Happy Independence Day to all Americans, the Posterity of 1776 and 1787. To all others, happy Fourth of July.
Two literary announcements:
1) After 15 or so years of stalling, yesterday I commenced work on a secret project. More on that later.
2) Yesterday I bought a book which I intend to review (here and at Amazon). It’s from an “enemy” camp though I hear rumor it may be partly amicable. More on that later too.
God Bless America!
PS: Expecting the TPC of the week; more on that later as well.
If you ever need much evidence that the growing “God gap” in American politics fosters an immense amount of ignorance and occasionally outright bigotry, look no farther than the concern — the alarm, even — that Amy Coney Barrett is on President Trump’s short list to replace Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court.
The alarm isn’t about her credentials. She’s checked every box of excellence — law review, appellate-court clerkship, Supreme Court clerkship (with Justice Scalia), elite law-firm experience, law professor at an elite law school, and now experience as a federal judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. She’s a young, brilliant woman at the apex of her profession.
So, beyond her obvious originalist judicial philosophy (shared to varying degrees by every person on Trump’s list of potential nominees), what’s the problem with Judge Barrett. Why do some progressives single her out for particular scorn?
It turns out that she’s a faithful Christian who lives a Christian life very similar to the lives of millions upon millions of her fellow American believers.
No, really, that’s the objection.
It’s not just that they’re afraid of losing Roe v. Wade (the Dred Scot of the 20th Century, but worse and so wrong even Jane Roe came around). They’re afraid of losing the battle to finish off what’s left of America. They’re afraid of failing their prince, not realizing that it’s a lost cause, win or lose.
Imagine if Barret was Jewish or Muslim. Or an atheist. Or a satanist. If she was, then the howls from the same progressives happy to attack a Christian would be audible on the moon.
Somehow this “highly respected web log” missed the cut for Time’s 25 Most Influential People on Them Interwebs. I’m sure we fell in the second 25 … second 25,000 certainly…
In a field of pop culture garbage, a few figures stand out. Drudge is a given. Trump too; Tweets with a purpose. I imagine he’s the one right-winger safe from the safety and trusty councily SJWs.
The inclusion of “Q” was a surprise. His entry was tinged with doubt but there, too, was a sense of foreboding. What if he’s right about some things?
And, what if he is? Q or not, things keep changing. Dinesh D’Souza has a new documentary coming in August: Death of America. I’m not sure if that’s already happened, something we’re desperate to head off, or if it’s just a historical certainty. My gut feeling is that it’s a mix of all three.
If you’ll excuse me, I have to go work on the blog CV for next year’s list…
About a quarter of US adults meet guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise in their spare time, according to new data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
The US Department of Health and Human Services recommends that people between the ages of 18 and 64 engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity each week, as well as muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week.
Subtracting 23% from the whole (apologies to Detroit Public “School” grads) leaves 77% not exercising. Oddly, this remainder is roughly the same as that percentage of Americans who are either overweight and/or obese and/or severely obese.
Friends, this ain’t gonna cut it. Not unless you’re in the mortuary business should this news be seen as anything but evidence of decadence and decline.
Some suggestions for those majority heavies wishing to shed flab and tone it up a notch (or ten):
Eating right and exercise are obvious – and easier than many would imagine. Perrin agrees with a government agency here!!! Just walk 2 1/2 hours per week – 30 minutes or 2 miles, Monday through Friday will do. That and cut the sugar and carbs. Got 30 minutes? I’ll bet you do. Find the time by:
Turning off the G-D television!
Consider NOT checking the Tweets, texts, and cat videos for half an hour. You’ll live.
Allowing your fantasy sports team half an hour to play on their own. They do that anyway.
Postpone that next cool and I’m-sure-yours-is-so-meaningful tattoo. Especially if it’s a facial tat…
While you walk, think about what you’ve read here, today, or over at TPC – new column coming ASAP.
Alternatively, consider doing your family a favor and make those final arrangements yourself as you see fit. Otherwise, you’ll burden them with decisions like whether to go all wood or steel or to simply dump your fat ass in the closet ditch.
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.
Big ugly buildings. Big, ugly purpose. Just kidding! Keeping the kiddies safe from cigars or whales or something…
I know I’ve covered this subject before … the first disclosed tower in NYC. Can’t find it. Hmm. Sure the NSA has a record of that somewhere.
It’s not your imagination. People are really getting dumber.
Over the weekend I started a draft on a similar subject, something I noticed. Here and now, I finish it with a few changes. Those were brought about by several stories which surfaced yesterday, which largely validated what I was suspecting all along.
Young people’s IQ scores have started to deteriorate after climbing steadily since Wold War Two, a new study has found.
The fall, which equates to about seven points per generation, is believed to have begun with those born in 1975, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.
“Wold” War Two is likely a plain, old error and not an example of the point…
It’s true. But it’s not technology causing the trend. It’s not the fish or lack thereof. And it is not some nebulous social “force.” There are three causes:
1) Smarter people are having fewer children, passing on fewer genes. This has particularly dire consequences for the West. This works in conjunction with the other two.
