity:  Another big battle in the war on common sense.  A women's shelter is being sued for turning away a man dressed in a nightgown.  Really.  According to the reports, a very large and very inebriated man dressed in a nightgown showed up at a women's shelter in downtown Anchorage, Alaska seeking entry.  He was not admitted to stay the night.  As a result, the shelter is now embroiled in a legal battle.  The Anchorage Equal Rights Commission (AERC), an administrative agency within the municipality of Anchorage, has brought a discrimination case against the shelter.

War on cops in Philadelphia.  Many people across the nation watched the hours-long standoff and shooting of Philadelphia Police Officers on TV.  Nine officers were injured and six were wounded by gunfire.  Thankfully, no officers were killed, and the gunman finally surrendered.  The following day I spoke to a Philly cop who had been on the scene.  He scoffed at the idea of Philadelphia Mayor James Kenny and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner arriving at the hospital to visit the injured cops.  He called the two "anti-cop liberals."

Terror without trust.  Already it has proved impossible to cap the number of genders.  The epithets "racist" and "Nazi" are applied to an ever-growing number of people who find themselves guilty of offenses that didn't even exist until recently.  It is so powerful it even knocks over the woke.

Missing the Point of Gun Ownership.  If there were ever a survey asking gun owners why they buy guns, I'd wager the majority of them would say that it basically is for protection.  The Second Amendment was not written for hunters but for the people's self-protection, including protection from tyranny.  The first thing smart dictators do is remove guns from registered owners. [...] There have always been guns in the country but mass shootings of innocents were rare until the 1960's. [...] Would there have been a Columbine massacre if God had not been removed from the schools?  Most of the mass shooters fit the same profile.  Most are single males and come from broken homes.  Nearly all have been under the influence of marijuana or psych drugs.  Not sure if any of these murderers were regular church goers but I doubt it.

U.S. Attorney Blasts Soros-Backed Philly D.A. For Putting Police in Danger With 'Culture of Disrespect'.  In a blistering statement Thursday [8/15/2019], United States Attorney William M. McSwain lashed out at the District Attorney of Philadelphia, saying his "vile rhetoric" and lax law enforcement policies were putting police in danger.  Larry Krasner, the Philly D.A., is a far-left former civil rights defense attorney who has sued police more than 75 times, and has defended far-left Occupy Philly activists and Black Lives Matter agitators.  Left-wing hedge fund billionaire George Soros helped put Krasner in office by donating an overwhelming $1.45 million to an independent political action committee backing his campaign in 2017.

Leaving the Democrats.  I have had a great life in the greatest country on earth.  All along the way, the Democrats have stepped on me, taxed me more, lied to me, called me names, and demand I give up my rights.  Democrats were the ones pushing environmental causes at the expense of humans and government takeover of healthcare.  They have mismanaged everything they get their hands on, and then blame others for their own deeds.  I watch them lie and cheat and twist words.  Democrats have alienated their own base to the point they have to argue for foreigners to come into this country illegally in order to vote for Democrats, mainly by calling those of us opposed to this "racist." [...] I am now called racist, homophobic, misogynist, and Islamaphobic.  A gun-toting, Bible-believing bitter clinger.  A deplorable.  A white nationalist.  Nazi.  I can't remember all of my Democrat party subtitles.

This Is What LGBTQ Organizations Are Doing to Society.  Virtually every week, there seems to be another issue that preoccupies the country.  But while our attention is focused on President Donald Trump, Google, Charlottesville, Russia, impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, the next elections, racism, a trade war with China, the #MeToo movement or something else, LGBTQ organizations are quietly going about their work dismantling ethical norms, making a mockery of education, ruining innocent people's lives and destroying children's innocence.

Twilight Zone Nation.  How in the world did we get to this Rod Serling place where drag queens are reading to our children in our libraries?  How, in a rational universe, did four ignorant, left-wing, lunatic women attain breathtaking power in less than a year?  When did sex trafficking become such a huge crisis?  How is it that facts and evidence and law have no pull at all anymore?  We find ourselves, apparently all of a sudden, in a place where telling bald-faced lies about anyone we want to slander is acceptable behavior, where billions of dollars of government money is unaccountably missing and no one seems really upset by that malfeasance, where pedophilia is working its way into appropriate behavior.

Will Any Single Intervention Eliminate Mass Shootings?  [Scroll down]  The next part of this puzzle is the very definition of "mental illness."  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry has been modified many times.  The most recent revision has removed most of the "gender dysphoria" diagnoses, normalizing the alphabet soup of sexual preferences.  This is done in the face of the fact that LGBTQ-whatever "gender preferences" are associated with higher mortality than binary male/female identities.  Doctors are supposed to "first do no harm."  Normalizing a health risk creates harm.  This means that the DSM changes are not medical, they are political.

Where does politics meet the divide?  Does Rashida Tlaib's rhetoric inspire the protestors outside Mitch McConnell's home?  Is Elizabeth Warren responsible for the shooting in Dayton that left nine people dead?  Does Ilhan Omar own the anger of American's when she says that white men should be profiled?. [...] Is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her baseless environmental screeds responsible for El Paso?  The shooter's manifesto "An Inconvenient Truth" not echoing the President, but liberals, AOC, and Al Gore's claims that we will be dead as a result of dwindling resources within 12 years?  Does Joe Biden's latest gaffe comment mean he is a White Supremacist, believing that while he might work on behalf of the poor brown and black kids, white children are superior?

Trump administration seeks to juice dishwashers by scrubbing energy regulations.  For years, consumers have complained about slower, noisier dishwashers that produce dirtier dishes, the result of tighter federal efficiency regulations that the Trump administration is now seeking to unload.  The Energy Department last month proposed a rule to create a new dishwasher product class that would finish a normal cycle in an hour or less by using less stringent energy standards than permitted under the current rules.  Sam Kazman, general counsel of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which led the charge for the regulatory clean-up, said the ever-tighter restrictions on energy and water have produced machines that take twice as long without getting dishes as scrubbed as earlier models.

Researchers: Crumbling family structures are contributing to mass shootings.  A study by the Family Research Council says that crumbling traditional family structures are contributing to a wave of mental health issues that often lead people to commit mass shootings and other violence.  "The fact that we have an epidemic of absentee fathers in the home and that we have a disintegrating family structure in America, which is brought about by a variety of things, is a major issue and a major cause for what we see happening in these mass shootings," Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Vice President of the FRC, told The Epoch Times.

El Paso Shooting:  Latest Atrocity Exploited by Democrats.  The deranged gunman's views are all over the ideological map.  However, his environmental views are clearly the result of progressives dominating public education and fake news media.  This quote from the manifesto exposes his insane progressive environmental views.

The link between pot and mass shootings may be closer than we think.  You can't walk through the streets of Manhattan these days without smelling weed.  Even as evidence mounts of the health problems associated with marijuana, New York has insisted on joining other greedy states scrambling to legalize this deceptively dangerous drug.  It makes no sense at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.  And, in all honesty, we cannot rule out a connection between increasing marijuana use, mental illness and the recent spate of mass shootings by disturbed young males.

The surprise isn't that we had two mass shootings in 24 hours, it's that we don't have many more.  After the El Paso and Dayton shootings at the end of last week, a friend of mine was asking how we can "pull young men out of the 4chan/8chan toxic cesspool." [...] The problem with this kind of thinking is that there are certainly toxic forums out there, but they're just toxic pools down river from our toxic culture.  I challenge you to listen to the kind of common rhetoric coming out of college campuses ("Hearing words I don't agree with is violence"), places like Twitter ("It sure would be a shame if something happened to your kids") and our standard political discourse ("You're a Nazi" for wearing that hat.)  and tell me that they're not toxic as well.

