"Midnight Rider" (opens in separate window)

the mall: back when shopping was fun

friday, may 29th, 2020

For at least two hundred years, one of the goals of the retail industry has been to make shopping fun – to make a trip to the general store, or the downtown retail district, or the indoor mall an enjoyable, even entertaining experience.

For years, friends walked through the mall, chuckling as they passed that funny counterculture store, on their way to the department store that served as an anchor at that end of the mall. They only came for the big department store, for its holiday sales and gift cards, and the licensed sweatshirts and jackets that they wore everywhere.

They never noticed, but they often passed another group, going the other way. That group would enter at the department store entrance because they liked parking there, but they’d never shop in it; they liked the little boutiques down the aisles; that’s where they spent their time.

Across the mall, on the other end of the wheel, another couple of friends headed toward the sporting goods store, never noticing the couple passing them in the other direction, headed for the health food store or the “natural crafts” shop halfway down the aisle. For years, these stores had all been the source of smiles, or maybe sneers, from each other’s respective customer bases.

Retailers have confirmed at least 3,600 store closings for 2020. Victoria's Secret, Tuesday Morning, Bath & Body Works, Nordstrom, Sears, Forever 21, and Walgreens are among the retailers that are planning to close stores this year.

Stores are designed with an eye to bright colors and comfortable surroundings. Malls have been built with stages in the wings, so they could bring in high school choirs for Christmas caroling, or personal appearances by pop stars or children’s TV performers. Department stores like Nordstrom’s, and grocery stores like Mariano’s spend the money for both a fine piano and a live pianist to entertain the shoppers as they go by.

None of these measures really add anything to the value of that pair of earrings or cufflinks, that candelabra or easy chair, that case of wine or bag of groceries for which you came.

But these various forms of decoration and entertainment work together to draw you to that store or mall in the first place, and then to inspire you to stay and shop some more. And the longer and more frequently you’re there because you’re comfortable, the more you’ll buy. A win-win, for both the store itself and the economy at large.

All of these stores – big and small alike – struggled for years, as online shopping gradually chewed away at their customer bases, as the loss of manufacturing lowered the income of the working class, as growing taxes sapped the nation’s disposable income.

The anchor stores bring in the foot traffic that introduces new people every day to the small boutiques. There’s a symbiotic relationship between them all.

Year after year, the city raised the property taxes on the mall, the state raised the energy rates, so the mall management company raised the rent on each storefront. The state raised the income tax on the stores, then raised the minimum wage they had to pay their part time clerks, then raised the state licensing fees, incorporation fees, bond requirements, and more.

The stores had to raise their prices and cut back on service – they had no choice – which made their online competitors even stronger in comparison.

Brick-and-mortar stores have been suffering for years, barely holding on through the growth of internet competition, spending more and more every year on security as the government released convicted criminals back on the streets, years before their sentences are up (if they’re sentenced at all).

Brick-and-mortar, long the first provider of work experience to high school and college students, has been faltering for a generation, battered by a few self-inflicted wounds and crippled by a thousand government-inflicted ones too.

The Demise of Retail

Now think about what has happened to the process of shopping in recent years.

After centuries of efforts to make shopping easier, more fun, more entertaining, there’s been a sudden transformation in the other direction.

Some of it is based on crime. Due to destructive leftist policies in our big cities, both downtowns and suburban malls have become dangerous, scaring customers away, often permanently, doing unimaginable damage to the retail sector.

The computerization of the purchasing process, which should have made shopping easier, has also made it more dangerous, as hackers put shoppers in fear of identity theft and the destruction of personal credit ratings through fraudulent purchases.

And the internet, while introducing ease for the homebound and the busy, has done even more damage in a way, by removing the critical, tangible step of comparing products in person, leaving people at risk for regretting decision after decision, because, that online purchase didn’t turn out to be as good as the picture onscreen.

More than 9,300 store closings were announced in the US in 2019, smashing the previous record of roughly 8,000 store closures in 2017, according to an analysis by Business Insider.

Worse, while hurting the consumer directly by the increased odds of online purchases turning out different than expected, the transition to internet commerce has done untold damage to the brick-and-mortar stores on which our economy was based.

We don’t just need our malls for shopping… we need them because they are a source of so much that we cannot get elsewhere. Retail is a good career for those who go into management, it’s a decent second job for those who don’t, and it’s a critical first job for almost everyone else. How many of our resumes start off with a high school or college part time job, either after school or during summers and holidays, as a clerk at the local department store or grocery, or at the mall’s pet food or electronics store?

For most American youths, it’s our first experience with showing up on time, working with the public, handling money, showing that we’re responsible with property, with money, with our assigned duties.

But retail has been taking a beating for years, and this crucial part of our lives – the start of so many of our careers – has been slowly ebbing away, no longer an option for more and more of our children and grandchildren. What will be our kids’ first jobs, when this plethora of options are gone?

One by one, chains contracted or evaporated throughout the Obama recession, waiting and praying for a real recovery, a real economic boom like the one they remember from the 1980s. And finally it happened.

Finally, in 2016, against all odds, Washington establishment insider Hillary Clinton lost to the businessman outsider, Donald Trump, and the recovery finally kicked into high gear. The country enjoyed three years of genuine economic growth – not that tepid one-and-two-percent stuff that the Obama apologists proclaimed “the new normal,” but genuine growth at – or over – 3%, possibly on target for a sustained boom of four. As unemployment went down and more potential customers had money again, more of the chains that had long been on the experts’ lists of “next one to close” finally started to recover.

Then Came The Wuhan Flu

Within a matter of weeks, the stock market tumbled by a third, thirty million Americans lost their jobs, and many states ordered retail stores to close for the duration – out of an abundance of caution –though with economic stats like these, the dwindling number of people who could still afford to shop would have been social-distancing anyway, by definition.

Every day, we read the financials and hear of fresh bankruptcy filings. Stores and restaurants that were already struggling have now been dealt the final death blow. Few businesses could afford to weather a three month closure, even in good times. The fear that they might reopen into a depression makes their prospects for reopening even bleaker.

We were in a boom time; a couple more years like 2018 and 2019 would have been enough to rebuild the foundations of many a chain, so they could withstand the next recession. But this one – largely manmade, in an overreaction to wildly pessimistic estimates – hit too soon.

And so we see these temporary store closures, in so many cases, become permanent.

We see retail chains that in January expected merely to shrink, announce in May that they will give up the ghost completely. The strip mall of ten storefronts dwindles to five, then to three. The huge indoor mall of fifty or a hundred is cut in half, then halved again. How will that mall keep its doors open now, we ask, with a quarter the rent to fund the massive footprint, the huge utilities and property taxes, the upkeep and security of a much larger mall than it has become?

And then we realize how much we depended on these retail establishments all along, whether on a regular downtown sidewalk or a strip mall or a big indoor mall. We didn’t just need them for shopping; we needed them to provide that convenient first job for our kids and our grandkids. We needed them to bring sales and property taxes into our communities.

The more retail we had, the lower our own property taxes could be; the more retail we lose, the more of the burden we have to share directly, in our own personal sales taxes, gas taxes, income taxes and property taxes. Watch your local, county and state governments; they will hike your taxes to make up for the commercial tax revenue loss… maybe this fall, maybe not until after the election.

