Bayou Renaissance Man

From Chris Martz on Twitter/X:

This plot shows the average number of days per year with daily maximum temperatures ≥95°, ≥100° and ≥105° per USHCN station since 1895.

The trend is down.

You will not see this reported anywhere in the press. I guarantee it. The extremes don’t increase at the same rate that the background warming does. Extremes are a reflection of the bounds of natural variability. Trends don’t create extremes.

There is also no such thing as “climate-fueled heat.” That’s media-spun BS. The climate is not a fuel. Local environmental conditions at the time of occurrence are. That’s called “weather.” Stop confusing the two concepts.

There's more at the link.

Here in north Texas, we're currently well into our annual heat endurance contest.  In any given week, temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit are likely to dominate, and it'll stay that way until sometime in September.  (We've only lived here for a decade, yet we've already had one summer where the temperature was over 100 degrees on each of over 100 consecutive days.)  According to the news media, this is proof of "global warming".  Around here, we call it "summer", because it's been that way for as long as people have lived here, and is likely to remain that way.

Peter

Friend, blogger, author and publisher Lawdog takes a vituperative look at the mainstream media's cover-up of the long-running Biden scandal.  Here's a sample.

I’m listening to the Legacy Media clutching their pearls and expressing shock — shock, I say — over the state of President Biden’s mental faculties.

Claims from the Media that the “Biden inner circle” “concealed his mental state” are falling upon deaf ears, so they’re pivotting to the excuse of “It’s a sudden decline, over the last couple of months”.

Horse. Puckey.

The Media was there in 2019, when the then-candidate for FICUS called an Iowa farmer a “damned liar” and challenged him to a push-up contest.

They were there in 2020 when he called a voter a “Lying dog-faced pony soldier” for pointing out that he had only come in at 4th place in the Iowa Democratic caucus. 

There were the requests for wheelchair-bound paraplegics to stand up; demands to talk to long-dead European country leaders, tripping over various stairs, ignoring and wandering off from meetings with leaders of allied nations, unprovoked angry outbursts at American troops, calling out to dead Congresswomen at a service where he was dedicating a building to her memory — all of which predate the “last couple of months”.

. . .

Let me ask you a question that should nail home how bad you should be hating journalists right now: How many brain surgeries did Joe Biden undergo in 1988?

The answer is two. Both of them for leaking brain aneurysms, at least one of which was a berry aneurysm at the base of his brain. Not to mention that he got himself a romping pulmonary embolism while recovering from the first time someone went spelunking through his think-pudding.

None of this should be a surprise to any reporter, much less the White House Press Pool, but I’m willing to bet it’s a surprise to some of my Gentle Readers.

There's more at the link.

Lawdog does an excellent job of laying bare the unabashed machinations, censorship and partisanship of the mainstream media.  It's gotten to the point that I literally can't think of a single mainstream media organization that's completely trustworthy to be neutral and unbiased when reporting the news.  (That includes Fox News, which is today as unbalanced on the right as The Atlantic or CNN is on the left.)

When are we going to stop referring to The News Media, and start calling them what they are - The Propagandists?

Peter

Yesterday I ran into an acquaintance who lives in Lawton, Oklahoma.  I'll call him Kumar (not his real name, for reasons of confidentiality).  He manages a hotel along I-44 in Lawton, one of several owned by his extended family around the country.  He was driving a brand-new Mercedes SUV, a big change from his normal run-down delivery van.

I asked him how he'd been able to afford the upgrade.  He smiled, and said "We owe it all to the New York municipal council."

"Come again?" I asked, puzzled.

"Oh, they've rented both of our family's hotels in the city - every single room - to house migrants, almost since they started arriving in New York.  We're making over a million dollars every month in gross revenue off the migrant surge!  Sure, the expenses are high, too, but overall we've doubled our net family income."

He may have been exaggerating, but a quick Internet search shows he's pretty much on the mark.

In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business.

As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.

. . .

Business owners in the surrounding neighborhoods have noted the decline in economic revenue for their businesses and others around them, as the tourists that would normally stay in such hotels and subsequently patronize their own businesses have been replaced by illegals who have no money.

“Our taxes are being used to pay for the migrants, and where are we supposed to make revenue?” asked William Shandler, manager at the Iron Bar located across the street from the Row hotel. “How as a business could we function?”

Republican Councilwoman Joann Ariola also criticized the gutting of the tourism industry in favor of illegals, pointing out that hotels were built to be used by tourists, “not for sheltering the masses of people pouring over our borders every day.”

“These locations were meant to boost the economy of this city,” Ariola continued, “but instead they’ve become a net drain and are costing us enormously.”

There's more at the link.

Kumar's family came here from India about 40 or 50 years ago, if I understand correctly.  His grandfather and grandmother slaved at any work they could find, and saved every penny they could, while pushing their kids to do well at school.  By the end of ten years, they'd saved enough to buy their first motel, near a major Interstate highway in Pennsylvania.  Grandpa and Grandma managed it, and made sure all the kids worked there before and after school, saving the cost of hiring workers.  By the time most of the kids had graduated high school, the family could afford to buy a second hotel, this one in New Jersey.  It went on like that until today, with three generations of the family involved, they own eleven hotels, all managed by family members, sharing their revenues so that the whole family enjoys the rewards of their hard work.

Well done to all of them - they've certainly demonstrated that the American dream is still within reach if you're prepared to work hard and go for it.  I'm just annoyed that in the process, they've illustrated how fundamentally corrupt our local and regional governments have become.  Look at the numbers cited above.  One city is spending almost $5 billion - so far - to house migrants who should never have been allowed across the border in the first place;  and all that money is coming from local ratepayers and businesses, most of whom desperately need it themselves!  The only upside I can see is that Kumar's family is spending a lot of that windfall income to buy more hotels, and spread themselves out further in this land of opportunity.  One can't blame them at all.  In the process, they're providing a needed service, and that's something we can all appreciate.