El Paso proves we live in a mean culture.  Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick went on a one-of-a-kind rant Sunday on Fox television:  "What do we expect," he asked, "when kids play video games instead of going to church?"  One of the shooters reportedly was acting out in real life a violent video game character.  Children just entering grade school today are being exposed to a boatload of vile and venom.  To gratuitous killing.  To music that celebrates it.  "Garbage in, garbage out."  American children are being programmed in a culture that is vengeful, covetous, and mean.  When they put it all together and make it a reality, why are we so surprised?  They are simply doing what they've been taught.

An Open Letter to Democrats Who Insist Politicians "Just Do Something".  Thousands can die in America's impoverished inner cities every year — with illegally acquired guns — and Democrats are silent.  Perhaps it's because they're the ones running those cities, like Chicago, Baltimore and Destroyt.  And decades of Democrat leadership have enabled the worst breed of gangsters by criminalizing gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.

Social Media's Transition from Novelty to Malignancy.  [Scroll down]  The most recent and troubling development in social media is the mob mentality.  Often the sharing of an opinion elicits a storm of response, and vastly wider distribution, via a person's now-expanded network of friends and followers.  Far from sharing ideas and feelings frankly and spontaneously, many people now assiduously avoid triggers, anything remotely resembling judgments of others, and even witticisms that might offend. [...] We now have a kind of Online Stockholm Syndrome.  You tread lightly with your social media audience or risk caustic online retribution and even real-world consequences like shunning, loss of a job, having your business boycotted, or worse.

President Trump Shatters Left-Wing Myths.  President Trump is boldly providing much-needed relief to the American people. [...] And now he has pinpointed what we have all seen, namely:  decades of liberal-run major cities, whose liberal policies, corruption, and mismanagement have degraded these urban centers and harmed their inhabitants.  The liberal "icons" that have controlled these areas for decades have allowed them, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to degenerate from once great cities to districts akin to hellholes.  No, it is not about the race of the leaders, but their liberal policies:  witness what Bill DeBlasio is doing to New York.  Untouchable liberal icons such as Elijah Cummings are to blame, grandstanding about the U.S. southern border while remaining indifferent to what is happening within their own district, unless as an excuse to demand that more funds be channeled their way.

The Voters Do Deserve to be Neglected.  One hears pundits on the Republican conservative side of the discussion bewailing the misfortunes of the people of Baltimore in Elijah Cummings's rat-infested district.  They say, "The people of Baltimore deserve better.  The American People deserve better."  No, they don't.  They deserve exactly what they have.  They deserve their rats and their crime rate.  America still is, for now, a republic that operates on democratic principles of voting.  The people of Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, and St. Louis all have elected one Democrat after another to lead them.  St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since 1949.  Detroit since 1962.  Chicago since 1931.  Baltimore since 1967.  When people in a two-party country continue for more than half a century, without interruption, electing candidates from the same party to lead them, even as their once-great cities fade into rat-infested murder centers, then those voters do indeed deserve exactly, precisely what they have.  They do not deserve a whit better than they have chosen for themselves.

Baltimore Is Worse than Trump Thinks.  Democrats have gotten away with too much for too long in the cities they've super-majority controlled:  Baltimore, St. Louis, Philadelphia; Detroit; Chicago; New Orleans; Newark; Oakland, on and on.  Children become permanently entangled in inter-generational familial poverty, squalor, drugs, guns, failing schools, juvenile violent crime, and lack of economic mobility.  The end results of Democrat dominance are more shocking and horrifying than most realize.  It's high time for reasonable Americans to accept an uncomfortable and deadly truth:  Democrats destroy everything and everywhere they attach their tentacles to.  The utter, abject failures of Democrat-run cities are the most egregious cover-up by the DMIC in American history.

Trump Speaks the Politically Incorrect Truth.  These majority-minority districts frequently elect useless demagogues, who deliver little, other than the rhetoric of flattery and blame.  Cummings and his colleagues Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) are all archetypal cases.  Not infrequently, extensive corruption is the handmaiden of these politicians — Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick comes to mind.  Trump's message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.  The state of America's lost cities — Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham — is familiar to anyone with eyes to see.  One boarded-up building after another.  Crime rates that rival Venezuela's.  Police insulted and attacked by shameless young people.

The Democratic Washing Machine.  The Democratic washing machine is so named because it was Democrats who decided to ruin a durable product in a mature industry.  In the name of saving electricity and saving water, they couldn't save just a little electricity and a little water.  No, they had to force manufacturers to create a product that used almost no water.  And to save electricity, they turned the control panel on the washing machine into something resembling the bridge of a starship, with so many options you have to study a detailed manual even to figure out how to turn on the device.

A failure to assimilate.  Decent Americans of all colors have silently watched out-of-control black criminals destroy city after city because raising any questions, doubts or objections bring down storms of career-destroying, job-ending accusations of white racism or Uncle Tomism.  This is the race conversation America has needed for so long, a conversation where black destructiveness and visceral hatred of anything not black gets called out and held to account rather than excused and let go.  For decades in the inner-city thugs have murdered, raped, and destroyed with impunity as beleaguered police come under attack for doing their jobs.

Why Do Democrats Run All of the Dangerous and Rodent Infested Cities?  Rep. Cummings, while being very obsessed with Russia, seems utterly bewildered with the idea that anyone could dare question why so many billions of federal dollars flow to places like West Baltimore when they are obviously doing no good.  Look at other cities in similar dilapidation and there holds a unique truth:  Democrats run them all.  How long will sewage run down the streets of San Francisco?  How long will St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, continue to rotate as the nation's most dangerous crime infested metros?

A Spirit of Lawlessness Has Descended Upon America.  We have raised an entire generation of Americans who have no respect for the law, and now we are reaping what we have sown.  I cannot even begin to tell you how alarmed I am by some of the videos I have been watching lately.  As you will see below, all over the nation, young people are brazenly flouting the law, obstructing and assaulting law enforcement officers and committing criminal acts in large groups.  I think "lawlessness" is perhaps the best word to describe what is happening, and many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

The Co-Conspirators in the American Left's Takeover of the Democratic Party.  Using the cudgel of the mainstream media, the entertainment complex and the education establishment combined with the apathy and cowardice of the Republican Establishment, the American Left had successfully, within 25 years after the Reagan landslides, inculcated into a plurality of the American people a belief that there are no moral absolutes and that the state, not God, is the source of the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and thus the state can deny those rights to whomever it chooses.  They are creating the belief that this country's founding documents are arcane, racially insensitive and unsuitable for today.  They teach they young that this nation is and always has been racist and oppressive, that religious liberty, the right to bear arms, and unfettered freedom of speech are subject to the whims of the state.

Immorality Embraced by So-Called Christian Love.  Situation ethics — introduced in 1966 by Joseph F. Fletcher — came into vogue as a way to excuse pre-marital fornication by Christians, and anything that could be considered Christian judgmentalism was muted by the liberal churches.  In the name of love, increasing numbers of churches became tolerant of sin.  In the contemporary church world, tolerance of sin is no longer considered kind enough or loving enough.  Now, as seen by Joel Osteen's recent appearance at an LGBTQ event, celebration of sin is the step beyond tolerance.  A "woman's right to choose" is openly embraced by many members of the National Council of Churches.  Likewise, homosexuality among the clergy is acceptable.

The Left is following Communism's playbook for revolution.  This process continues and is manifested in the widespread antipathy for sexual propriety, faith, and all that is great and good — and in the lust for perversion, socialism, feminism, multiculturalism, "transgenderism," and anti-Americanism in general.  We see it in the tearing down of statues; removal of long present Christian symbols; leftist propaganda and decadence in schools and entertainment;, prioritizing of illegal aliens over citizens; revising of American history and impugning of whites; and in attacks on the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and all things traditional.  This destabilization of the American mind and moral compass now has begotten, as it must, societal destabilization.  This is reflected in, most obviously, the flooding of our nation with unassimilable foreigners via a purposely porous border.  This serves the Cloward-Piven goal of overloading the system to cause breakdown, necessitating replacement of it with, the theory goes, a socialist one.  Of course, this human flood strains schools, hospitals, and services and resources in general.