And perhaps we will learn a lesson that we should have learned, years before.

And now, the world of shopping has taken yet another hit, this one totally a 2020 phenomenon.

The Joy of Shopping

The 2020 pandemic caused by the CCP Virus – or, more precisely, the response to it – has done more damage than most of us acknowledge.

In addition to the obvious health crisis – thousands sickened by the virus, countless others getting sick every day with other things, but leaving issues undiagnosed for months because of the focus on the virus… and the massive economic pain – millions unemployed, countless businesses closed, pensions and retirement savings gone... the very concept of shopping itself, the basis of our economy, has been transformed.

We are now expected to wear a mask everywhere.

You can’t breathe normally, and if you wear glasses, they fog up so you can barely see. They put arrows on the floor so that you go one way down the aisles; they have supervisors to remind you not to dawdle and ponder your purchases. Since there others in line outside, taking your time to contemplate options is no longer fair.

As a result, you can rush in, uncomfortably locate what you know you need, and then check out and get out, as quickly as possible. The joy of shopping has been stolen from us.

The number of store closings this year could be even higher than previous records, according to estimates from the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. The firm estimated last year – prior to the coronavirus pandemic – that as many as 12,000 major chain stores could close in 2020.

From generations of effort to encourage people to take their time in the store, possibly to be attracted by another display, another shelf, another product line… now there’s no time for such distractions. That carefully crafted endcap, the carefully dressed mannequins, the point-of-sale impulse purchases, are now gone. There’s no time; there’s a line outside!

Some of this will change back; it isn’t all permanent. But with the effort of so many who shape both public policy and consumer opinion to change our way of shopping, some parts of this transformation will definitely stick.

While the jury is still out on whether the “social distancing” concept helps or hurts in the fight against seasonal viruses, there is no doubt how much it hurts the economy. Will we see those high school choirs and personal appearances return to our malls this fall? Will we see shoppers freely encouraged to take their time in the stores again, free to be attracted by other products that weren’t on their shopping lists? We need to. It’s imperative.

It’s not just a matter of reopening the factories and stores. It’s also about returning to the way it was: the successful, exciting, joyful experience of being surrounded by crowds of fellow buyers, spending the day downtown, going from store to mall, then to restaurant for lunch, then back to shopping in the afternoon and maybe the theater after dinner.

If we laughingly pull our business from the local retailers, and give all our money to Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma, then soon, there will be nobody to give our kids that first part time job. Soon, there will be no place to try on clothes before we buy them so we know they fit, no place to buy the things you need to look at in person, those decisions you just can’t entrust to a thumbnail picture on a website.

So many of us proudly say “I do all my banking online now; I don’t need that bank,” and “I do all my shopping online now; I don’t need that mall,” never realizing that they DID need that bank, that department store, those little boutique shops, after all.

The conservative who makes fun of the vegetarian restaurant, the liberal who makes fun of the gun shop, and the stuffy elitist who makes fun of the tee-shirt silkscreening store – they never realized how much their favorite stores depend on their least favorite stores too.

The mall needs all of its storefronts to succeed – the giant anchors at the end of the aisles, the expensive corner locations that everyone crosses at some point, the little mid-block storefronts that most of us pass by on our way to their neighbors. Even the little jewelry kiosks and toy kiosks and wristwatch repair booths in the middle of those aisles have a part to play. They all collaborate, even if they don’t know it themselves.

It is only by all these stores bringing in foot traffic for each other, making sales, and paying utilities and taxes, that the whole downtown, the whole shopping center can succeed.

Millions of us have spent two months in which each purchase was a stand-alone transaction. We have sat at our computers and ordered from the grocery store, either choosing delivery or driving there for curbside pickup. If we don’t go back to the normal way soon, this drudgery will become normal for us, and that would sound a death knell for this economy.

Retail stores – and the manufacturers that supply them, and the employees who work in them – all depend on people shopping for other things, and stopping to check out a new shop just because it interested them. Both indoor and outdoor malls facilitate this. Going from Sears to Penney’s at Woodfield, or from Macy’s to the Bass Pro Shops at Gurnee Mills, requires walking past dozens of smaller stores, each of which might catch your eye, each of which might become your new favorite – but for that to happen, you have to be drawn in that first time.

This problem really didn’t start with this pandemic. It started years ago, when city politicians decided to befriend the drug gangs and let them take over the shopping districts… when confiscatory taxation drove up the prices… when a host of destructive policies drove manufacturing to foreign shores so that we no longer see the local “made in USA” products on our shelves that make a shopper excited to buy a local product and keep his neighbors employed. And it started when we began listening to politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders, who so hate the concept of “consumption” that they ridicule the availability of different brands of deodorant.

If this were just the beginning of an assault on retail, it wouldn’t be so terrifying. Two months of bad habits wouldn’t reverse two hundred years of advances.

But we’ve had years and years of assaults on the retail sector… and this latest could well be the final nail in the coffin, not only for the companies that can never reopen, but also for most of the ones that do… because the world in which they reopen may be a hostile one to the effervescent, productive retail life that America so truly needs.

As President Calvin Coolidge reminded us so often, “the business of America is business.” We need to be proud of that fact; we need to take delight in being a part of the wonderful engine of American prosperity.

One political party has been using a trite old line – “it takes a village” for some thirty years now. Lately, during the business closures of the 2020 pandemic, they’ve taken to a new version of the same thing – “we’re all in this together.”

It’s true, in a way, but not in the way they think.

What We Need To Do

In the American economy, we all do depend on each other, but not for charity, not for taxes and shaming and peer pressure. We depend on each other because the way our economy is designed, one person’s success supports everyone else’s success. To quote a much wiser Democrat than we’ve seen on the scene in many years, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

John F. Kennedy was right. The retail world – the old-fashioned, brick-and-mortar stores that pepper our landscape – work together to keep the country moving. They employ the small businesses: a thousand small trucking companies, rather than a single giant one… they employ a thousand landlords, rather than a single industrial park REIT… they create a vibrant variety of starting jobs for every talent and every type of employee.

If you go to the pet store for pet food, brushes and clippers, cat houses and puppy beds, you’re served by cashiers who love animals as much as you do. If you buy watches at a jeweler, clothes from a haberdasher, dishes from a kitchen store, books from a bookstore, you’re helping those employees find their passion.

On the contrary, if you buy everything online, you’re helping Amazon to put those small businesses out of business. The people who process your order will never even see the product; they’re stuck on an assembly line in a giant distribution center, labeling cardboard boxes so fast they don’t even know what the hell they’re shipping.

I for one, don’t believe that’s what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed our economy. I was once a small business owner, and know this to be true.

I believe they envisioned silversmiths like Gorham and Revere, printers like Franklin and Rivington, brewers like Sam Adams, cobblers like Enoch Crosby.

Our nation was designed for farmers and merchants, manufacturers and teachers, parsons and ranchers, small businessmen all, from coast to coast. Our Founding Fathers did not envision a nation in which everyone bought everything by mail order. They’d tried that already – working with the infamous factors of London in colonial times – and they most certainly did not approve.

In the weeks and months to come, as the nation reopens and we find ourselves able to shop freely at last, let’s return to the brick-and-mortar once again. Let’s give those proprietors a reason to hire our kids for the summer; let’s give our communities a robust economy again.