Pity one can't say the same about New York City and its demented spendthrift policies . . .

Peter

Courtesy of Pascal Fervor, commenting at Liberty's Torch, we find this object lesson in reality.  Click the image for a larger view.

Next time a climate alarmist tries to pull "The seas are rising!" on you, show them that picture, and ask them to explain it.  They won't, of course - because they can't, unless they admit that sea levels on the whole are not rising.

Thank you, ancient Romans!

Peter

Watching our country descend into banana republic territory (see the Babylon Bee for more about that), I came across this graphic on MeWe.  I find it eerily disturbing.  Click the image for a larger, readable view.

That may be ten years old, but it also might be a scarily accurate prediction of our present situation . . .

Peter

I'm sure many readers have noticed that the campus riots against Israel have many common features.  Many demonstrators all have the same type and color of tents in their "protest camps", often arranged in similar grid patterns.  They have professionally printed protest signs, delivered in their hundreds, rather than spontaneously-drawn hand-made signs.

Does that remind you, perhaps, of those strategically-placed and anonymously-delivered pallets of bricks that accompanied street riots in many American cities during 2020, and the unrest that led up to the Presidential election that year?  It sure does me . . .

There's also the presence of professional agitators and activists to organize the otherwise clueless students.

Mayor Eric Adams warned Wednesday that “outside agitators” had descended on Columbia University’s campus to radicalize students ... Hizzoner blamed the on-campus chaos on insurgents who have a “history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos” instead of protesting peacefully.

“There were individuals on the campus who should not have been there. They were people who are professionals and we saw evidence of training,” Adams said.

“I know that there are those who attempting to say, ‘Well, the majority of people may have been students.’ You don’t have to be the majority to influence and co-op an operation. That is what this about.

. . .

Adams said the NYPD was brought in Tuesday night to quell the unrest at Columbia after the administration acknowledged outside influencers “were on their grounds training and really co-opting this movement.”

There's more at the link.

The U.K. Telegraph provided this pen-portrait of one of the better-known radical organizers in New York City.

When Eric Adams, the New York mayor, issued a warning about “outside agitators” infiltrating the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, his words were accompanied by video of students dutifully obeying orders from a grey-haired woman.

She was identified as Lisa Fithian, a New Yorker living in Texas, yet the 63-year-old would have needed no introduction to law enforcement officers involved with policing protests in the US for more than half a century.

Described by Mother Jones as “the nation’s best-known protest consultant”, Ms Fithian has supported a plethora of movements over the decades including opposing the Iraq war, fighting for Louisiana communities following Hurricane Katrina, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy Wall Street.

She has been arrested between 80 and 100 times yet unions and activist groups hold her rabble-rousing skills in such high regard they have paid her $300 (£240) a day to run demonstrations and teach them tactics for taking over the streets.

Video released by New York police at Mayor Adams’ briefing on Tuesday showed Ms Fithian instructing a mob of pro-Palestinian protesters as they took over an academic building at Columbia University.

. . .

After attending Skidmore college in New York, she cut her teeth as a political activist with the Washington Peace Center campaign group in the 1980s, organising demonstrations locally and nationally with a focus on anti-racism issues.

By the time she took a key role in Occupy, a social justice movement that targeted leading financial institutions, she was a revered figure among fellow campaigners.

As Occupy took over the parks of New York and Los Angeles in 2012, she was reported to have been handing out advice to younger activists on tactics ranging from proper tear gas attire to long-term protest strategies.

“When there is some conflict, or things aren’t going the way that we want them to go, or people don’t have a good long-term plan,” a twenty-something protester told Mother Jones, “I have heard others and myself say, ‘Damn it, where is Lisa Fithian?’”

Max Berger, another Occupy campaigner, said: “Nobody is going to say that what Lisa does is not badass so she is in a very strategically important position of teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.”

Again, more at the link.  She was far from the only such organizer there.

Also, intriguingly, we find that many of the "migrants" who recently poured across our southern border, with the help of the Biden administration, may be involved in the campus riots.

The modern version of Rent-A-Mob, perhaps?

Perhaps most intriguing from my point of view, the "fact-checking" sources that almost unanimously debunked the placement of bricks during the 2020 riots, denouncing them as mere "construction debris", are also working flat-out to deny that outside agitators are at work in these campus riots.  A simple Internet search reveals the common guidelines they've been given.  They're all marching to the beat of the same drummer, suggesting that their "fact-checking" is itself nothing more than political propaganda.

Put all that together, and the "demonstrations" begin to look more and more like the George Floyd protests of 2020:  a technique for political intimidation, rather than a "spontaneous" outburst.  These riots are far too well organized and coordinated across the country for that.

I think I have a solution, though.  Let's gather up every organizer we can find, plus the "student leaders" who are looking to them for guidance, and drop them all into the middle of the biggest concentration of Hamas terrorists we can find in Gaza.  Let them discuss solidarity and fellow-feeling all they like, while the rest of us watch.  It might make for a sell-out pay-per-view experience.

Peter

A proposed city separation in Louisiana has all the usual suspects screaming "Racist!" (as usual).

Wealthy white Baton Rouge residents have won a decade-long court battle to split from poorer neighborhoods and form their own city with plans for better schools and less crime. 

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the new City of St George could move forward with incorporation, splitting off from the rest of Baton Rouge. 