How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society and Family Life.  The welfare state is another significant driver of the decline of the nuclear family.  Unsurprisingly, the black family is massively impacted.  In 1965, 25 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock.  In 2016, that rate had increased to 70 percent and even topped 80 percent in certain urban areas.  In the 1940s, this number was five percent, which was comparable to that of white children.  The Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rate in 2016 was 52 percent, while for whites it was 30 percent.  The rise in children born out of wedlock cannot be separated from the massive expansion of the welfare state under Johnson's Great Society.

The American Left Is Racist, Not President Trump.  The problem with silencing an entire generation of white people in the name of fighting racism is that while they have been silent, extreme environmentalism, anti-white racism, and creeping socialism have swept across American culture, taking over our schools, universities, entertainment and media industries, our corporations, and government at all levels.  Unchecked, this will destroy the country.

Trump is not a racist; he's pushing the Overton window to normal.  For the past 60 years, Leftists have been pushing the Overton window steadily (duh) left.  From the manic colors of the LGBTQRSTUV+ rainbow, to contending that people can magically use hormones and surgery to "change" their gender, to "shouting your abortion," Leftists are introducing entirely new (and frequently insane) ideas into the realm of acceptable public conversation. [...] Think of ideas that were normal just a decade ago:  using pronouns consistent with biological sex, worrying about Muslim-inspired terrorism, admiring the Founding Fathers, believing that a traditional male-female marriage is optimal for raising children, mentioning the Judeo-Christian God in public, questioning anthropogenic climate change, or being anything but mindlessly positive about a member of a "Progressive protected victim class."  Nowadays, thanks to relentless media, entertainment, political, and educational pressure, voicing those ideas creates the risk that the speaker will be shouted down, humiliated, fired, or even physically attacked.

How Bureaucrats Ruin Everything From Dishwashers To Gas Cans To Cars.  Have you ever wondered why dishwashers today take twice as long to do a worse job of cleaning dishes?  Or why it's so much harder to get gasoline out of a new gas can?  Or why cars made decades ago always turn heads, while today's are drab in the same way?  There's a simple answer to these modern-day mysteries:  Government regulators.  Take the dishwasher.  Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced that it would revise its rules regarding dishwasher efficiency.  Why?  Because the existing rules — which set limits on how much electricity and water a dishwasher may use — are forcing manufacturers to build machines that are worse than ever.

Dallas Drag Queen Show Promoted to Infants.  The City of Dallas Public Library is currently advertising a controversial and divisive drag queen show to be held at the Grauwyler Park Branch location and that the show is appropriate for age groups from infants to 11 years old.  The drag queen performers for this public library event during the day are employees of an adult night club venue where children of this age are not permitted to enter.  The drag queen event is scheduled to take place at a public library Saturday [7/13/2019] at 1 pm where children will be able to "hear stories, sing, dance, and interact with these fabulous ladies" according to the library event page.  This Dallas event follows on the heels of a similar and controversial drag queen event that was canceled by the city government of Leander, and in Houston where two drag queens involved with these shows were discovered to be registered sex offenders.

Pelosi vs. AOC: It's a Beautiful Thing.  Everything about modern leftist ideology is extreme.  It is extreme in substance, and its practitioners are self-absorbed, sanctimonious, uncompromising and often irrational.  Intersectionality zealots are disciplining white feminists for their selfish advocacy.  Biological males are dominating female athletic events courtesy of the transgender movement.  Leftists of color and female gender are dissing old white men despite the men's long records of dedication to the sacred cause of progressivism.  Some women of color are being told they are not black enough to lead the cause.

Democrats are Officially the Party of Derangement.  If any of the 20 Democrats win in 2020, we can officially say goodbye to our democracy as we know it.  College campuses have already been destroyed.  The two left coasts are a disaster and demographic changes are leading to several purple states turning blue as the Democrats' refusal to address the immigration crisis proves successful in their quest for power.  More ignorant, arrogant, and bigoted representatives will be elected to Congress in the manner of AOC, Omar and Tlaib and Republicans will find themselves more and more marginalized.  We can only hope that the majority of Americans watching this disaster unfold wake up and realize that intolerance for thee ultimately leads to intolerance for me.  Democrats do not care about Americans' rights — they seek totalitarian power.  They need to be stopped.

Julian Castro Pounds the Table, Demanding Abortion for Men, Too.  [Scroll down]  In this case, I guess Julián Castro's support for transgender abortion contains some semblance of warped logic.  Not that this highly implausible and as yet scientifically impossible scenario is worth mentioning in a presidential debate when you are already limited by time and must choose your words wisely.  And not that there are other more practical, more pressing issues to be dealt with.  But that's what you get from a political party that wants to fund the kinds of procedures that could put babies inside men's bodies, while simultaneously fighting for laws that would allow these same babies to get ripped out again.

Mastercard to unleash massive identity theft wave across America by allowing "gender fluid" individuals to use any name they want on their credit cards.  A recent Mastercard company announcement explains that many members of the LGBTQIA+ community are experiencing "major pain" from having to use credit cards, debit cards, or prepaid cards that don't "reflect their true identity."  So, Mastercard plans to fix this by allowing LGBTQIA+s to use any made-up name they want — swinging wide open the door for mass identity theft.

The Editor says...
Identity theft is one thing, but this opens the door to fraud, most of all.  One cannot take advantage of credit if the customer, the merchant, and the bank can't even agree on the customer's name.  Anyone who is so confused and so mercurial about his or her own name should have a credit rating of zero.  Pay in cash or be gone.

Woman's 'Hail Satan' invocation prompts walkout from Alaska town meeting.  Several government officials and attendees walked out of an Alaska government meeting south of Anchorage this week when an official who's also a member of the Satanic Temple ended the opening prayer with "Hail Satan."  The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly's previous policy stated that those delivering the invocation must be a member of a recognized church, but the rules were changed last October when Alaska's Supreme Court decided in favor of the ACLU that the policy was unconstitutional, according to Alaskan Public Media.  Iris Fontana, the Satanic Temple member, was one of the plaintiffs in the case.  An atheist and a Jewish woman were also involved in the lawsuit.

'Hail Satan' opening prayer at Alaska government meeting prompts walkouts, protest.  Several attendees at a government meeting open to the public in Alaska walked out in protest after an opening prayer praised Satan.  The Associated Press reports the prayer, where a woman declared "Hail Satan," was given by Satanic Temple member Iris Fontana, who won the right to open the meeting with an invocation of her choice.

Student Gets Kicked Out of Class For Saying There's Only Male and Female.  This is just an amazing video to watch.  Hat tip to Rod Dreher for covering it.  The student, Murray, tells the teacher that there are only two genders, male and female.  The teacher tells him that the national authority says otherwise.  [Video clip]

Progressives Seek To Make Segregation Great Again.  The progressive left touts segregation on college campuses.  You have probably already heard of minority students requesting separate dorm facilities and safe spaces.  But there is another aspect of college life that the left wants to segregate:  Graduations.  Virginia Tech University recently started offering ten segregated graduation ceremonies that are separated by race, sexuality, and other identity groups.  Students are allowed to participate in the graduation of their choosing.  The ceremonies are open to anyone who wishes to attend, but the participants must fall into the right category.