And let’s cheer and celebrate when stores survive and prosper, not just the ones we’d shop at ourselves, but even the ones where we don’t remotely understand their appeal. Because in order for capitalism to work, we do all need to be productive – conservative or liberal, moderate or apathetic.

We need to reopen America. NOW! We need to work... and shop... and live again. As Free Americans.

© 5.26-28.2020 by JS, "John's Journal".

A Day In The Life.

Awake at 4a, and then back to sleep until 8a on Friday, I skipped the heat – a warm and balmy 60° outside – had a couple smokes in the garage while the coffee brewed, did my DR (Type 1 Diabetic Routine - Blood Sugar Level Test and Sliding-Scale Insulin Shot), applied the CBD Hemp Ointment to my neck and shoulder, pill regimen had simple Rye Toast for breakfast, and checked the weather and news.

Except for a couple quick errands, there wasn't much of anything to do, and I'm getting tired of inventing stuff to do. Other thatn blow-up the condo, and rebuild it, there aren't any things I need doing. It rained all day, limiting my ability to do much outside, or even take a walk around the complex. So I paid some utility bills online, got an email notice from AT&T that my old 2014 4G Samsung "Rugby" Flip-Phone would become obsolete in February 2022, as they switch to 5G networks. Shit bastard scum are caving to the Chinks and their rush to %G! I hate "smart phones", so I might just get my landline reactivated, and forgo any cellphones. I'll have to think about it.

After my midday DR and lunch, I snoozed for 3hrs on the couch, and strted watching a few episodes of "Expedition Unknown", did the evening DR and had dinner. History Channel had an interesting "Ancient Aliens" Marathon on, so I watched until 10, did my nightly DR, set-up coffee, breakfast and the morning DR stuff, baked 8 Chicken Cordon Bleu – 4 for Becky and 4 for me – and finished watching "AA" until 11:30p. Lights out.

Up at 7:30a on Saturday, I had a couple smokes in the humid garage while coffee brewed, did my morning DR and had breakfast. I chacked the weather and news; same-o, same-o. After running a couple errands and taking a drive around the county, I noticed a LOT more vehicles on the roads, people in downtown York, fuller parking lots, stores filled with more shoppers, and that made me feel better. I spent the day doing some condo chores, midday DR and lunch, a 2hr snooze, and a 2hr visit from Sherry. I sure needed to see her. We went over her proposed new landscape plan, and had a wonderful visit, as usual. We also made plans to back out to the park and do some exercising, next week. T-storm clouds were gathering as she left, and I put the Jeep into the garage, in case of any hail.

After the evening DR and dinner, I watched some old "Expedition Unknown" episodes on Discovery, did the nightlyDR around 10, and called it a day.

Up at 8:30a on Saturday Sunday – I missed a day, somehow – I had coffee and breakfast, started laundry and tried to re-orient myself to what day it really was. Somehow I lost a day... oh well, shit happens.

I checked email, the weather and news. Becky and I had planned to go to Mt Rose Cemetery to take my homemade (MS-Publisher v7) Memorial Day and Father's Day cards, since both Dad & Mom are US Army Vets. I also cut some branches of a large Roseum Elegans Rhododendron growing behind my office-sunroom, wheich we'd leave in a vase with the cards on the table inside the Chapen of Memories, where they're interred. And of course, Becky wanted to stop at a local garden center on the way home, which had just opened Friday under "Yellow", and it was mobbed. I stayed in the Jeep, while she bought 2 herbs. After getting her back to her condo, I finally got home around 4p.

Around 5p, I got an email from the HOA president, asking me to look at a huge Trident Maple, with black spot on its leaves, and which was dropping leaves all over the two adjacent units. I will still give diagnosis and advice, but I won't make decisions for the Board, anymore and take responsibility for getting jobs done.

By 6p, I'd done my evening DR, had dinner and watchsed some of the NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 race in Charlotte, but 400 laps is just too much, so I switched to other CATV channels unril 10, did the nightly DR, and quit for the day. I don't even know who won the race, and I don't care.

Awake at 4a, I went back to sleep until 8:15, and could have slept thru to 10-11, but remembered that I had to post the "Chris Plante Show" weekly thread on FR. Up and hurrying, I posted it, did the morning DR, got coffee and breakfast, and started another load of laundry. I wasn't planning on going anywhere today, just get some condo chores done, and finish the laundry routine, since I didn't get it done yesterday.

Now that the weather's warmer, and a jacket isn't practical, I have to wear my shirttail out, instead of tucked-in, to hide my daily concealed carry piece of one of my, and the 2-extra magazine holster. I made a trip to Sam's Club to get 4 packages of Member's Mark Smoked and Flame Roasted Norwegian Salmon Slices, and with high humidity and temps hitting near 80°, I puttered around the condo, caught a early after snooze, and watched Motor Trend's "Iron Resurrection" all day.

After the 7p DR and dinner, I returned to watching "IR", until 9p, when History's "Grant", a new 3-part miniseries, came on. I was too tired, unplugged and went up to bed. I'll catch the 3-part show on History's Streaming Channel, in a week or so.

Awake at 4a, 5 and 6, with a weird dream involving a mass shooting at a university I was visiting for some research (Hell, I don't know what ny of it means), I finally got up at 7, had a couple of smokes and thought about the dream, made coffee, 3 sunny-side-up eggs, bacon and toast, took the pill regimen and applied the CBD Pro-Level 5 Ointment to my arm/neck and lower back. I posted the day's "Chris Plante Show" post to the weekly thread on FR, listened for a few hours, while paying some utility bills online, and doing other paperwork. After such a lousy night's sleep, I put-off my trip to Weis Market for another day; I was just too tired, and coffee wasn't helping. I needed a couch nap, but it was too early in the day.

After the midday DR and lunch, I posted the "Rush Show" graphics, and had a 4hr snooze on the LR couch. That helped a little. By 6p, after the evening DR, I watched more old episodes of "Iron Resurrection" until 10, and started nodding-off; time to get some sleep, as I wasn't feeling well. I did the nightly DR, took an Rx 12.5mg Ambien® CR™, and called it a day.

Up at 8:30a on Wednesday, once again I had to hurry to get the morning DR done, get coffee brewed, some Rye Toast, and get the daily "CP Show" posted to the weekly thread, on FR. Humid and 77° already, I turned down the AC to 73°, to get all the humidity out of the condo. I emailed Sherry to see if we were still on for our irregular walking date at a local North York park, and she confirmed we were. I got the "Rush Show" graphics posted right before my midday DR and lunch, got ready and left at 12:30p.

Sherry and I walked only about a liitle over a mile, mainly due toi me being so tired from so little sleep over the past 2 days. I was tiring easily. We usually cover 2 miles or so, but not today. After some hugs and goodbyes, I left for home to get some ZSZZZZZs on the LR couch, and mindful of getting to sleep early, tonite. She is so much fun to be with, I hate to leave.

After getting home, I napped on the LR couch for only 2hrs, did the evening DR, had a smoked salmon, cream cheese on Rye bread sandwich, opened-up a bottle of "Butter" Chardonnay for later, did some basement cleanouts and rearranging. and watched History's "American Pickers" and Discovery's "Expedition Unknown" until 11p, and quit for the night. Cleaning ladies are coming at 8:30a. Lights out.