St George will have 86,000 residents across a 60-square-mile area in the southeast of East Baton Rouge Parish and will have its own Mayor and city council.

Supporters of the new city say that the existing city-parish government is poorly run, with high crime rates and bad schools. 

Opponents say the movement is 'racist' and will create a 'white enclave' as it separates a wealthy area of the city from the majority Black city and school district.

There's more at the link.

I lived in Louisiana for more than a decade.  I know Baton Rouge reasonably well.  I'm pretty sure you'll find those living in the proposed City of St. George are not primarily whites objecting to sharing the city with blacks.  I'm confident you'll find they're simply sick and tired of paying the highest rates in the city, only to receive exceptionally poor treatment at the hands of the municipality, which has for years (decades!) taken that money and used it to employ, service and subsidize poorer people in the city while neglecting "the goose that laid the golden eggs".  Now that the goose has decided it will no longer put up with that, and instead wishes to improve its lot in life, they're screaming that the problems are the goose's fault - racism, rich vs. poor, haves versus have-nots, and all the rest of the usual slogans.

The same scenario has played itself out in other American cities, notably Buckhead in Atlanta, GA.  In every case of which I'm aware, the same allegations of racism, elitism, etc. have been leveled against those who want to escape the poorer morass that's absorbing their high rates and leaving them with almost no return on their money.  That applies particularly to security.  Criminals from the poorer areas target those living in the rich areas, because that's where the money is - but the city police do nothing extra to protect those targeted areas, often under instruction from the City Council to do so.  It's understandable that the victims of crime feel more than a little aggravated by it, and want something done about it.  They've finally decided to do it themselves, since they can't rely on the city's leaders to do their job.

When will the progressive left learn that if you steal the goose's golden eggs for long enough, it'll take itself off to where it can lay its eggs in safety, free from your rapacious clutches?  Why should the richer suburbs subsidize the poorer without any return for themselves?  If they were treated fairly and equitably, they probably wouldn't mind so much:  but when they're basically robbed blind to pay off poorer areas, they get a mite tetchy about it.  In their shoes, so would I.

I hope the City of St. George will serve as a wake-up call to other Baton Rouges around the country.  Don't push your greed too far, or it may come back to bite you right on your fundamental jujube.

Peter

First, Haiti:

Haiti’s capital has been thrown into further chaos after its top warlord ordered his soldiers to “burn every house you find” – as the nation struggles to usher in a new government.

Notorious gang leader Jimmy “Barbeque” Cherizier, 47, was heard on social media messages on Sunday inciting his men to clash against police and burn down homes indiscriminately across Port-au-Prince, including Lower Delmas where he grew up. 

“Continue burning the houses. Make everybody leave,” says a man in the audio recordings who is believed to be Cherizier.   

“No need to know which house. Burn every house you find. Set the fire,” he adds, claiming to have sent jugs of gasoline to the gangsters. 

Local residents have verified that houses have been set a blaze in the capital, with Radio Tele Galaxie reporting loud blasts and gunfire echoing across city hall as Lower Delmas has turned into “a battlefield between police and armed gangs.”

Along with the gunfights along city hall and the National Palace, gangsters also looted the State University of Haiti’s medical facility overnight, local Radio RFM reports. 

With officials and human rights groups estimating that as much as 90% of the capital is now controlled by violent gangs, fears have grown that Cherizier has united them in an effort to seize control of the nation during a period of transition.

Sunday’s order to attack came ahead of the installation of a transitional council preparing to establish a new government after Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry fled the nation. 

There's more at the link.

As we've mentioned before in these pages, successive Haitian governments (if that's a valid description of them) have allied with various gangs in order to achieve political power, then plunder the national treasury under the guise of governing.  The inevitable result is that the gangs have grown tired of ruling through middlemen, and want to govern directly, without giving up a cut of the loot to politicians.  Tragically, the people of Haiti have never risen up and demanded proper government.  If they had, this could have been nipped in the bud years ago.  They didn't;  so now they're paying the price.

Contrast this with El Salvador, where the people got fed up with the gangs, the corruption and the criminality of their society, and did something about it.

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

. . .

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Out of gratitude for restoring peace in the country, voters reelected him with 85% of the vote. Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

. . .

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Again, more at the link.

Notice how President Bukele's measures completely bypass and render impotent the corrupt liberal institutions of "justice".  You won't find progressive prosecutors letting off offenders with a token slap on the wrist, or setting them free the same day they're arrested after making them promise to attend court when summoned.  Those offenders, under El Salvador's system, are checked for gang tattoos, and video of them outside and inside jail is scrutinized.  One gang tattoo, one flashed gang sign, and they're automatically classified as gang members and imprisoned.  They have the right to argue their detention, and about 10% have been released;  but most can't demonstrate their innocence, and they're still locked up.  The people of El Salvador, delighted to be able to venture outside their homes in safety for the first time in years (if not decades), have just shown whose side they're on by re-electing President Bukele and his party with overwhelming support - to the distress and hand-wringing of said liberals and progressives, who see all their favorite soft-on-crime approaches being ground into the mud.

Now look at the USA.  States and cities where liberal, progressive attitudes are applied are drowning in crime.  Don't believe the "official" crime statistics, either - they're deliberately flawed, biased and under-reported.  Ask the people who live there.  They'll tell you the reality.  Contrast those states and cities with those where law and order takes a higher priority, and see the difference.  People from the first group are migrating to the second group as fast as they can afford to.

Tragically, the Biden administration is admitting millions upon millions of migrants from high-crime, low-trust societies (including Haiti) into the USA, without so much as a background check.  That's going to make our crime situation much, much worse.  It already is in some places.  What will we, the people of the USA, do about it?  Will we demand our own Bukele to rein in the criminals?  Or will we roll over, supine, and let the gangs dominate?