Marijuana damages adolescent brains, health professionals write in op-ed.  Two health professionals penned an op-ed in The New York Times on Sunday that despite society's shift on marijuana use, it does not change the fact that the drug is not safe for high school and college students.  Kenneth L. Davis, the president and chief executive of the Mount Sinai Health System, and Mary Jeanne Kreek, the head of Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases at Rockefeller University, cited studies that show a "deleterious impact on cognitive development in adolescents."

San Francisco and Los Angeles.  If you are planning a visit to San Francisco or Los Angeles, may we ask why?  On a casual walk in downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles, tourists will encounter streets and sidewalks strewn with drug needles, garbage, and feces.  Gang activity is high in both cities.  Both cities find themselves saddled with liberal/progressive governmental policies.  As one serious result, living conditions for low-income residents of San Francisco and Los Angeles routinely reach toxic levels.

Reality is Not an Option.  What is "equality before the law" when some people are entitled to extra protections under hate crime laws?  What is "basic human decency" when, to be a victim, one must identify a group of people as oppressors and revile them publicly as a class? [...] There isn't the slightest evidence that illiterate third-worlders or a tattoo-defaced generation of the sexually confused are inclined to be either tolerant or productive citizens.  There is plenty of evidence that many of these disorderly creatures have good old-fashioned tribal axes to grind.

Texas town overrun with crime and disease.  The mayor has had enough.  Uvalde is a small town of 17,000 inhabitants, and they are now overrun by illegal immigrants and an international cartel smuggling operation.  Uvalde is 40-60 miles from the border, but it might as well be right at the border.  "We are in no man's land.  The state is not doing anything; the federal government is not doing anything," the mayor, who is begging the politicians to get involved, said.  "We are getting nothing.  I've lived here all my life and have never seen anything like this.  The people in the communities are getting scared.  What is coming that we don't see?  Who knows?  People up north and in D.C. have no clue what is going on here.  They don't realize that these people are not being screened for diseases.  We're fed up."  Situated at the crossroads of major highways coming up from border towns in the Laredo and Del Rio border sectors, Uvalde has now become a dumping ground for migrants coming north.  And they are not just coming from Central America.

Venezuela: hyperinflation leads to new banknotes for second time in a year.  Venezuela is releasing new banknotes for the second time in less than a year, the central bank said on Wednesday, after hyperinflation eroded the effects of an August 2018 monetary overhaul meant to improve availability of cash.  Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, last year cut five zeroes off the currency and prices.  The move was supposed to ease shortages of cash that pushed most of the economy toward debit and credit card operations and put heavy strain on digital commerce platforms.  Banknotes of 10,000, 20,000 and 50,000 bolivar denominations will begin circulating on Thursday [6/13/2019] to "make the payment system more efficient and facilitate commercial transactions", the central bank said in statement.

Minneapolis' Sacred Stupidity.  [T]oday's generation of Democrat machine politicians in charge of our cities don't bother trying to sell themselves as capable administrators anymore.  How can they, when Los Angeles' trash piles rival those of Kinshasa, homeless bums micturate on passing taxicabs on New York streets, it's recommended that one wear galoshes on the streets of San Francisco so as to avoid ruining one's Ferragamos by stepping in freshly-lain human feculence, and New Orleans is inundated each time there's a hard rain because the city's pumps and drainage infrastructure are virtually untouched by improvement despite billions in spending for just that purpose?

Deep Blue Connecticut Is A Model For How Not To Run An Economy.  Connecticut is currently facing a $3.7 billion-plus deficit, but the problem is much worse than it looks.  Research found that Connecticut has the worst-funded pension system in the country for the second year in a row.  Unfunded pension liabilities amount to $117.7 billion and unfunded liabilities for other post-employment benefits (OPEB) amount to $36.7 billion.  While the 6.35 percent general sales tax rate isn't raised, the new budget expands the sales tax base to include more goods and services.  The sales tax would expand to include parking, dry cleaning, laundry, interior design services and safety apparel.

Brown and Out in Beverly Hills.  Leftists advance incrementally.  Their template is as simple as it is predictable:  Ask for a little, and swear that the demands will end there.  Most regular folks will give in because decent people generally seek compromise.  But to leftists, compromise is merely a temporary step, a strategy.  "We don't want gay marriage, we just want equal partner benefits!  Civil unions will shut us up."  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell is fine.  It's not like we want the military to pay for tranny surgeries!"  "Gender discrimination laws will not lead to the government forcing women to let men use their bathrooms."

Life In the Socialist Paradise of Bernie Sanders and AOC.  Venezuela is the latest chapter in the long story of socialist crimes against humanity.  Venezuela reminds us how long a country can circle the drain, destroyed by socialism but still hanging on by its fingernails.  Reuters, a liberal news source, has the latest on Venezuela's long goodbye, but never mentions the fact that it is socialism that destroyed what once was one of the world's richest countries.

Who Are the Big Babies Now.  This is the mediocracy at work.  They revile greatness to mask their own inadequacies.  Hence, contrived hate crimes, fat shaming, participation medals, identity politics, demand for rights already accrued, for lopsided equality, for affirmative action, resentment politics, no-platforming, and other corrosions of democratic health.

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.  Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness.  The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof.  A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement:  "Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions."  Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking.

California Is The Future The Liberal Elite Wants For You.  [Scroll down]  Already, petty crime has been effectively legalized.  Crooks get a free pass on the first $950 a day they steal. [...] And now pot's effectively legal here, which is spectacular.  Just what Cali needed — more people on a drug that makes them dumber and lazier.  Take a walk down the street and see the sights!  Look, there's a schizo with his cargo shorts around his ankles baying at the billboard informing you about how no human being is illegal!  Oh, and there's another homeless druggie muttering to himself about alien carrots stealing his vital essences as he pushes along his stolen shopping cart heaped with refuse.  If you're appalled or distressed by this, you're the bad guy.  Caring means letting lunatics and addicts wallow in the elements enslaved by their insanity and/or sickness.  Shame on you for wanting your kids to be able to play outside.  Hypodermic needles and piles of human waste on the sidewalk are just part of the price you must pay to dwell in the sun.

Law enforcement, media changed standards for Trump.  One of the more unfortunate effects of the Trump-Russia investigation — and there have been many — is the weakening of traditional standards of argument and proof in the public debate over allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 election.  (Just for the record:  It didn't.)  In particular, angry disputes about the president have done terrible harm to the principle that an investigator, be it a journalist or a prosecutor, should meet at least some standard of proof before leveling an accusation.

Perfect storm brews in Portland Maine as Mayor, Council welcome illegals.  Currently, there are three major factors leading up to the storm in Portland.  All three involve illegal immigration:  [#1] Portland has had an incredible influx of illegal immigrants over the last few years.  [#2] Immigrants are supported by a heavily strained, taxpayer-funded city welfare system.  [#3] City officials are encouraging the situation while being unable to provide satisfactory solutions to the problems they have created.

Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black.  More than half of California's roughly 105 million acres are owned by the federal and state governments.  It is on these sprawling parcels that the wildfires tend to rage before devouring private land, homes, and businesses.  Public lands "have proved far more vulnerable to forest fires than properties owned by private groups," Hoover Institution scholar Richard Epstein wrote in California's Forest Fire Tragedy. [...] The loudest voices assign blame for the fires to man-made climate change.  But the human activity primarily responsible for the destructive spread of wildfires is public policy favoring burned timber over harvested timber.  While maybe well-intended, laws inspired by the 1970s environmentalist movement, which is determined to make sure saw blades and trees never meet, have stoked the furnaces.

San Francisco:  The Radical Left in Charge.  In America's largest coastal metropolises, Democrats rule.  For all intents and purposes, there are no Republicans.  Today, for instance, the New York City school commissioner is hard at work trying to destroy the city's public schools.  He is firing white administrators.  He is telling school principals to give special privileges to minority children.  He wants to dumb down New York's premier high schools, in the name of diversity.  And yet, New York is not quite in the league of San Francisco, now become America's urban basket case.  It is worth noting that the city is home to House Speaker Pelosi, who is hard at work slandering the president of the United States.