2) Lower-IQ peoples are increasing in number, passing on their genes.
3) Modern Western immigration is geared toward the importation of non-Western peoples from countries with populations known to correspond with number two, immediately above.
What prompted my drafting earlier is immaterial. Last fall I reported on the various national IQs and the world average (86). Then, I wrote:
“I’m a little surprised the USA came in as high as it did. I would not be surprised if that number (and the global average) slips a little with each coming decade and/or generation. …”
Back then I had it in my head that the US was somewhere in the mid-90’s, I’d have settled for 95 (and this wasn’t via random guessing). 98 is just too high. More likely, it’s around 94.5. It’s not that big of a difference but, as its a point on a downward trend, it’s especially troublesome.
Last year I quipped: “98 will have trouble returning to the moon. 86 will not go the first time. 72 might have trouble finding the thing with a telescope.” This principle applies to all areas of society. Space travel is one thing. Running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, gasoline refinement, and relative judicial stability are others.
It’s become a vicious cycle – and yes, 1975 would be about the time it should have started manifesting itself. A crazed and deteriorating culture drives brighter people to work longer and harder while embracing the selfish and the trivial and delaying or foregoing starting families. They pay taxes to support the others, who keep having children. This is, obviously, not sustainable. Those on the right tail of the curve are increasingly squeezed by those in the shifting middle.
And, societally, it’s the middle, the average that really counts. If you’re reading this and understanding it, you’re above average. Surely you have noticed the decline of late during your interactions with the masses. It’s real. And it’s a real problem.
Others have noticed as well. Vox Day on the subject yesterday:
Vox Day/Youtube.
By the way – related good news here: Youtube assigns “related” channels to a particular creator. How? I’m not exactly sure. Regardless, I now have three related channels:
Vox appeared last night. It’s an honor to be algorithmically included in his and Stefan’s company. Banshee Moon was a prepper-esque channel. Now it’s more a bikini lifestyle channel – which I am also proud to associate with…
Note: the decline in the schools does not really factor into the general lowering. It fits with the general decline, however. Children with less base intelligence have less need for real education.
This isn’t the garden variety refugee either, not the kind the left and the open borders crowd tell us are so critically beneficial to the GDP. It’s Julian. Assange. The same cyber sleuth and reporter held up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years now.
It seems this particular refugee isn’t adding that magic economic value. In fact, they say he’s become an “inherited problem” and a nuisance. Ecuador may give him the boot:
Julian Assange’s nearly six-year refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is in danger, opening the WikiLeaks founder to arrest by British authorities and potential extradition to the US, multiple sources with knowledge tell CNN.
While Assange has in the past claimed his position in the embassy was under threat, sources say his current situation is “unusually bad” and that he could leave the embassy “any day now,” either because he will be forced out or made to feel so restricted that he might choose to leave on his own. His position there is “in jeopardy,” one source familiar with the matter said.
Assange’s exit from the embassy could open a new phase for US investigators eager to find out what he knows.
In their defense, the man is costing them much money and worry. It’s an embassy, not an apartment building. For him, his potential release to the streets is fraught with danger.
The UK will arrest him on a procedural bench warrant stemming from a Swedish criminal matter. That’s just procedure.
Sweden may extradite him on untenable, quasi-dismissed, and likely nonexistent criminal charges related to #metoo event that probably never happened. That’s probably going nowhere.
The real danger comes, surprise, surprise, from the American Empire. US “investigators” claim they want to know what Assange knows about international affairs. To that end, they have likely already secured an arrest warrant for him. Mind you, there’s no crime the US could, in good faith, charge him with. But that matters little in a land of little faith. If they want him, they’ll get him.
And they already know what he knows. He published it. That’s how he got into trouble in the first place – by exposing the embarrassing secrets the Empire would rather remain secret.
It would not surprise me at all if Assange were simply “silenced.”
It’s amazing. The US literally crawls with politicians, banksters, bureaucrats, MIC operatives, Hellywood values monsters, liars, charlatans, and criminals of every stripe, all dedicated to robbing, murdering, or enslaving the free people. It’s not a Deep State so much as a Deep World. But they go after Assange for exposing a little bit of it.
Most amazing is that the people have heard little of this and care even less.
One almost hopes for a James Bond-style escape for Julian to some civilized country. Maybe Pam can arrange something?
The top ten schools in several categories are front and center in the USN report. There is other good performance outside the upper extreme, such as one school I found in a large Floridian city: 96% graduation rate; 64.4% college readiness; 84% AP participation with 69% success; and 71% reading and 66% math proficiency.
That school ranks 29th among all Florida schools and 343rd in the nation. However, this “best” school still graduates 96% of students when 29% are not reading at the level and 34% have trouble with arithmetic. It makes one wonder. It should make one suspicious.
Then, there are the “worst” schools. I skewered them recently in a related article. Please pardon any caustic effect therein. The worst offender districts spend more money than the average while delivering single-digit proficiency results. I think it’s safe to say “fraud” again.