The liberals and progressives do have one accurate point in all this.  Throughout history, whenever a "strong man" appears offering a solution to crime and other ills, he's ended up becoming more or less a dictator, and often has had to be removed violently in his turn.  That's a real danger here in the USA right now.  Tragically, those same liberals and progressives don't seem to realize that their insistence on unfettered immigration from high-crime, low-trust societies is paving the way for such a dictator to arise here too.

President Bukele didn't come out of nowhere.  He rose to power through offering a relatively simple, yet Draconian, solution to El Salvador's crime problem.  How will this nation react if someone offers that recipe here?  Can our constitutional republic survive such an authoritarian figure any better than it can survive chaos and criminal anarchy?  Your guess is as good as mine . . .

Peter

This may be the most important video you'll watch in weeks, possibly months.  It's only 8½ minutes long, but it encapsulates the disastrous situation in which our country now finds itself.  I can't emphasize too strongly that you should not only watch this yourself, but circulate the link to your family and friends, because this is what's coming unless we turn our country around in very short order.

The following article, also by Mr. Hanson, isn't a transcript of the video above, but touches on some of the same points.  I highly recommend that you click over to it and read the whole thing.

Why are those controlling President Biden using him to advance so much of a destructive agenda that it will likely end America as we know it? If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?

1. Wipe out a 2,000-mile border. Allow 10 million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let in toxic drugs that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support to those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.

2. Run up $35 trillion in national debt. Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.

3. Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China. Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without adequate response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the U.N., ICC and WHO to atone for past American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.

4. In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation. Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Reboot all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion and commendation.

5. Recalibrate violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if they are slain police officers.

There's much more at the link.  Essential reading, IMHO.

Folks, we need to listen to Mr. Hanson's warnings, and pay attention to what's going on in our country, and do something before it's too late.  Even if we can't affect things on a national scale, we stand a better chance of doing so in our states, and an excellent chance in our local towns and counties.  However, if we do nothing, that tide of nihilism will wash over us, and history will say that we committed suicide by cooperating with those who set out to destroy us.

I hope my readers are listening - and willing to act, each of us as best we can in our own lives and circumstances.  In particular, we should be prepared to defend our lives, our loved ones, and our property in the face of a burgeoning crime rate committed by "migrant" aliens.  (As per our previous post this morning, ignore those who claim that aliens aren't contributing to crime, or that crime rates are actually going down.  They're lying.  Read the first link in this paragraph for the facts.)  Secure your premises, get armed and trained in the tools you need to defend yourself, and stand ready to assist police and others who are fighting against the criminal tide.

Peter

Remember the kerfuffle raised by climate change activists over the past three or four decades, alleging that many island chains would soon be submerged beneath the waves due to rising sea levels?

Not so fast . . .

The Guardian was in fine form last June stating that rising oceans will extinguish more than land. “It will kill entire languages,” it added, noting the effect on Pacific islands such as Tuvalu. Those areas of the Earth that were most hospitable to people and languages are now becoming the “least hospitable”.

Silly emotional Guardianista guff of course, but happily it does not seem to apply to Tuvalu. A recent study found that the 101 islands of Tuvalu had grown in land mass by 2.9%. The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average”.

The Maldives is also a poster scare for rising sea levels, with the attention-seeking activist Mark Lynas – he of the nonsense claim that 99.9% of scientists agree humans cause all or most climate change – organising an underwater Cabinet meeting of the local Government in 2009. As it happens, the Maldives is one of a number of areas that have seen recent increases in land mass. Other areas include the Indonesian Archipelago, islands along the Indochinese Peninsula coast, and islands in the Red and Mediterranean Seas. Notably, the  coastal waters of the Indochinese Peninsula had the most substantial gain, with an increase of 106.28 km2 over the 30-year period. Of the 13,000 islands examined, the researchers found that only around 12% had experienced a significant shoreline shift, with almost equal numbers experiencing either landward (loss) or seaward (gain) movement.

. . .

Sea level rise is not a “predominant” cause of the changing coasts, the scientists note.

There's more at the link.

I find it interesting that the climate change alarmists made claims such as "submerged islands!", then insisted that there was no time to waste, we had to act now, and we had to throw millions (if not billions) of dollars at the problem to "protect vulnerable populations", as well as damage our own economies by cutting back on anything and everything that might contribute to rising sea levels.  When research over several years (in some cases, decades) has now proved that their claims were wrong, they're conspicuous by their deafening silence.  All the money they gouged out of politically correct governments and "woke" corporations . . . what good did it do?  Where did it go?  Who benefited most from it?  No good asking those questions;  they won't answer them - but we all know where the money came from that's kept them employed and living comfortably - some would say high on the hog - all this time.

Almost the entire climate change industry is based on pseudo-scientific twaddle.  Go watch the video report at that link.  It's the truth.

Peter

Comparing fast food prices in California and a neighboring state, Arizona, is an eye-opener.

The recent minimum wage hike in California has sparked a debate on its impact on consumer prices. Critics of the wage increase have argued that it would not lead to higher costs for consumers. However, a comparison of prices at a popular fast food chain, @Arbys, reveals a stark reality.

A classic roast beef sandwich, a staple item on the menu, is priced at $5.59 in Arizona. The same sandwich costs a hefty $9.24 in California. This significant price difference clearly demonstrates the effect of the minimum wage increase on consumer wallets.

. . .