Leftist Heartbreak in San Francisco.  Like most big cities, San Francisco is poorly run, stridently progressive, and overly regulated.  Unlike many other big U.S. cities, it's located on one of the most scenic spots on Earth and has delightful year-round weather.  I take no pleasure in seeing such a glorious place run into the ground by bad leaders (and voters), even if I occasionally struggle with Schadenfreude.  But oddly enough, San Francisco's harshest critics these days are not on the Right.  To many progressives, San Francisco has turned from a source of their love and affection into a painful disappointment.

'Sky-High' Trash Piles Found In Los Angeles, Raising Concerns About Typhus.  Apparently, problems with waste are not limited to San Francisco.  NBC4 reported Monday [5/20/2019] that "sky-high" piles of rotting trash were found around Los Angeles, leading some to worry about a new typhus outbreak.  "Even the city's most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA's busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago.  The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms," the outlet reported.  [Video clip]

San Francisco's Quality-of-Life Toll.  San Francisco is the nation's leader in property crime.  Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella.  The rate of car break-ins is particularly striking: in 2017 over 30,000 reports were filed, and the current average is 51 per day.  Other low-level offenses, including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.  Many in law enforcement blame the crime wave on Proposition 47, which in 2014 downgraded possession of illegal narcotics for personal use and theft of anything under $950 in value from felonies to misdemeanors.  Anti-incarceration advocates disagree with that argument, but theft is indisputably booming, and narcotics activity is exploding on sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds.  When compounded with other troubles for which the city is now infamous (human feces, filth, and homelessness, which is up 17 percent since 2017), San Franciscans find themselves surrounded by squalor and disorder.

Surprise! Learning about Cotton in School Is Racist Now.  I currently live in Arlington, Va., and do not vote in local elections.  It's not that I don't want to vote, but there is literally no one [...] on the ballots who could even pretend to be anywhere close to being a conservative.  The problem isn't my lack of desire, it's that I don't have anyone to vote for.  As one of the most progressively leftist communities in this country, my local government is completely devoid of any representation of my beliefs and values.  So, I was not surprised to read ARLNow's article about an Arlington elementary school teacher who has found herself in hot water for having her students study cotton.

Planting of Cotton at Arlington Elementary School Prompts Discussion.  A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids "pick cotton" was a misunderstanding.  "At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton," said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.

NY Times:  Venezuela's Economic Devastation Comparable To Countries Destroyed By War.  Democratic socialism is working in Venezuela.  It's working to make everyone miserable and hungry.  The sign in the photo [left] reads:  "Maduro is hunger."  The NY Times reports the economic decline Venezuelans are now experiencing is unsurpassed in the past 45 years outside of countries in the midst of war.

The Editor says...
Socialism doesn't work in Venezuela.  It also doesn't work in Zimbabwe or Cuba.

Death Always Follows Democrat Policies.  In my upcoming first book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child is Becoming a Democrat, I avoid policy and hone in on parenting.  I believe that if my playbook is followed, we can ensure that future generations of our youth don't grow up to be Democrats.  Substantive health care fixes, cures for cancer and AIDS, and the first man and woman on Mars will be as useless as a Willard Romney endorsement if we don't win the youth battle within the four walls of our homes.  I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the abhorrently increasing zeal for abortions during any stage of pregnancy.  The residual effects of Democrat polices, in addition to producing killer kids, also kill our unborn.  All of it is by design; nothing in politics is coincidental.

America's largest cities drowning in debt, with Chicago leading the way, study finds.  America's 10 largest cities, largely Democrat strongholds, are drowning in municipal debt, according to a new report from government watchdog Truth in Accounting.  The report sought out "to determine what ... overlapping financial entities mean for taxpayers' bottom line."  Truth in Accounting said its purpose was to "calculate the various bills (and surpluses, when available) at the city government level and divide them out to determine a per-Taxpayer Burden."  The two cities with the highest burden:  Chicago and New York City; Chicago's combined taxpayer burden:  $119,110; New York City's combined taxpayer burden:  $85,600.

Life if the Democrats take control.  Democrats back in power would continue to appoint Leftist Judges who would continue to limit Conservative speech in the open forum or on public media such as the Radio.  These same judges would continue to tear away our basic foundations where they find Religion an enemy of their goals.  Consider what life would be like if the face book options for gender become law.  Facebook gives its members the choice of 58 types of gender identification.  Are you ready to deal with that if the Democrats continue to push such that concept.  Marriage continues to be under assault.  TV shows are now glorifying the 3 person marriage.  Do not believe me?  Watch SWAT on CBS.

Why Have Department of Defense Suicides Spiked?  The Department of Defense has a suicide problem.  Thank Presidents Clinton and Obama[.]  Prior to 1993, the Department of Defense (DOD) used to screen recruits, officer candidates, and service academy entrants for mental, personality, and suicide behavior disorders.  Now they don't. [...] When men and women had enlistment physicals, they were evaluated by a physician for obvious physical defects and to also see if they had an apparent mental or personality disorder.  Any potential recruit screened with mental, personality, and suicide (and a range of other) behavior disorders were considered unfit for service.  Then President Clinton signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  DOD's policy that screened for personality disorders and mental illnesses during the pre-enlistment physical was terminated as a function of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law.  The law removed all screening for DSM categories of homosexuality, sexual and personality disorders and mental illnesses.

The Destructive Equality Act of 2019.  My dictionary defines psychosis as "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality."  We now have a majority of members of Congress who are prepared to pass into law that the sex individuals are born with — their chromosomal and physical reality — will take a back seat to how those individuals choose to define their own sexual identity.  Henceforth, we'll be done with the idea that there is some objective reality independent of what of any particular individual decides it is.  I once complained that our society was denying morality — right and wrong.  Now we're beyond this.  We're denying reality in its entirety.

Why are so many Democrats so reprehensible in exactly the same way?  For the past fifty years, the imposition of multiculturalism and all that it has entailed, two generations have been taught that tolerance of all things must supersede all other values.  Ergo, we've arrived at a place in which the bulk of one of our two political parties has, if inadvertently, embraced evil in the name of tolerance — radical Islam, all variations of sexual orientation including pedophilia, the absolutist notion that all minorities are victims, all women are victims.  We must now accept the trope that all white men are bad, a blight on civilized society.  How destructive is this to our country?  It is devastating, and they do it purposefully, these Democrats.  They have become the embodiment of Cloward-Piven and Saul Alinsky.

New York Blocked A New Pipeline And Guess What They Just Found Out.  The "Keep it in the ground" crowd has a lot of influence with the Democrats who control the government.  That why, back in 2013, when the new Constitution Pipeline was proposed to carry natural gas from Pennsylvania's rich shale oil fields to New York, activists were able to block the construction despite it already having been approved by federal regulators.  Similarly, when National Grid (the local energy consortium) requested an extension to the Williams Co.  Transco pipeline, they were also tied up because of the outcry from environmental activists.  Here comes the surprise that nobody could have possibly seen coming.  The city and its surrounding downstate region are still expanding with new construction projects, but their energy suppliers have told them that they will not be able to supply natural gas to any new customers because they're already at capacity.