Up at 6a on Thursday, My ass was dragging again from being tired. Lousy night's sleep. I started coffee, had a couple of smokes in the humid garage, did the morning DR and had some Rye Toast w/ KerryGold Irish Butter, for breakfast. The cleaning ladies arrived at 8:30a, and promptly broke the vinyl plank wood and marble floor mop, so I had to run over to Weis Market to get a new one, extra pads and some other things on my weekly list.

I did the midday DR and lunch around 1p, slept for 4hrs on the couch, did the evening DR around 7p and started watching Amazon Prime movies, which I get free. By 11, I'd done the nightly DR and kept watching Prime Movies, "Battle of The Bulge" and "Taking Point du Hoc", until 3a. Yikes! Time for some sleep.

A Pandemic "Crisis"? Compared To What?

I talked with a man today, an 80+ year old man.

I asked him if there was anything I can get him while this Coronavirus scare was gripping America. He simply smiled, looked away and said: “Let me tell you what I need:

I need to believe, at some point, this country my generation fought for, is worth it,
I need to believe this nation we handed safely to our children and their children,
I need to know this generation will quit being a bunch of sissies, that they respect what they’ve been given, that they’ve earned what others sacrificed for.”

I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going or if it was going anywhere at all. So, I sat there, quietly observing.

“You know, I was a little boy during WWII. Those were scary days. We didn’t know if we were going to be speaking English, German or Japanese at the end of the war. There was no certainty, no guarantees like Americans enjoy today. And no home went without sacrifice or loss.

Every house, up and down every street, had someone in harm’s way. Maybe their Daddy was a soldier, maybe their son was a sailor, maybe it was an uncle. Sometimes it was the whole damn family...fathers, sons, uncles... Having someone, you love, sent off to war...it wasn’t less frightening than it is today. It was scary as Hell. If anything, it was more frightening.

We didn’t have battle front news.
We didn’t have email or cellphones.
You sent them away and you hoped, you prayed. You may not hear from them for months, if ever. Sometimes a mother was getting her son’s letters the same day Dad was comforting her over their child’s death. And we sacrificed.

You couldn’t buy things. Everything was rationed. You were only allowed so much milk per month, only so much bread, toilet paper. EVERYTHING was restricted for the war effort. And what you weren’t using, what you didn’t need, things you threw away, they were saved and sorted for the war effort.

My generation was the original recycling movement in America.

And we had viruses back then, serious viruses. Things like polio, measles, and such. It was nothing to walk to school and pass a house or two that was quarantined.

We didn’t shut down our schools. We didn’t shut down our cities. We carried on, without masks, without hand sanitizer. And do you know what? We persevered. We overcame. We didn’t attack our President, we came together. We rallied around the flag for the war. Thick or thin, we were in it to win. And we would lose more boys in an hour of combat than we lose in entire wars today.”

He slowly looked away again. Maybe I saw a small tear in the corner of his eye.

Then he continued: “Today’s kids don’t know sacrifice. They think a sacrifice is not having coverage on their phone while they freely drive across the country.

Today’s kids are selfish and spoiled. In my generation, we looked out for our elders. We helped out with single moms who’s husbands were either at war or dead from war.

Today’s kids rush the store, buying everything they can, no concern for anyone but themselves. It’s shameful the way Americans behave these days. None of them deserve the sacrifices their granddads made.

So, no I don’t need anything. I appreciate your offer but, I know I’ve been through worse things than this virus. But maybe I should be asking you, what can I do to help you?

Do you have enough pop to get through this, enough steak? Will you be able to survive with 113 channels on your tv?”

I smiled, fighting back a tear of my own, now humbled by a man in his 80’s. All I could do was thank him for the history lesson, leave my number for emergency and leave with my ego firmly tucked in my rear.

I talked to a man today. A real man. An American man from an era long gone and forgotten. We will never understand the sacrifices. We will never fully earn their sacrifices. But we should work harder to learn about them, learn from them, to respect them.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Hunan Flu Virus Realities.

Feeling confused as to why Coronavirus is a bigger deal than Seasonal flu? Here it is in a nutshell. I hope this helps. Feel free to share this to others who don’t understand.

It has to do with RNA sequencing, ie, genetics.

Seasonal flu is an “all human virus”. The DNA/RNA chains that make up the virus are recognized by the human immune system. This means that your body has some immunity to it before it comes around each year... you get immunity two ways, through exposure to a virus, or by getting a flu shot.

Novel viruses, come from animals, the WHO tracks novel viruses in animals, (sometimes for years watching for mutations). Usually these viruses only transfer from animal to animal (pigs in the case of H1N1) (birds in the case of the Spanish flu). But once, one of these animal viruses mutates, and starts to transfer from animals to humans, then it’s a problem, Why? Because we have no natural or acquired immunity.. the RNA sequencing of the genes inside the virus isn’t human, and the human immune system doesn’t recognize it so, we can’t fight it off.

The truth is that this virus originated in China. Worse, decisions by the Chinese communist regime after the virus appeared accelerated the problem. Like the malignant American media, the Chinese communists can’t help it either. Communism is a system built on lies. Keeping the shiny polish on the regime is more important than the truth. That’s why the Chinese communists downplayed the threat of the coronavirus for months. This is how communists behave.

Now, sometimes, the mutation only allows transfer from animal to human, for years it’s only transmission is from an infected animal to a human before it finally mutates so that it can now transfer human to human, once that happens, we have a new contagion phase. And depending on the fashion of this new mutation, thats what decides how contagious, or how deadly it’s gonna be.

H1N1 was deadly, but it did not mutate in a way that was as deadly as the Spanish flu. It’s RNA was slower to mutate and it attacked its host differently, too.

Fast forward.

Now, here comes this Coronavirus, it existed in animals only, for nobody knows how long, but one day, at an animal market, in Wuhan China, in December 2019, it mutated and made the jump from animal to people. At first, only animals could give it to a person. But here is the scary part: in just TWO WEEKS it mutated again and gained the ability to jump from human to human. Scientists call this quick ability, “slippery”.

This Coronavirus, not being in any form a “human” virus (whereas we would all have some natural or acquired immunity). Took off like a rocket. And this was because, Humans have no known immunity... doctors have no known medicines for it.

And it just so happens that this particular mutated animal virus, changed itself in such a way the way that it causes great damage to human lungs.

That’s why Coronavirus is different from seasonal flu, or H1N1 or any other type of influenza, this one is slippery AF. And it’s a lung eater. And, it’s already mutated AGAIN, so that we now have two strains to deal with, strain s, and strain L, which makes it twice as hard to develop a vaccine.

We really have no tools in our shed, with this. History has shown that fast and immediate closings of public places has helped in the past pandemics. Philadelphia and Baltimore were reluctant to close events in 1918 and they were the hardest hit in the US during the Spanish Flu.

Factoid: Henry VIII stayed in his room and allowed no one near him, till the Black Plague passed (honestly, I understand him so much better now). Just like us, he had no tools in his shed, except social isolation.

And let me end by saying, right now it’s hitting older folks harder, but this genome is so slippery, if it mutates again (and it will). Who is to say what it will do next.

Be smart, acting like you’re unafraid is so not sexy right now.

Stay home friends, and share this to those that just are not catching on.

The Official Human Chinese Flu Virus Numbers Are Total Bullshit.