To verify the price difference, one can simply download the @Arbys app and start an online order, then switch locations from Arizona to California. The stark contrast in prices is undeniable and raises concerns about the affordability of goods in the state.

There's more at the link.

Here's a selection of headlines from just one newspaper over the past couple of weeks about how the minimum wage hike in California is affecting fast food outlets.

Do you get the impression that California's legislators and administrators don't actually give a damn about the impact of their decisions and policies on the lives of ordinary Californians?  I sure do!

The question is, when will ordinary Californians do something about it?  I hope it's soon, for their sake . . . otherwise their state is going to have slid so far down the slippery slope to failure that there may be no climbing back up again.

Peter

Not content with blaming businesses for crime, as in this morning's first blog post, it seems that the loony left - in San Francisco this time - wants to make businesses financially liable when they're driven out of business by street crime.

A pair of progressive San Francisco lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow residents in the crime-ravaged city to sue grocery stores that close up shop if they don’t give six months’ notice.

The proposal by San Francisco Board of Supervisors members Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin would require business to either find a successor grocer or work out a plan with residents in the neighborhood to ensure the availability of supermarket options.

The Grocery Protection Act ... comes amid a rash of retail theft fueled by the city’s drug and homelessness crisis that has led to several business closures.

Whole Foods closed its Market Street location last year after there were 568 emergency calls lodged in a 13-month period due to incidents such as vagrants throwing food, yelling, fighting and attempting to defecate on the floor, according to the New York Times. At least 14 arrests were made at the location.

There's more at the link.

I marvel at the sheer blind stupidity of lawmakers who can blame others - in this case, businesses - for trying to get away from the intolerable conditions created by those same lawmakers.  They appear unable to grasp the nettle and accept that the criminal, anti-social behavior of their own constituents is at the root of the problem.  Just what does it take to get through to these critters?  A clue-by-four?  Wielded by a San Francisco street vagrant, just for equity's sake?

San Francisco police can't solve the problem, because their hands are tied by their own city council, and by a liberal progressive-left District Attorney who won't apply the law as it is written, and dismisses most such cases with a figurative slap on the wrist (if that).  The courts can't solve the problem, partly because too many local judges (not to mention juries) are selected on the basis of their ideological purity, partly because local laws have been rewritten to favor offenders rather than law-abiding citizens, both corporate and private.

All I can say is, after this news, San Francisco is just about the last place in the world where I'd open a food-related business.  Why should I try to make a living in a city that's actively encouraging others to steal it from me - and urging them to sue me if I won't stay there and let them rob me blind?

Peter

From Larry Lambert:

When you put a potato in a microwave oven and punch the “pizza” button, and it is still a potato, it will help you understand how gender works.

Indeed!

Peter

I had to laugh at this news report.

Spanish soldiers are changing their gender from male to female to earn certain benefits only available to females, including higher pay and better sleeping quarters, due to a self-identification law aimed at helping transgender people.

. . .

A majority of the now-female soldiers have kept every other aspect of life, including male genitalia, sexuality, and even facial hair.

“On the outside, I feel like a heterosexual man, but on the inside, I am a lesbian,” Army Corporal Roberto Perdigones told Spanish newspaper El Español. “And it is the latter that counts. This is why I made the legal change to become a woman.”

Perdigones says he was encouraged to change his gender because of “positive discrimination” and has since received a 15 percent salary increase.

“For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 percent more salary for being a mother,” he added.

The soldier is looking to use his additional privilege as a woman to sue for shared custody of his 16-year-old son, assuming the courts will give him a better chance.

Perdigones changed his gender last year, and when he arrived at the barracks in Ceuta, he did so with hair too long to meet the male requirements and earrings, which the Spanish military prohibits men from wearing.

The army corporal was even given a personal bathroom because he wasn’t comfortable with sharing with either biological gender.

“I even have a private room in the barracks, all to myself, with a private bathroom. This is because I cannot be with men as I am a woman, and I did not consider it appropriate to be with biological women out of respect for them,” Perdigones said.

There's more at the link.

Boy, talk about working the system!  I'm sure Corporal Perdigones was (and still is) laughing all the way to the bank.  It just goes to show:  if the system provides profitable loopholes, some people will exploit them for all they're worth.

Now, let's try that with a US Marine Corps corporal, telling his Gunnery Sergeant DI that he's now a woman - and a lesbian.  I have this mental picture of the Gunny's head exploding . . . and another of the unfortunate corporal doubling multiple times around the perimeter of the entire base wearing makeup and jewelry, with his (sorry - her!) rifle held above their head, chanting - and panting - "I'm whatever the Marine Corps says I am!"

Peter

I'm hugely enjoying how a mistake has backfired on the person who made it.

A "woke" bureaucrat at the Veterans Administration decided, apparently on her own initiative and without consultation, to get rid of a famous photograph titled "VJ Day in Times Square", an icon of American victory in World War II.  (Click any image below for a larger view.)

Military Times reports:

The ban was announced internally at VA medical facilities late last month in a memo from RimaAnn Nelson, the Veterans Health Administration’s top operations official. Employees were instructed to “promptly” remove any depictions of the famous photo and replace it with imagery deemed more appropriate.

“The photograph, which depicts a non-consensual act, is inconsistent with the VA’s no-tolerance policy towards sexual harassment and assault,” the memo stated.

“To foster a more trauma-informed environment that promotes the psychological safety of our employees and the veterans we serve, photographs depicting the ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ should be removed from all Veterans Health Administration facilities.”

There's more at the link.

When the news broke yesterday, it took only a matter of minutes for the head honcho of the Veterans Administration to reverse his underling's decision.  I'm sure he recognized the storm of anger and disgust from outraged veterans that was about to break over his head, and wanted to stop it before it started.