A World Without Morality.  If the theoretical end point of liberal democracy is a world without boundaries, physical or cultural, then it is a world without morality.  After all, morality is a world of fences and gates that control human behavior within the closed social system.  In order for there to be a moral order, there must be order and that must include boundaries.  Once the boundaries lose their purpose, the fences and gates are simply gravestones in a cemetery of a long forgotten people.  No one cares if the kids knock over the grave stones.  In fact, in a world without form, the hunt for something to level becomes increasingly urgent as there is less and less to knock over.  Once the statues of the great men of the past are removed, their names must be removed.  Once the basics of family life have been destroyed through divorce and feminism, the innocence of childhood is attacked via the degeneracy of transgenderism.

Sanctuary Laws and the Death of E Pluribus Unum.  "Sanctuary" laws that shield illegal aliens may have the veneer of compassion, but their implementation is setting the stage for confrontations between federal and local law enforcement officers with conflicting orders.  The short-term result could be dead or wounded officers.  In a broader context, these laws raise the specter of a constitutional crisis and a breakdown of social order.  Sanctuary laws are an existential threat to America and need to end. [...] Sanctuary laws are a gateway to chaos.  If such rebellion is allowed to stand, are there any limits at all?

'MeToo' Hysteria:  Handshakes In The Workplace Could Be Next On Chopping Block.  Employers seeking to avoid lawsuits in the hypersensitive age of the #MeToo movement are looking to ban even the most innocuous professional courtesies, including handshakes.  Last week, Kate Palmer, associate director of advisory at human resources consultancy Peninsula and an alleged "expert" on the matter, said that employers may soon seek to ban "all forms of physical contact to avoid confusion about what kind of touch is appropriate," according to The Sun of Britain.

Here's how many square feet you can afford to rent on a median income in these popular US cities.  You may make the big bucks in the big city, but that doesn't necessarily mean your pad is going to reflect that.  When it comes to finding the perfect spacious apartment, you have to take into account both your location and annual salary.  And in some cities, such as New York City, Boston or Los Angeles, you may just have to accept that you'll always feel a little cramped.

Watch Former Fed Prosecutor Smash Anti-Trump Commentator's Biased Version Of "Truth".  The facts are undeniable regarding the Mueller investigation.  After nearly two years and tens of millions of dollars wasted, there was no collusion and no obstruction — period.  The media is now working double-time to try and spin that reality into something else.  If they are allowed to do so this is no longer America because if a president isn't free to do his job then none of us are.  If you support attacking President Trump then you support attacking everything this country once stood for — namely freedom, liberty, and the right to self-expression.  And it has been the Democrat Party and the media who have created this very real division that is now tearing the nation apart.

A mysterious condition makes marijuana users violently ill.  Before the meal began, Moon joked with Jagger that it would be her last supper.  A few hours later, she was at home vomiting uncontrollably.  She'd spend the next few days in the hospital.  Moon had previously been diagnosed with a condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS.  Very little is known about CHS, which was first identified in the early 2000s.  The recognized hallmarks of the condition are heavy, consistent marijuana use, violent vomiting and nausea, and a tendency to use extremely hot baths or showers for relief.

The Editor says...
Romans 6:23.

Transgender Rights:  Judge Warns Girls Have No Right to 'Visual Bodily Privacy'.  A federal judge is allowing a lawsuit against transgender facilities in a school district to proceed, but warned the student-plaintiffs that, if the government allows boys who claim to be female to use the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms, then the girls have no right to "visual bodily privacy."  Judge Jorge Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the school district that adopted the Obama-era transgender policy permitting boys claiming to be female to use the girls' bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.

San Francisco's Slow-Motion Suicide.  The city's current concentration of wealth likely doesn't represent the beginning of a golden-if-sinful era, but the end.  Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close.  In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible:  It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence.

West Virginia Leads Nation in Homeownership Rate; New York and California Rank Last.  West Virginia ranked No. 1 among the 50 states for its homeownership rate in 2018, which was 74.7 percent, according to new housing data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.  New York and California ranked 50th and 49th with homeownership rates of 51.0 and 55.1, according to Table 15 in the Census Bureau's Annual Statistics on Housing Vacancies and Homeownership.  The Census Bureau calculates the homeownership rate by dividing the number of owner occupied housing units by the total number of occupied housing units.

How Chicago Democrats Created Trump's Border Wall Problem.  After World War II outmigration became a concern for all big northern Democrat-controlled cities since the growth of suburbs and the baby boom prompted young couples to leave big cities and seek more space for their families.  But this outmigration created a huge problem for the big Democratic cities from Boston to Los Angeles: how to restore and stabilize their city's population and keep control of Congress.  The solution was to allow illegal immigration and support them with benefits.  Providing illegal immigrants with benefits such as food stamps and housing were crucial, since illegal immigrants were not well educated and did not earn enough income to be self-sufficient.  This concern prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to establish the Great Society welfare programs, and he himself admitted the programs were intended to strengthen America's big cities.  LBJ stopped the agricultural guest worker program, called the Bracero program, just at the time he started the Great Society.  This allowed illegal immigrants to come to Chicago and not worry about being educated well enough to support themselves.  The lack of income was made up through free benefits.

Doctors Are Now Giving 8-Year-Old Girls Testosterone, Claiming They're 'Transgender'.  According to medical doctors and a parent of a gender non-conforming child speaking on a panel for the Heritage Foundation, their quest to stop dangerous transgender treatments on minors has exposed that "government-funded research now allows wrong sex hormones such as testosterone to be given to girls as young as 8," reported The Christian Post on Tuesday [4/2/2019].

I have my 'Trump 2020' cap!  Without fear of punishment for their crimes, the enraged Deep State is now trying to remove Trump by absurdly claiming he obstructed justice.  These people are relentless and evil.  If Trump is not re-elected, Democrats will pass a law to kill babies after they are born.  Sharia law will gain more strongholds in our culture.  Our economy will tank due to job-killing crazy green policies.  Single-payer health care will empower Democrats to dictate who lives and who dies.  The LGBTQ agenda will be forced down our throats.  Reading and quoting the Bible will be illegal.  These are not exaggerations, folks.  All of these anti-freedom and anti-Christian initiatives are being pushed right now by Democrats.  President Trump is the main obstacle, courageously standing in their way.  The Democrats have become the party of full-blown lawlessness.  Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities boldly break our immigration laws.  Democrats encourage illegals to break our immigration laws at the border.

One Bad Apple.  Globalism, multiculturalism, and socialism have done the trick:  destabilized traditional family values with all these new mores like same-sex marriage, gender-neutral bathrooms, and prepubescent transgender rights.  But basically people feel mocked and set aside by the elite who run this town, those in City Hall, the media, and the hatchet-faced women of glossy magazines.  Pseudo-lefty-trendy magazines like The New Yorker fail to address the fact that Hispanic, Chinese, Korean, even African-American societies are conservative by nature.  These phonies pretend to speak for the underdog, but converse only with each other.

'Seattle Is Dying' because Liberalism Is Killing It.  If you haven't seen the KOMO News special Seattle Is Dying, you need to.  The hour-long show does a sound job of depicting the ugly decline of one of the most beautiful places in America.  However, the piece misses the forest for the nasty, dirty, twisted trees.  Part of the root of the problem in Seattle is political, but Seattle Is Dying virtually ignores the liberal politics behind Seattle's foul decline.  As John Sexton at Hot Air put it, "[t]here's really no escaping the fact that the current situation is the result of political decisions."

Look at the science and stop the march toward legalized marijuana.  Despite myths to the contrary, marijuana is a serious health risk.  It does indeed result in unhealthy dependence among nearly one-third of users.  It is a definite risk (perhaps deadly) for lung health, and it is especially dangerous for heart health.  Some studies also show that it substantially increases risk for a form of testicular cancer.  To be specific on heart risks, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports:  "Limited evidence suggests that a person's risk of heart attack during the first hour after smoking marijuana is nearly five times his or her usual risk."  Meanwhile, the measurable consequences for states that have legalized recreational marijuana have been bracing.