The situation, the fraud is much worse than just poor test results. The whole basis and structure of the public schools in this country is so out of touch with American values that placing children in many or most of our schools is tantamount to child abuse. Seriously. The American model, in many states, is built on the fraud and historic bigotry of Blaine Amendment meddling. A beginning based on hating Catholics. Then, segregation and the hampering of black achievement. Next, integration, both of students and of plans to lower expectations and results. No free thinking citizens produced, just barely competent and obedient worker drone units. That was then. Now, the schools have become prisons.
I’ve been to more than a few schools recently. And I’ve been in more jails and prisons (on professional business…) than the average. There really is little difference. To convert a prison into a school, just add some desks. To make a school into a literal prison, just add bars to the windows. Beyond the physical similarities, there is congruence in the treatment of the inmates. And, in many places, the students literally have fewer rights, less freedom that prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Click here, read, and think about the application of these principles to your child’s school: Basic Rules and Protocols. In addition to suspicious, you should now be getting angry.
Yesterday I rang a bell about Marvin Goodfriend (who, it turns out, is not a good friend) and his scheme to rob and enslave you. He’s pushing a cashless society, among other things.
Other countries in Europe are quietly doing the same thing even as Americans gain more weight and more tattoos.
These things are all interrelated, thanks to the never-ending gifts of globalism. Ready or not, war and financial crisis are coming to the West. Stefan Molyneux and Peter Schiff discussed part of that and more yesterday:
Stefan M.
Watch that, all of it. They discuss the coming crash, the debt, the stupidity, the end of retirement, immigration (both ways), and the near-certainty of full-fledged socialism in America. If you’re on your game, then you can answer the riddle as to why those evil men like GoodFIEND want negative interest rates, even in a time when central banksters are saying things are great and rates should rise a bit. If not, then I suggest maybe another highly respected web log might be more to your liking. Maybe not to read but just one with a bunch of cat pictures. Cats with tattoos. Obese cats with tattoos…
Today Stefan talked to Joseph M. Humire about that socialist disaster in Venezuela (watch that). If you’ve been following along at FP the past year or so, then you know that’s a pet subject and a microcosm of what American’s can look forward to. Turns out there is more to that tragedy than even I knew.
I was going to make a video about all this but what you see here is probably as close to a synthesis as I’ll come for now.
Solutions? Well, you had that lovely election the other day so everything should be fine, right? You took my advice and wisely elected Ron Paul President in 2008, remember? Or not. Schiff is probably right. Barring some great 27-D chess move by the Trump, the suffering masses will be penalized with even more of the same insanity that created these deep problems in the first place.
I have other real solutions (two really) which I will hold tight for the time being. Three predictions as well.
PS: another great column at TPC is coming along any hour now. That, then, here.
Newspapers are dying. You could probably guess as much just by picking one up. Even the Sunday editions have shrunk to nearly nothing. The ads can be thicker than the news sections.
The US has, as of 2017, 53 metro areas with populations exceeding 1million. 107 exceed 500,000. Yet, the US only has three (3) daily papers with circulations which exceed 1 million. Only 7 exceed 500,000 subscribers (4 are based in NYC).
Even as the cities continue to grow, the papers decline. And odds are your local paper isn’t even locally owned anymore. Hedge funds and other financials are rapidly taking control of print media. It’s not a warm, fuzzy relationship.
“They’re not reinvesting in the business,” Ken Doctor, a longtime newspaper analyst and president of the website Newsonomics, said about Alden Global. “It’s dying and they are going to make every dollar they can on the way down.”
Several hedge funds have become newspaper barons in recent years. Alden Global now owns about 60 daily newspapers through a subsidiary, Digital First Media. New Media Investment Group, which is managed and controlled by private-equity firm Fortress, owns almost 150 newspapers in smaller towns like Columbus, Ohio, and Providence, Rhode Island, through a unit, GateHouse Media. And hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC is one of the largest shareholders and bondholders in McClatchy Co., publisher of the Charlotte Observer and Miami Herald.
(Continued below)
There are several ways to look at this:
First, you’re reading this on a computer. This site, a highly respected web log, is admittedly an Op-Ed operation. And, it’s small. I have neither the time, money, or interest in running full-time news here. The upside is that no globalist corporation controls anything here. Right now, one such company is trying to slow down my distribution. I’m not sure how the coming harsh EU regulations are going to affect their operations in America but it can’t hurt whatever comes. The other upside is that all the news sites in the world are just a few clicks away.
Second, and this is very cynical, given the literacy trends in the US, the papers may not have enough readers to subscribe to anything. That, I think (hope) will reverse. Tomorrow I start a 2-part series on that subject at TPC. You’ll see a link here.
Lastly, I think two types of print papers will survive, thrive maybe. The first group consists of the big three – WSJ, NYT, and USAToday. Maybe a few more regionals. They already deliver copy while running healthy, national websites too. I look for it to continue. And, for those of you at the base, local level, rejoice. I think a few small, local niche papers might make it, concentrating hard on what the locals expect out of whatever nuanced interest.
Come what may, I’ll be here until such time as the call of the mountains becomes irresistible.
PERRIN LOVETT 
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