Because the U.S. data on coronavirus infections are so deeply-flawed, the quantification of the outbreak obscures more than it illuminates.

We know, irrefutably, one thing about the coronavirus in the United States: The number of cases reported in every chart and table is far too low.

The data are untrustworthy because the processes we used to get them were flawed. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s testing procedures missed the bulk of the cases. They focused exclusively on travelers, rather than testing more broadly, because that seemed like the best way to catch cases entering the country.

Just days ago, it was not clear that the virus had spread solely from domestic contact at all. But then cases began popping up with no known international connection. What public-health experts call “community spread” had arrived in the United States. The virus would not be stopped by tight borders, because it was already propagating domestically. Trevor Bedford’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which studies viral evolution, concluded there is “firm evidence” that, at least in Washington State, the coronavirus had been spreading undetected for weeks. Now different projections estimate that 20 to 1,500 people have already been infected in the greater Seattle area. In California, too, the disease appears to be spreading, although the limited testing means that no one is quite sure how far.

In total, fewer than 500 people have been tested across the country (although the CDC has stopped reporting that number in its summary of the outbreak). As a result, the current “official” case count inside the United States stood at 43 as of this morning (excluding cruise-ship cases). This number is wrong, yet it’s still constantly printed and quoted. In other contexts, we’d call this what it is: a subtle form of misinformation.

This artificially low number means that for the past few weeks, we’ve seen massive state action abroad and only simmering unease domestically. While Chinese officials were enacting a world-historic containment effort—putting more than 700 million people under some kind of movement restriction, quarantining tens of millions of people, and placing others under new kinds of surveillance—and American public-health officials were staring at the writing on the wall that the disease was extremely likely to spread in the U.S., the public-health response was stuck in neutral. The case count in the U.S. was not increasing at all. Preparing for a sizable outbreak seemed absurd when there were fewer than 20 cases on American soil. Now we know that the disease was already spreading and that it was the U.S. response that was stalled.

Meanwhile, South Korean officials have been testing more than 10,000 people a day, driving up the country’s reported-case count. Same goes for Italy: high test rate, high number of cases. (Now some Italian politicians want to restrict testing.) In China, the official data say the country has more than 80,000 cases, but the real number might be far, far higher because of all the people who had mild(er) cases and were turned away from medical care, or never sought it in the first place. That may be cause for reassurance (though not everyone agrees), because the total number of cases is the denominator in the simple equation that yields a fatality rate: deaths divided by cases. More cases with the same number of deaths means that the disease is likely less deadly than the data show.

The point is that every country’s numbers are the result of a specific set of testing and accounting regimes. Everyone is cooking the data, one way or another. And yet, even though these inconsistencies are public and plain, people continue to rely on charts showing different numbers, with no indication that they are not all produced with the same rigor or vigor. This is bad. It encourages dangerous behavior such as cutting back testing to bring a country’s numbers down or slow-walking testing to keep a country’s numbers low.

The other problem is, now that the U.S. appears to be ramping up testing, the number of cases will grow quickly. Public-health officials are currently cautioning people not to worry as that happens, but it will be hard to disambiguate what proportion of the ballooning number of cases is the result of more testing and what proportion is from the actual spread of the virus.

People trust data. Numbers seem real. Charts have charismatic power. People believe what can be quantified. But data do not always accurately reflect the state of the world. Or as one scholar put it in a book title: “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.

The reality gap between American numbers and American cases is wide. Regular citizens and decision makers cannot rely on only the numbers to make decisions. Sometimes quantification actually obscures as much as it reveals.

Biden Offers $15K To First-Time Homebuyers.

On Monday, shit-for-brains Joe "Plugs" Biden unveiled a $640 billion housing plan that includes a $15,000 tax credit for all first-time homebuyers.

The Democratic presidential candidate's plan includes six "Biden principles for housing": affordability, stability, safety and health, accessibility, energy efficiency and resilience, and closeness to good schools and jobs. What an asshole.

The $15,000 home tax credit would be accessible to an individual at the time of a home purchase and is aimed at reducing the wealth gap experienced by black and Hispanic communities due to their lower rates of home ownership.

The former vice president also wants to end "redlining," the practice of banks denying services to people in a particular area that historically has been used to discriminate against minorities; roll back Trump administration policies that he says are "gutting fair lending and fair housing protections for homeowners"; and increase the supply of housing by lessening local zoning and land use regulations.

The plan would be paid for by raising taxes on corporations and large financial institutions, including a specific fee on "certain liabilities of firms with over $50 billion in assets."

Senior Wisdom.

This section is for our beloved senior citizens who have reached an age that these jokes now have real meaning! We have all achieved the aches and pains, as well as the wisdom, of growing older! Laugh loud and hearty... it's good for you! Just don't bust a gut.

1. I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

3. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.

5. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

6. Was learning cursive really necessary?

7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

9. I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.

10. Bad decisions make good stories.

11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don't want to have to restart my collection... again.

13. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.

14. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

15. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

16. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lite than Kay.

17. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.

18. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

19. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear or understand a word they said?

20. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front

Eat The Babies!

I won't even guess, and surely don't want to know, about this weirdo shit; YOU figure this one out. "All of you!" she went on, turning to those around her, "You’re a pollutant! Too much Co2. We have to start now. Please — you are so great. I’m so happy that you are supporting a Green New Deal, but it’s not enough. Even if we were to bomb Russia, it’s not enough. There’s too many people, too much pollution. So, we have to get rid of the babies. That’s a big problem. Just stopping having babies just isn’t enough. We need to eat the babies. This is very serious. Please give a response.” And please DON'T get back to me with your opinion. I'm thinking that socialist, commie, asshole, mentally-ill leftist bitch, Asshole Occasional Cortex, got "punked" on her idiotic idea of "fighting climate change" by stopping people having babies. Someone needs to clue-in the stupid mutt NY bitch.

NYC threatens up to $250G in fines for using terms like 'illegal alien,' threatening to call ICE.

New York City's Commission on Human Rights announced on Thursday that residents could face up to $250,000 in fines if they use terms such as "illegal alien ... with intent to demean, humiliate or harass a person."

"Hate has no place here," a tweet from the City of New York read. The city's announcement ticked off a list of offensive ways to address immigrants -- including threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or harassing someone for their "limited English proficiency."

"Threatening to call ICE when motivated by discrimination, derogatory use of the term 'illegal alien,' and discrimination based on limited English proficiency are unlawful discriminatory treatment under the NYC Human Rights Law," the announcement read.

It clarified that calling ICE with a "discriminatory motive" was a violation. It was not immediately clear what New York City would consider a call to ICE lacking in "discriminatory motive."

"Fines of up to $250,000 can be assessed for each act of willful discrimination, and damages are available to complainants," the city said.

New Yorkers could also face fines if they use similar language towards a lawful resident or citizen whom they perceive to be in the country illegally.

"The NYC Commission on Human Rights ... defines discrimination on the basis of perceived or actual immigration status and national origin under the New York City Human Rights Law in public accommodation, employment, and housing," the announcement read.

The Commission on Human Rights has a history of censoring speech it deemed harmful. Composed of political appointees, the committee previously enacted a ban on employers and landlords using gender pronouns other than those preferred by employees and tenants. Violations of those regulations similarly carried a $250,000 fine if the offenders engaged in "willful, wanton, or malicious conduct."