Green Insanity Is Flooding Towns and Destroying Lives.  Having written extensively in these pages on the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri River basin in 2011, I believe that the occasion of this present flood disaster plaguing Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota has given rise to many questions.  Foremost, I have been asked if there is an environmentalist element, as there was in 2011, when the Corps of Engineers intentionally permitted the flooding of eight states in order to further their highest priority (as per the Master Water Control Manual) of "habitat restoration for riverine wildlife" at the expense of the original top priority, flood control, and the preservation of human life and property.

United Airlines Goes Gender-Neutral or Whatever.  In over a century of manned airflight, there's one nagging problem that has never been addressed:  Misgendering.  That ends today.

Leftists Have Turned San Francisco Into A Nightmare Of Drugs And Homelessness.  There's no denying that San Francisco is one of America's most beautiful and recognizable cities, but it has been racked with problems thanks to leftist policies that have driven drug addiction and homelessness through the roof.  The Daily Wire's Kassy Dillon and Colton Haas traveled to the city by the bay and spoke to experts and homeless people about the conditions that have encouraged the spread of drugs, disease, and more.  During their trip, they could see the awful condition the city is currently in.

More than a third of New Yorkers say they can't afford to live here.  More than a third of all city residents say they can't afford to live anywhere in the state — much less the Big Apple — and believe economic hardship will send them packing in five years or less, according to a dismal new poll.  That's 41 percent of city dwellers who say they can't cope with New York's high cost of living, according to a Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday [3/20/2019].  Separately, 41 percent fear they'll be "forced" to pull up stakes and seek greener pastures where the economic climate is more welcoming.

Changing the Rules.  The news cycle is so unnaturally shrill as if it was the status quo itself was screaming.  From unenacted policies to the automatic assignment of blame to Western civilization the news cycle has become one continuous rant.  Referring to the root causes of the Christchurch mosque massacre a Slate article argued: "we are a nation born of shame.  A white-majority Australia exists only as the result of a genocidal invasion."  Speech has never been more dangerous nor points of view more opposed.  When the demand isn't "why didn't you denounce this" or "why didn't you apologize for that" it is may be "why did you misgender me?"  You can go to jail for saying "he" instead of "she".

Major Science Journal Embraces 'Nature Rights' Movement.  Nature rights" is a hard-leftwing and anti-free market movement — once on the fringe but now growing increasingly mainstream within environmentalism — that doesn't seek tighter legal regulations over our use of the natural world, but rather, advocates personalizing nature toward the end of granting flora, fauna, ecosystems, and geological features human-type rights.  In a saner era, the idea of granting rights to "nature" would be laughed off the public stage.  But it's not funny.  The nature rights movement is serious, it is growing in power and influence, and it becoming alarmingly successful.  Indeed, the movement has made important strides in the last few years:  four rivers have been granted enforceable rights, including the Amazon and Ganges.  So too have glaciers.  An orangutan was declared a "non-human person" in Argentina and granted a writ of habeas corpus to be released from a zoo to a sanctuary.  Most recently, a special election in Toledo, Ohio passed that granted "rights" to Lake Erie.

President Trump Saves Thousands of Lives.  So what happened in 2015 and 2016 to cause the violent crime rate, including the homicide rate, to rise after decades of decline?  I can't think of any explanation other than the Black Lives Matter movement and the relentless attacks on law enforcement that it engendered, which were supported by the Obama administration.  But what happened when Donald Trump took over in the White House?  The homicide and violent crime rates began to fall again.  If the New York Times's projection is correct, the second year of the Trump administration saw a steeper decline in the homicide rate.  Again, what could possibly have caused this change?  I can't think of a plausible theory other than the Trump administration's renewed support for law enforcement and the waning of the anti-police Black Lives Matter movement.  Something happened beginning in 2017 that has saved thousands of lives.  If it wasn't the new administration in Washington, what was it?

The financial collapse of the Democratic mayors.  Recently, non-government organization Truth in Accounting published a report about the financial condition of the 75 largest cities of America.  As it turns out, 63 out of 75 cities in America were not able to pay bills at the end of the fiscal year of 2017.  The final result of this study was the calculation of the burden borne by taxpayers in these American cities.  The formula is simple:  the financial balance of the city (positive or negative) is divided by the number of inhabitants.  The result is a good assessment of how effectively the city authorities work, depending on the positive or negative financial balance of the city per capita.

KOMO News' Special: Seattle Is Dying.  "People didn't use to use the word embarrassing about Seattle, but they use it a lot now," the narrator to a new KOMO News special titled "Seattle is Dying" says.  The focus of the special is homelessness and the ways in which it has changed the city.  There's a section featuring angry residents of one area of the city who are screaming at their representatives for action.  They want the tent cities managed and they're tired of calling the police only to find out the police can arrest people but those same people will be back on the street, sometimes within hours.

7 Reasons Why the Equality Act Is Anything But.  [#1] It would penalize Americans who don't affirm new sexual norms or gender ideology.  Jack Phillips' case went all the way to the Supreme Court after the Colorado Civil Rights Commission accused the bakery owner of discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation when the self-described cake artist declined to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.  The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, but le the law in question, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, intact.  Until last week, Phillips was in court again defending himself against the same agency under the same law.  The day after the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips' case, Autumn Scardina, a lawyer who identifies as transgender, requested that he create a "gender transition cake."  After Phillips declined, the state Civil Rights Commission found probable cause under the law that the baker had discriminated on the basis of gender identity.  Thankfully, the commission last week dropped the case, and Phillips agreed to drop his own lawsuit accusing the state agency of harassing him for his Christian beliefs.

Antifa-Controlled Portland Police Bureau Faces Mass 'Exodus' As 50+ Officers Quit Over Insane and Dangerous Far Left Policies.  As Portland trends further and further from Democrat to Marxist, the rank-and-file officers of the Portland Police Bureau have been put in the unenviable position of being ordered by the mayor to cater to the far left protesters and rioters like Antifa.  At the same time the officers also face a more and more irate public, angry at the police bureau's propensity for ceding the city to the protesters on a regular basis.

From Democratic Socialism to Total Destruction in Venezuela.  During the 1970s, Venezuela's per capita income was higher than the sum of all other Andean nations, including Chile.  The country had the lowest taxes in the region, coupled with a stable democracy.  Since the US left the gold standard, only the Swiss franc and the Venezuelan bolivar managed to maintain their value.  In 1980 the Venezuelan bolivar was worth more against the U.S. dollar than in 1880.  It remained that way until the 1973 elections when both the legislative and executive branches came under the power of a single democratic socialist party, Acción Democrática, while simultaneously the Arab oil embargo that year produced a huge increase in oil prices.  [A]s a result government revenues increased by a factor of 4.  The government than embarked in "democratic socialism", systematically applying the same theories supported now in the USA by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Democrat Lawmaker and Teamster President: 'Chaos' in Schools Since Obama-Era Discipline Policy.  A Democrat state senator and a Teamsters president said the dramatic drop in school suspensions in New York City since the Obama-era policy urging more lenient forms of discipline for minority students has led to "chaos" and a lack of "accountability" for dangerous behavior.  New York state Sen. Leroy Comrie told CBS New York that schools in his Queens district are losing the confidence of parents.  "They're taking their children to other schools even if they have to pay for private schools," he said.  "They don't want to have to have their children in an environment where they're assaulted and there's no accountability."

Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and the Leftist Takeover of the College Campus.  When one observes the modern-day college campus, one observes nothing but the Marxist-leftist indoctrination of America's youth. [...] One has to look no farther than Boston University to find courses with titles such as "Dismantling White Privilege, Power, and Supremacy."  Any course that attempts to induce guilt for one's ethnicity is undeniably subjective in nature.  Consider the debates on sex, sexuality, and human physiology.  There is arguably mainstream societal acceptance that there are more than two "genders" and that sex and sexuality are in no way linked.  Furthermore, if one even questions the eligibility of male athletes in female-only sports, he will often be labeled a bigot, or at the very least old-fashioned.  No empirical research is needed to realize that much of American history is now scrutinized rather than honored.  American military involvement is commonly preached as oppression rather than liberation.  Everything from the nuclear family to supporting ICE is under scrutiny.  There is a systematic dismantling of American values that were once accepted as objectively good and now maligned as evil.  When objective truth and reality no longer exist, the Left can rewrite the rules to society — and it has.  Where do all of these ideas come from?  Primarily college campuses.

Blacks and the Democrats.  What has been the payoff to the black community for religiously voting for Democratic leadership?  To start, although blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population, they account for nearly 50% of the homicides.  According to the National Council for Home Safety and Security, the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States for 2018 had Democrats as mayors, and according to the 2019 American Community Survey, 9 out of the top 10 poorest cities also have Democrats as mayors.  Many of these cities have the largest population of African-Americans in the country.

The Problem Is Legislative Overreach, Not Executive.  In 1975, two years after Richard Nixon negotiated the Paris Accords and ended the war in the Vietnam, the Communist North Vietnamese reneged and invaded South Vietnam.  Instead of defending the South as Nixon promised we would do in this event, President Gerald Ford looked on helplessly as the Democratic Congress would not permit it.  At the same time, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and turned the country into a death camp.  Because the Democrats hated Nixon and Republicans, and saw no political advantage to intervening, they permitted our allies to be slaughtered and enslaved.  A year later, in 1976, Ford signed the National Emergency Powers Act, which would allow special powers for the president should this kind of emergency arise and the legislature decides to play politics as people die or great injustices occur.  Trump Is Right on the Law and the Merits President Trump's recent decision to invoke this act and fund a border wall was in response to the Democrats in Congress refusing to cooperate.

Students Across US Now Majoring In Marijuana At Colleges.  Colleges are now adding cannabis to their curriculum.  Grace DeNoya is used to getting snickers when people learn she's majoring in marijuana.  "My friends make good-natured jokes about getting a degree in weed," said DeNoya, one of the first students in a new four-year degree program in medicinal plant chemistry at Northern Michigan University.  "I say, 'No, it's a serious degree, a chemistry degree first and foremost.  It's hard work.  Organic chemistry is a bear.'"

Socialism destroys prom:  School officials ban kids from riding in limos because everyone can't afford it.  Socialism invariably destroys everything it touches, including even proms.  Back in the day, some kids used to enjoy saving up enough money through the semester so they could rent a lavish limo for their year-end senior prom.  But thanks to the socialist mindset of one New Jersey school's officials, this tradition is no more.  According to Trenton radio station WKXW, officials at Lakeland Regional High School made a decision this year to ban students from driving to their prom or renting a limo.  Instead, every student must pay $15 to be driven to the prom at Rockleigh Country Club on a chaperoned bus.

Male Christian Wrestler Forfeits State Championship Spot Rather Than Wrestle Girls.  An 18-year-old high school wrestler in Colorado has given up a potential spot in the Colorado high school state championships because he chooses not to wrestle two young ladies saying it violates how he was raised to treat women.  Brendan Johnston of The Classical Academy in Colorado says those values — despite some light complaints from at least one of the young ladies he would have faced — are informed by his Christianity and, after a discussion with his coach and some deep thought on the subject, he's decided to stand behind his principles despite knowing it would mean a shortened competition.

Girls' sports being decimated by biological males claiming to be females.  There are only two genders in this world of ours, male and female, and it doesn't matter how someone "identifies," that biological fact is established and unalterable. [...] With that being said, the Left is nevertheless hard at work trying to convince us that gender is a 'fluid' thing and in some cases, an outright choice, so old societal constructs like "male" and "female" sports are no longer necessary or relevant.  That's why they go along with allowing biological males to participate in (and dominate) all-female events simply because they 'identify' as a girl, claiming — remarkably and unbelievably — that there are no physical differences between the sexes.

From Roy Rogers to Infanticide.  America has moved on.  Democrats, Hollywood, and fake news media say America no longer wants white guys like Roy Rogers on TV, infecting our kids with Christian morals and family values.  America has moved on from the biblical teaching that there are only two genders.  NYC recognizes 31 different genders.  Facebook gives customers 56 gender options.  Leftists believe they are far more sophisticated and intelligent than Bible believers and Americans living in flyover country.  Leftists say determining a baby's gender by its genitalia at birth is idiotic.  They say we must allow the child to evolve into the gender it wants to be.  This insane child abuse has led to hundreds of kids as young as four years old identifying as transgender and changing their sex.

If There's a Hair in Your Soup, Thank New York's Commission on Human Rights.  [Scroll down]  New York City had long ago rolled through the usual spectrum of legal protections for everyone from ex-cons to transgender men.  And the Commission has been desperately concocting new legal protections.  Its latest initiative declares that employers, including in the health care and food service industries, may not prevent employees, regardless of race, from wearing dreadlocks because that's racial discrimination.  The Commission's new guidelines insist that employees have "the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state."  Schools, public and private, are also forbidden from banning dreadlocks.

Emotional support pit bull mauled 5-year-old girl: suit.  A woman has filed a $1.1 million negligence lawsuit after her 5-year-old daughter was mauled by a pit bull — which was being used as an emotional support animal — at Portland International Airport when she petted it.  Mirna Gonzalez and her children were waiting for an Alaska Airlines flight to Texas on Dec. 18, 2017, when she stepped away to grab a coffee, the Washington Post reported.  While she was away, Gabriella asked if she could pet the dog, which suddenly bit her in the face and left her bloodied.

The Editor says...
The whole concept of "emotional support animals" came from the far left fringe.  Those whose only god is the government, and whose primary concern is their own feelings and emotions, must depend on warm and fuzzy animals to cope with situations that the rest of us consider routine.

Disarming Law Enforcement in Portland.  Portland today is much changed from the city that I grew up in.  Signs of urban decay and degradation are everywhere.  Streets are littered with trash, human feces, and drug needles.  Transient camps and villages dot the city.  Vagrants roam the streets and threaten pedestrians and businesses owners.  A Portland resident calls the police every 15 minutes to report an incident involving a homeless person.  Still, the city's progressive politicians and activists would like residents to believe that law-enforcement officials pose a greater threat than public anarchy.  Portland's attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau.

Based On 'Discrimination' Law, Iowa Jury Awards Trans Woman $120,000, Access To Male Prison Facilities.  A jury in Iowa has concluded that the state discriminated against a former Iowa Department of Corrections nurse because the employer wouldn't let her use the bathrooms with male employees.  The jury also said the Iowa Department of Corrections denied Jesse Vreogh health care coverage for "medically necessary surgery" — i.e. a double mastectomy to look more like a man.  The jury awarded Vreogh $120,000 for the "emotional distress" of both instances based on Iowa's sexual orientation and gender identity law, which was introduced in 2007 and signed by Democrat Gov. Chet Culver.

Venezuela Isn't Just a Failed State.  It's a Failure of the Left.  If we look at government spending as a percentage of GDP, Venezuela seems far from socialism.  In recent years government spending in Venezuela has been measured at about 40 percent of GDP, with the caveat that these statistics are not fully reliable.  For the U.S., the corresponding figure is about 37 percent.  Yet emerging economies typically cannot afford the same government programs as wealthier countries, and they cannot run them with the same efficacy.  Poorer countries that try to expand their governments to size of wealthier countries, such as Brazil and Venezuela, typically encounter sub-par economic performance.  These are indeed stories of big government run amok, as some of conservatives are suggesting.