The tweet that broke the story was time-stamped 7.24 AM yesterday.  Mr. McDonough's reply, above, was time-stamped 9:03 AM.  That must be some sort of bureaucratic record, to squash an out-of-line deputy so publicly and so bluntly in so short a time.  I think the VA brass were scrambling on this one, to try to salvage their public image.

No word yet on Ms. Nelson's future career prospects with the VA, but if I were in her shoes, as soon as I saw my boss's response, I'd have been sending out my resumé far and wide - and praying that someplace more "woke" than the VA would have a slot for me.

I'm sure not many of my readers wish her well in her job search.  Her decision was one of the most stupid and ill-advised I can ever remember hearing about from a senior administrator.  Fortunately for the VA, her boss wasn't as stupid.

Peter

Please take three minutes of your time to listen to this lady describe the impact of pro-migrant policies on the city of Denver, Colorado, and on her life.  It's mind-boggling.  Then realize that precisely the same impact is being and will be experienced in every single left-wing-controlled city in this country, unless and until the voters lose patience and put a stop to it.

https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1764076610636894524

This is happening TODAY.  What will it be like tomorrow?

As I've said so often before, along with many others who have eyes to see and ears to hear:  GET OUT OF BIG BLUE CITIES.  NOW.

Robert Heinlein's "Crazy Years" are already here, with just a few details differing from his vision.

Peter

It seems that the woke virus is as virulent as ever in academia.  The Daily Mail reports:

Britain's top universities warned staff and students that saying 'the most qualified person should get the job' is a microaggression. 

Russell Group universities, including the University of Glasgow, have issued guidance and even provided training courses to educate people on how to eliminate microaggressions.

Guidance from the Scottish university alongside the engineering department of Imperial College London insisted that using the phrase was discriminatory.

Glasgow University's guidance is the latest advice from their anti-racism campaign and the university explained that the phrase ignored the idea that race plays a part in life success.

The top universities said that other examples of microaggressions - subtle or thinly veiled everyday forms of discrimination could include telling people that 'everyone can succeed if they work hard enough'.

There's more at the link.

So, if I need critical surgery, I'm not allowed to select a surgeon on the basis of his or her qualifications or experience?  I'm not allowed to choose on the basis of which university, in which country, they attended?  I'll tell you for free, any brain surgeon who qualified from an alleged university in Lower Bongo (or Havana, for that matter) won't be getting my money when I can choose one who qualified at, say, Johns Hopkins!

The trouble is, this sort of nonsense has crept into corporate hiring all over the First World.  It's no longer good enough to be a top performer.  You have to be politically correct and woke as well if you're to have any hope of advancing to upper job levels.  Personally, I don't think it's worth it.

(Of course, if I were still able to be in the job market, I could always label myself as African-American to boost my chances.  Hey, despite my Caucasian appearance, I was born in Africa, and I'm now an American citizen - so I qualify, right?)

Peter

We've all read the warnings about the number of young, military-age men pouring over our southern border.  We've also read reports that increasing numbers of gang members have been identified among them.  That reality now appears to be coming home to roost.

The Gun Free Zone blog sets the scene.

As a Miami boy, born in the 1980s, I am familiar with waves of Cuban migrants coming to the United States.

In 1980, Fidel Casto began to empty Cuban prisons and ship them with refugees to Florida.

He famously said, “I have flushed the toilets of Cuba in the United States.”

Today, it’s Venezuela that is flushing its toilets into the United States.

. . .

Venezuela’s currently president is Nicolas Maduro, former VP to Hugo Chavez, and Chavez was buddy-buddy with Castro.

It’s not at all difficult to understand how this situation came to be.

So it makes perfect sense that Venezuela’s violent crimes are dropping, because the violent criminals are here now.

The worst part is that half of the American government is on board with this policy, evident that they refuse to send these criminals back.

It’s only going to get worse.

There's more at the link.

The result is that Venezuela's largest criminal gang is now operating in several large US cities.  Recent headlines tell the story:

It's not only Venezuelan criminals, of course.  A Honduran migrant recently raped a 14-year-old girl at knife-point in Louisiana.  The local police complain they're having immense problems trying to control crime committed by migrants.

Kenner Police Department Chief Keith Conley also railed against illegal migrants committing crimes in the area and said they pose challenges for law enforcement for many reasons.

"Lack of access to data, false identification and language barriers put local law enforcement at a huge disadvantage," Conley said.

"We cannot verify if an illegal alien is giving correct information as it pertains to names and dates of birth. It is not only a drain on police manpower, but a financial drain on local law enforcement’s budgets and taxpayers' money."

"In a 25-day period, this illegal alien caused terror in our community. We are glad he is off our streets, but will he be back? Will he have a new identity? What other crimes has he committed since he crossed our borders?"

Again, more at the link.

Solomon is a military veteran and a law enforcement officer.  He points out:

Decisions have consequences and all this feel good, pussified, we are the world bull**** that has been pushed by those in power is leading to one thing.

Americans thought **** was bad?  They're about to be ravaged.  Not so much rural areas but most certainly the big cities.

You're about to see most American big cities turn into open air cesspools.

It will take a decade or more to round up and control some of the gangs and terrorist that have crossed.

My biggest fear?

The Army is about to cut its Special Operations personnel.  We're gonna need them.  Not for operations outside the country but INSIDE!  Many of these gangs are simply too well armed to be confronted with police tactics.  Some of the best SWAT units in the US will be overwhelmed.  

We're not gonna need force multipliers aiding local agencies against some of these creatures.  We're gonna need Ranger type capabilities.