Thursday's announcement came as Democrats hammered the administration's immigration enforcement raids and cautioned against using the term "illegal alien." "No one is an 'alien,'" Rep. Ilham Omar, D-Minn., tweeted in June after Trump used the term.

The Associated Press has similarly admonished reporters for using "illegal" as a descriptor for immigrants. The wire service's 2013 style guide, instead, was updated to read: "Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission."

But as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, pointed out, "illegal alien" is the term used under federal law. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions specifically directed his Justice Department not to use terms other than "illegal alien," which he said was based in U.S. code.

“The word ‘undocumented’ is not based in US code and should not be used to describe someone’s illegal presence in the country,” he reportedly said in an agency-wide email.

Cow Insemination Is Rape, Milking Is Sexual Assault, Says Researcher.

A research paper currently being pushed by a researcher at the College of Brockport Gender Studies program wants society — feminists — to talk about the unseemly “sexual exploitation” of dairy cows in order to “fully fight gendered oppression.”

The author claims the dairy industry is rife with ‘sex-based discrimination’ (of cows), and compares insemination of the cattle to “rape.” The milking of cows is, of course, “sexual assault.”

This isn’t satire, so be careful, if you start buying into this, you too could be assimilated. According to Campus Reform:

A paper currently being promoted by a New York University calls on society to consider the rampant “sexual exploitation” of dairy cows by the milk industry in order to “fully fight gendered oppression.”

Specifically, the author compares cattle insemination to “rape” and the milking of cows to “sexual abuse.” The researcher believes “the dairy industry is a host for sex-based discrimination.”

Titled “Readying the Rape Rack: Feminism and the Exploitation of Non-Human Reproductive Systems,” the paper was published Friday in a journal called Dissenting Voices, which is published and edited by the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the College at Brockport State University of New York.

The published piece aims at discussing the “sexual exploitation of non-human bodies, specifically dairy cows.” The author notes that “as a vegan and animal rights activist,” she feels compelled to reveal the “feminist aspects of animal agriculture,” a topic she says is unfortunately “under-researched,” but is nonetheless important because “the same way women’s health has been at stake for years, a dairy cow’s reproductive system has been poked and prodded.”

According to the publication, “the dairy industry is a host for sex-based discrimination,” and a “site where sexual assault and objectification based on biological makeup are highly prevalent but ignored as we choose to neglect non- humans with whom we share a planet.”

The paper argues that “in order to fully fight gendered oppression,” society must also address the plight of dairy cows, which it asserts are “still subjects to sex-based discrimination and violence,” despite their voices being “not always lifted or comprehensible.”

Blah, blah, blah, that’s enough of that.

The paper is based on the fact that you can’t milk bulls (even transgendered bulls?). We read the actual paper but couldn’t find information about NYU pushing it, although they are crazy enough to do it.

So, independent reporter Tim Pool has a video up about it. He thinks it’s a hoax but, he appears to be wrong, since it’s listed on the college of Brockport site.

This is where we are today. Vegans in particular, of which the author is one, put up articles about this ‘exploitation’ on a regular basis.

Worldwide Eco-Wacko Suicide.

If fossil-fuel power plants are to go the way of the clipper ships over the next decade, something must replace them. Going solely solar would require installing solar panels over an area of land nearly the size of West Virginia. Generating just 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from wind would require mounting turbines on an area encompassing land the size of New Hampshire and Vermont. About 900 hydroelectric plants were demolished between 1990 and 2015 owing to opposition from environmentalists outraged by harm to fish ecosystems. Nuclear plants would get similarly rough treatment at the hands of fanatics frightened by the prospect of nuclear power.

Solar and wind power flit across the landscape intermittently, requiring an alternate source, like coal or gas, to make electricity when nature takes a break. Environmentally friendly Europeans find that a lack of reliable backup when nature takes that break increases the risk of electrical grid failures. German engineering, as good as it is, has not been able to eliminate the effect of “green” politics, which would replace fossil and nuclear power with renewables. The result is 172,000 localized blackouts in Germany in 2017.

Poverty was a constant companion of humanity until modern times. The proportion of people worldwide living in poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010, according to the World Bank, an achievement unprecedented in human history. It was the result of a rapid boost in global energy production — up 43 percent during that period, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Nearly 81 percent of that power was generated by fossil fuels, such as oil and gas.

A billion people around the globe still suffer extreme energy poverty, with no access to electricity. Everyone gets a hint of what that means when storms knock out the power, and everything in the house stops. Fumbling occasionally for candles is a mere inconvenience, but life beyond carbon — entirely dependent on sunshine and a breeze — would be insanity.

Trump Just Drove A Mack Truck Through
The Shameless Liberal Hypocrisy On Sanctuary Cities.

If the liberal attitude toward immigration and a host of other issues could be summed up with just one saying, it would be this one: “good for thee, but not for me.”

Safely tucked away inside their think tanks, tenured academic positions, lily-white suburban enclaves, and ESPECIALLY behind their carefully crafted WALLS, it’s easy for liberals to virtue-signal about how the rest of us should be “compassionate” and agree to welcome every migrant who takes a notion to come to the United States. But when it comes to their own personal lives, their “money” is almost never anywhere in the vicinity of their big fat jabbering pie holes.

In other words, just like with the degree of charitable contributions from people all-too-eager to spend YOUR money, liberals are big fat hypocrites.

Liberals take what you said, change it until it's no longer what you said, and then attack you for what you didn't say.

Such was the case last week when President Donald Trump brilliantly proposed - in a masterful troll job that may very well exceed all of his previous troll jobs - that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) transport illegal border-crossers to … wait for it ... sanctuary cities. Sure, it’ll sadly probably never happen, and likely the only reason Trump brought it up was to do exactly what it did - expose liberal hypocrisy. But even so, you’d think liberals would be ALL OVER the notion, right? This should be so EASY, given their worldview, so why not just call Trump’s bluff and say “bring them on in?” I mean, even allowing for the typical degree of liberal hypocrisy, the very definition of “sanctuary city” means that those in charge of designating their cities as such must want them to be, you know, a SANCTUARY for illegal immigrants. The more the merrier, they’re always saying, yet when the bad orange man proposes giving them what they supposedly want, right in their own backyards, they look that gift horse in the mouth like it’s got three eyes.

It’s almost like they think Mexico and Central America aren’t sending their best, or something.

Senator Amy Klobuchar accused Trump of “literally using human beings as pawns in a political game.” If that was the case, it was a checkmate move, Mr. President. Actress Alyssa Milano called the idea “sick and twisted.” Rep. Adam “Pencil-Neck” Schiff called it a “hare-brained scheme.” Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro waxed eloquent about “the cruelty of this administration,” because apparently the definition of “cruelty” is matching liberals up with the reality of their absurd utopian fantasies. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin accused the Trump administration of treating illegals like a “pestilence to spread around the country,” which still begs the question: if they love them so much why would they care?

And then there was Cher, who did a Trump-prompted stark 180 on mass immigration by wondering via Twitter why Los Angeles and California, a city and state that aren’t “taking care of” their “own” should bring in and “take care of more.” This was a woman who, less than two years ago mind you, begged anyone who could to “take a dreamer” into their home. It’s hard to know how long it’ll be before “red-pilled Cher” issues the obligatory profuse apology, but for today at least it’s nice to see a ray of common sense pierce even the most brainwashed of souls.

There were plenty more where those came from, all perfectly summed up by Trump Deputy Director of Communications Matt Wolking, who tweeted: “Seeing left-wing media folks who advocate for open borders lose their minds because immigrants will bring violence and crime to their cities is ... quite a sight.”

Indeed. It reminds me of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s now legendary question to Jorge Ramos last October when the Univision anchor was traveling with the first migrant caravan.

“How many of these migrants are you taking in personally into your home and are supporting once they get into the United States?” Carlson asked Ramos.

“I think that’s a great question and that’s precisely the kind of question that people like you ask when you don’t want to understand that this has nothing to do with individuals,” Ramos responded. After an awkward back and forth, Carlson asked him if he would simply take in “three” migrants, a question Ramos dodged yet again because he CLEARLY wasn’t about to take any of the migrants he supposedly cares so much about into his sprawling, walled (because of course it is) mansion. They might get the carpets dirty, after all.

To his credit, San Jose, California Mayor Sam Liccardo is the only liberal non-hypocrite in America right now. That’s because he offered to take any illegal immigrants President Trump would transfer to his city: “[Donald Trump] plans to release detained immigrants to [San Jose]??” Liccardo tweeted Friday. “We welcome any families willing to endure such extraordinary hardships and to take such tremendous risks to be a part of our great country.”

Liccardo’s non-hypocrisy, on this issue at least, stands in stark contrast to the rest of his ideological brethren. Liberals want to take your money and choose where to spend it, but don’t want to give it themselves. Liberals want walls for their mansions and their neighborhoods, but none for America. Liberals want armed guards and even guns for themselves, but would disarm ordinary Americans whose lives apparently aren’t as “valuable” as theirs.

And as Trump masterfully exposed, they want endless immigration from the Third World, but not anywhere near where they live.

Why People Troll.

Imagine someone whose life never took off the way they wanted. For whatever reason, they are now stuck in a miserable situation; a dream career never came to be and they still live in mom’s basement. Their life is parasitic and they know it. The only thing that brings them any relief is tearing down others. Those who don’t create can only try to destroy. It’s a sad fact that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel.

Abusive childhoods are breeding grounds for adult addictions. Traumatic events that occur while the brain is still developing mess up the circuitry, magnifying the consequences across the spectrum of life. The transmitters between each neuron operate below optimum levels. This is where addiction comes in. If a normal person’s dopamine levels are at a healthy 100%, someone who’s suffered childhood abuse will only work at 40%. However, the drug of choice boosts that up to 80%, which is the closest they’ve ever felt to being whole. But when the drug wears off, the dopamine level crashes below what it was previously, at 20%. So the addict has to go back to the drug inflate it again (only it may never go as high; next time will be 75%, then 70%, etc.).

But drugs of choice can take many forms: cigarettes, pills, pornography, video games, or even television. Anything that causes a temporary dopamine rush becomes dopamine fuel. Specifically, I want to talk about internet trolling, when someone leaves nasty, hateful, or derogatory comments over the internet. Things they would never say to a person’s face. It seems to not have any consequences because of the safety of the computer screen; but like any addiction, this temporary boost is unfulfilling and cries out quickly for more. As suicides from cyber bullying have been on the rise, the consequences are clearly not so harmless at all.

The amygdala (which means “almond” due to its shape) is a part of the brain that controls fear and aggression. Vision has a direct path to the amygdala due to its location (behind the eyes the middle of the lower brain). This is why we react emotionally to imagery (and why propaganda can be so effective). Logic and reason take place in the cerebral cortex, which is further up, taking information longer to be processed there.

In the wild, this is a useful survival mechanism. If our tribal ancestors saw a lion at a distance, their fear response kicked in and the amygdala sent messages to the renal glands above the kidneys to release adrenaline and help them run fast. Our brains are so effective at this studies have shown that we can react fearfully to danger before we even recognize what the danger is.

But this can have a tragic effect on modern society.

Our surroundings growing up have a tremendous impact on our mental stability as adults. Ideally, a child should develop in a two-parent home that provides a balance of love and discipline. But if the parents divorce, are verbally or physically abusive, or neglectful, the child is put in a constant fight-or-flight mode too early in life. As a result, the brain overcompensates by reinforcing the amygdala as a survival strategy while under-developing the frontal cortex.

Because their fight-or-flight reflex is messed up, people with overdeveloped amygdalas struggle with insecurity, anxiety attacks, and aggression towards others. They misinterpret everything as attacks and are prone to rages even at the slightest hint of friction. They can have difficulty maintaining close relationships. Think of an animal backed into a corner afraid for its life; when it goes into fight-or-flight mode, it scratches, bites, screams, urinates, anything to get out of the situation alive. In humans, short tempers betray deep insecurities.

What’s especially noteworthy is that other opinions can also be viewed as a threat. Argumentative people crave a “thrill of victory” (again, the dopamine rush) because their minds interpret other viewpoints as literal threats. It’s like an immune system going berserk and sending white blood cells to wipe out an infection. This is why I personally try to avoid internet debates; just like the person with anger management issues, someone who constantly needs to win arguments online is usually trying to mask childhood insecurities.

I personally think that the specific abuse that leads to internet trolling is neglect. Divorce and its traumatic effect on children is one example, but neglect can take many forms. It could be that the parents punished the child by locking them in closets or kept them isolated from others. Or the mom or dad always worked too late and never spent time with their children.

Our relationship with our parental figures shapes who we are perhaps more than anything else (birth order plays a factor, too). There’s an old saying that the way you talk to your children is the voice they’ll hear in their heads for the rest of their lives. Children need to feel safe and protected by their families. Absent parents create fear in their children. The child lives with an  underlying sense of being abandoned in the wild surrounded by predators. In adulthood, this fear manifests itself as a desperate need for attention. People who are loud, boisterous, or flamboyant were often neglected by their parents. The coping mechanism is the attempt to be the center of attention, always, in every situation, and is the sad story behind famous comedians like Robin Williams.

The term “projection” is used to describe imagining one’s own desires onto others. However, I use the term somewhat differently. Let’s call it “the parental hallucination.” People with bad relationships with their parents grow up imagining everyone they meet is their parents, most of the time without even realizing it. There’s a projector in their heads broadcasting an image of their mom and dad on everyone they know, even their own spouses and children.

This is why so many girls abused by their fathers marry abusive men. They’re trying to rewrite their childhood in adulthood, only this time they hope to get love and nurturing from the monster. But the deadly trap is that like any addiction, it never works. Robin Williams spent decades being adored, applauded and loved by millions, but that could never fix the neglect he suffered from his parents.

So we have two ingredients that make up the groundwork for an internet troll. The first is an overdeveloped amygdala that views everything, even something as harmless as another person’s opinions, as a threat. The second is the parental projection, the hallucination that everyone they meet online is their mom and dad. If they were neglected as children, they now have the ability to make themselves the center of attention. The third is perhaps the most crucial: anonymity. Imagine being able to punish your parents from the shadows without ever suffering any perceived consequences. Trolls often tend to have garish, cartoony avatars and rarely show their true faces. Like the KKK, Isis, or Antifa, real cowards act brave while wearing masks.