What did you say?  You want me to get to the point?

We just allowed a counter insurgency type element to walk across the border and its gonna take a military response to bring order.

Chaos in the cities is coming.  No go zones are here and the middle class and poor are about to be ravaged.

Tough on crime is coming back in style but many will be killed, raped and terrorized before Washington DC even notices.

More at the link.

To my mind, the most dangerous aspect of this criminal migrant invasion is that it's going to force many Americans into a vigilante mindset.  Speaking about Muslim fundamentalist terrorist attacks in France in 2015, I wrote:

The reaction from ordinary people like you and I won't be to truly think about the tragedy, to realize that the perpetrators were a very small minority of those who shared their faith, extremists who deserve the ultimate penalty as soon as it can be administered.  No.  The ordinary man and woman on the streets of France is going to wake up today hating all Muslims.  He or she will blame them all for the actions of a few, and will react to all of them as if they were all equally guilty.

One can't blame people for such attitudes.  When one simply can't tell whether or not an individual Muslim is also a terrorist fundamentalist, the only safety lies in treating all of them as if they presented that danger.

More at the link.

Precisely the same consideration applies to the actions of criminal migrants.  It's simply not possible for us to tell which migrants are relatively decent people, and which are criminals:  therefore, the only sane approach in high-crime cities is going to be to treat all migrants as potential criminals unless and until they prove otherwise.  That's already happened with black inner-city residents.  I'm sure most of us have seen complaints from them that too many white people treat them as criminals, whether they are or not.  Unfortunately, they live in neighborhoods where criminal gangs flourish;  therefore, they're tarred with the same brush.  It's inevitable.

That way lies vigilante justice.  If our law enforcement agencies and officers are overwhelmed by criminal migrants, the people of our cities will take the law into their own hands.  As a result, innocent people are almost guaranteed to suffer.

Who is to blame?  Not the vigilantes - they're trying to protect their own lives, families and property.  No, the responsibility lies with those who allowed those criminals to pour unchecked across our borders.  Who will call them to account?

Peter

That's how Brandon Smith sees globalism and its followers.

From Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell to Steven Pinker and beyond, all scientific evidence suggests that human beings have inherent psychological qualities and characteristics from birth. Some of these are unique to the person, some are universal archetypes and ideas that the majority of people share (such as conscience and moral compass). If we didn’t have these built-in qualities, humanity would have become extinct thousands of years ago. We still don’t know where exactly they come from, we only know that without them we are no longer human.

There is, however, a certain percentage of people (1% or less) that actually do not have these inborn character traits. They are generally known as psychopaths and sociopaths, and their behavior is very similar to that of the globalists. I have long held the theory that the globalist cabal is in fact a cult of higher functioning psychopaths.

Their lack of empathy and conscience, their thirst for godhood and omnipotence, their drive to attain all encompassing surveillance of the population, to know everything about us at all time, to have total control over the environment and society, the narcissistic self image of a supreme ruler who is worshiped by the masses, and the delusion that they will be able to read minds and predict the future. These are psychopathic fantasies, and they are willing to chase these fantasies by any means necessary.

But even psychopaths sometimes need a fundamentalist framework in order to maintain organization and inspire devotion within a group. It makes perfect sense that they would choose luciferianism as their religion.

Their “do what thou wilt” philosophy of hedonism takes the idea of freedom and removes all responsibility – It is a degenerate view of liberty, rather than a principled view. Freedom, they think, is only for people like them; the people willing to desecrate everything in their path and upend the natural order.

As psychopaths, they are devoid of natural inborn contents and are more robotic than human. So, it’s no surprise that people like Harai argue there is no soul, no freedom (for you) and that machines are capable of the same creativity as humans. An empty person with no soul or creativity is going to assume that all other people are empty. An immoral person will also be compelled to prove that everyone else is just as immoral as he is. Or, he will be compelled to prove that he is superior to everyone else because he has embraced his immorality.

Do the elites actually believe in a real “devil” with hooves and horns and a pitchfork? I don’t know. What matters, though, is the philosophical drive of their cultism. Their goal is to convince a majority of the populace that there is no good, and there is no evil. Everything is empty. Everything is relative to the demands of the moment, and the demands of society. Of course, they want to control society, so then everything would really be relative to THEIR demands.

If you want to see something truly demonic, imagine a world in which all inherent truth is abandoned for the sake of subjective perception. A world that caters to the preferences of psychopaths with no ethical imperative. A world where the ends always justify the means. This is the luciferian way, and the globalist way. And no matter how much they deny it, the reality of their beliefs is visible in the fruits of their labors. Wherever they go, destruction, chaos and death follow.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

That might sound far-fetched to many people, but I've seen at first hand the consequences of the pursuit of money and power for their own sake, rather than as a means to an end.  I'll give you just one example, out of many I could cite.  Back in the 1980's, while working in the information technology industry, I helped one businessman figure out his (very complex) taxes.  In the course of doing so, I learned that he was worth sixty to seventy million already, and worked up to twenty hours a day to make more money.  If he didn't add at least ten per cent every year to his net worth, he reckoned himself a failure.  However, while dedicating his life to the pursuit of money and the power it brought with it, he'd been through three marriages, all ending in bitter and acrimonious divorces.  His son was a high school dropout, living somewhere in Europe to evade the draft in South Africa, vocally and viciously hating on his father at every opportunity.  His daughter was a drug-addicted prostitute suffering from multiple venereal infections, but refusing to get treatment for them.  His life outside work and money was a ruin, a total and complete failure . . . yet he still addictively and compulsively lived and worked solely for more money and power.  If ever there was a living definition of a "false god", he was pursuing it.

I've no idea what happened to him in the end, but I can't think it was anything good.

I'm also reminded of an article in the international edition of Fortune magazine on July 6, 1987.  I found it so nauseatingly compelling that I filed it in my spiritual reading library - and have kept it there to this day - on the principle of "Know your enemy", because what it described was, and still is, the antithesis of Christianity, and a very clear enemy to any meaningful life of faith.  It was titled "The Money Society".  Here are a few excerpts.

Money, money, money is the incantation of today.  Bewitched by an epidemic of money enchantment, Americans in the Eighties wriggle in a St. Vitus's dance of materialism unseen since the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties.  Under the blazing sun of money, all other values shine palely.  And the M&A decade acclaims but one breed of hero:  He's the honcho with the condo and the limo and the Miró and lots and lots of dough.

. . .

Back in 1967, around 40% of U.S. college freshmen told pollsters that it was important to them to be very well off financially, as against around 80% who listed developing a meaningful philosophy of life as an important objective.  But by 1986 the numbers had reversed, with almost 80% aspiring plutocrats as against 40% philosophers.  The number and wealth of the rich have swollen accordingly, with U.S. millionaires proliferating sixfold over the last 20 years to around 1.3 million souls today.  The richest 1% of Americans, who owned 31.8% of the national wealth in 1963, had upped their share to an even heftier 34.4% of it two decades later.

. . .

The corporate restructuring [of the 1980's] isn't just an economic change.  It is also a social change, transforming the relationships between individuals and their employers.  Altered sometimes unrecognizably, cut loose from their traditions, no longer able to offer long-term career commitment, old companies can inspire neither attachment nor loyalty in employees.  "What we're living in now is an age of Hessians," says University of Rhode Island historian Maury Klein, biographer of robber baron Jay Gould.  A realignment like this cuts people adrift from the traditional moorings by which they identify themselves, as do other of our era's social and cultural changes, from family breakdown to the newfangled relations between the sexes to the continuing attenuation of community ties.

What has this to do with the money craze?  Everything.  Says historian Klein, "Money tends to be more or less important in an age, depending on the degree of turbulence and social change that is taking place."  Like the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing era of the robber barons, Klein says, ours is "an age where traditional self-identities are under great attack and great strain just from the pace of change.  In that situation, money becomes a way of defining who you are by what you have."

That way of defining a self is rampant in the money society.

. . .

What then is one to make of that patron of the arts Saul Steinberg, chairman of Reliance Group Holdings, sometime greenmailer, and recently host to a gathering of such writers as Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg?  What does he think when he walks in his door after a hard day at the office and sees, first thing, his Francis Bacon triptych?  On one side a naked man throws up into a sink;  on the other, a naked man strains on a toilet;  in the middle, grotesque and half hidden, a third naked figure casts a batwinged, demonic, and loathsome shadow ominously across the floor.  Who knows what these images might say to Steinberg of life in high finance?

All this is what is really meant by the word "lifestyle" - more superficial style than rooted, meaningful life.  And the point of these examples is not that the money society has triumphantly driven out all the solid, estimable values, like the shaggy barbarians at the gates of Rome.  Rather, the money society has expanded to fill the vacuum left after the institutions that embodied and nourished those values - community, religion, school, university, and especially family - sagged or collapsed or sometimes even self-destructed.

Now we live in a world where all values are relative, equal, and therefore without authority, truly matters of mere style.

It's hard to read that 1987 article and not see the roots of today's secular, wealth-obsessed, psychopathic focus of those who lead (or say they lead) our society.  The money-focused hedonism and self-obsession of the 1980's gives rise to the uber-hedonism of globalism and its denial of individuality, community, culture, faith and nationality.

Here's Yuval Harari, one of the high priests of globalism, talking about his - and their - vision of the human being today.  It's chilling.

That's a vision of humanity that I reject utterly - but it's the vision of humanity that is guiding the globalists in their quest for power.  They truly believe they can overturn all of human history, all of humanity itself, and make the world something directed by a machine that acts in the name of what's good for that world as a whole, without considering individuals, communities, cultures, religious faith, or anything else.  A secular society in every conceivable way.

I can understand how Brandon Smith came to his conclusion.  Increasingly, I share it.

Peter

New York City mayor Eric Adams displays utter mathematical innumeracy.

Mayor Eric Adams expects the city will spend roughly $10.6 billion to care for migrants over the three-year period ending in June 2025. The city spends an average of $352 per night to care for each migrant family, city budget officials said.

I blinked when I read that, did a double-take, and read it again.

Friends, $352 per night amounts to an annual sum of $128,480.  Let me put that in words:

One hundred and twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and eighty dollars.

That's what New York City is spending per migrant family - just one of them - every year.

How many of us - or, rather, our households/families - earn $128,480 every year?  I suspect not very many of us . . .  If we earned that much, I reckon we'd be able to pay for housing, furniture, clothing, food, transport, and anything else we needed, even budgeting carefully in an expensive place like New York City.

How about New York City abandons the entire effort to shelter migrants, fires every city or state employee involved in it, cancels all the contracts with hotels and others, and simply hands over to each migrant household a cash amount of one hundred thousand dollars per year, to live there and pay their own way?  The migrants would doubtless be very happy, and the city would save millions!  The ratepayers would object, but they're already being fiscally raped to a greater extent than that by the city's current policies.  It's just that most of them haven't noticed it among all the other demands on their money.

(To those who object that such a cash hand-out would merely attract a lot more unwanted migrants to flock to New York City:  those of us living elsewhere think of that as a feature, not a bug!)

Progressive-left budgeting at work.  Sheesh!

Peter