This futile attempt to make up for a lost childhood motivates people to take up strange causes. Most angry feminists have an absent father somewhere in their past. Behind most atheist social media trolls are oppressively strict religious parents. Crazed environmentalists or animal rights activists tend to have parental figures who beat or verbally abused them (they project their parents onto the meat companies and themselves onto the animals). The epidemic of single motherhood has left us with a generation with considerable daddy issues.

The desire for attention from parents while wanting to lash out at them at the same time is a toxic combination. This is the average internet troll in a nutshell. But lest I be accused of adopting the “blame your parents” cliché, there does come a point where self-responsibility comes in. In other words, no matter how bad their childhoods were, people can eventually grow up and come to terms with it, then quit the never-ending attempt to rewrite everything in adulthood. Escaping these behavioral patterns is one of the most freeing things that can happen in life.

Oh, Goody Goody.

Comey said he's "never thought of electronic surveillance as 'spying' ".

There are some people in the DOJ IG's and intel agency offices who've been electronically monitoring him since around Feb. 2017 who are happy to hear this.

Remember when I said the SpyGate plotters aren't the ONLY ONES WHO CAN WRITE FISA WARRANTS.

Guess who's team has had that ability since late January, 2017?

And where were the SpyGate plotters after 2017? Most of them were out of the gov't and then last year they lost their security clearances. Unless I miss my guess, every single time the SpyGate plotters contacted the foreign intel officials overseas they plotted this coup with, they were under surveillance.

The only way that didn't happen would be if Trump & his team were incompetent, which I doubt.

Trump Trolls The Democrats To Highlight Their Hipocrisy.

It isn't difficult to grasp the scope of Democrat and media hypocrisy. It's far beyond YUGE! Regarding immigration, it is beyond description. They are making their disingenuousness so obvious that they might as well put it on billboards. Tolstoy wrote:

"Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised." (Anna Karenina)

President Trump suggested, perhaps seriously, that the hundreds of thousands of illegals whom the Democrats insist be allowed to flow into the country unimpeded be distributed to those states and cities throughout the nation that have designated themselves sanctuaries to such migrants. After two years of doing everything in their power to keep our borders open to all comers, asserting that these illegal aliens are "gifts of love" (Pelosi) to America, you would have thought Trump suggested depositing dumpsters full of fetid rodents to all those virtue-signaling cities and states.

The leftist media spent the day hysterical that he would dare imagine such a ploy. They called it retribution, illegal (sanctuary cities are illegal), inhumane, vengeful, and worse. In short, they had a full-blown meltdown that rivaled the hysteria of a few days ago after A.G. Barr confirmed that spying on the Trump campaign and presidency did occur.

The Democrats, having lost their minds, leaped at the chance to display for all their blatant hypocrisy. They demand that those pawns (the migrants) in their game of remaking America for their purposes not be shipped to their their cities! No way, Jose.

For the duration of Trump's presidency, the Democrats have done their level best to foil his promise of immigration reform, no matter how many rapes, murders, and other crimes are committed by such non-citizens, who for the Left deserve more rights and more compassion than Americans. Pelosi, Schumer, and their acolytes have once again proven beyond all doubt that they value the prerogatives, if not the lives, of illegal aliens over American citizens. But they don't value lives at all – not those of American victims or those of the thousands of migrants who die on the long journey here because the left has lured them with promises of government largesse. This on the same day that the New York State Assembly blocked a bill to help Gold Star families with college tuition but approved $27M for tuition for illegals, even those present in the U.S. for only thirty days! What a murder of crows, our progressives!

The Democrats' loving embrace of illegal immigrants is a scam. They do not want them in their own sanctuary cities, the biggest of them already fraught with homelessness, drug abuse, and all that accompanies those pathologies. Nancy Pelosi's city of San Francisco, like Seattle and Los Angeles, has been disfigured by leftist notions of compassion. Tourists, long a mainstay of the local economy, are appalled. Those who still come are given maps in order to avoid the paths benighted by fecal matter and discarded, contaminated needles.

The progressive vision for the Obama-imagined transformed America is a Democrat-created bust. Obama's polices transformed the country, all right; he nearly destroyed us, which is why Trump won in 2016.

All of this leads us to the Left's refusal to admit that the Obama administration did indeed weaponize our alphabet agencies in order to take Trump out. E. Nesbit, the British author of children's books, wrote, "Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know." The Left has for over two years now refused to acknowledge that a group of self-appointed thugs at the top of those institutions did indeed violate countless laws in order to sabotage a candidate they opposed. They surely know that it is true; there is too much evidence available to all to deny it. Still, they pretended to be shocked when A.G. Barr pronounced that spying did take place. They've spent two years trying not to believe that what is true is, in fact, true. "One thing you can't hide – is when you're crippled inside" (John Lennon). The Democratic Party is crippled, economically, ethically, and morally. All they have is their exposed hypocrisy and their rage at losing an election they took for granted.

The Left's hysteria over Trump's suggestion that the many thousands of illegals who have invaded the country be sent to sanctuary cities would be hilarious if it were not so unspeakably hypocritical. It is the Democrats who have done everything in their power to encourage these people to come, to breach our borders. But they do not want them in their communities. Trump, as usual, trolled them into revealing who they really are: disingenuous, elitist snobs. The man is a genius, and he is the best president since Reagan.

"It takes a common thug to commit injustice, but it takes an exceptional thug to call it "social justice." (Jakub Wisniewski)

Breakfast Isn't Important.

I skipped breakfast again this morning. I won't worry about it.

Yes, I've heard the advice. "It's the most important meal of the day." It balances blood sugar levels, kick-starts your metabolism, stimulates the brain, etc.

A Harvard University study said men who regularly skip breakfast have a 27% higher risk of suffering a heart attack. 27 percent!

But I'm not worried, because I now know there's no proof that skipping breakfast causes heart attacks or any other problem.

In his latest video, nutritionist Dr. Ruth Kava points out that just about all the claims about breakfast being especially important are unproven.

Those Harvard researchers actually say it "remains unknown whether specific eating habits ... influence ... heart disease risk."

Strokes and heart attack news persists in part because people who skip breakfast tend to have other bad habits, like smoking.

But the breakfast bunk keeps coming.

Several years ago, the government announced that skipping breakfast may make you fat. Of course, the media jumped on that one. "Missing breakfast tricks your brain into thinking you want higher-calorie foods," says WebMD.

"Far from making you fat, breakfast actually helps activate your metabolism so you start burning fat," says StepToHealth.com.

But it's not true, shows a new analysis by the British Medical Journal.

"They looked on a number of different studies, and they did not find that eating breakfast ... helped people lose weight," says Kava.

The government has backed away from its claim.

Why did researchers and the government get it so wrong?

Partly because eating habits are hard to study. You can't follow test subjects for years, continuously controlling what they eat.

So, many studies are based on what people say they ate. Some people forget. Or lie.

Many of us have been suckered by studies funded by cereal makers. Five of 15 studies mentioned by the government in its breakfast push were funded by General Mills or Kellogg.

"Yeah, well, they're the ones that are interested in having their products sold," says Kava.

On its cereal boxes, Kellogg touted that study that found people who didn't eat breakfast could lose weight by starting to eat cereal or breads for breakfast instead of skipping breakfast altogether or eating meat and eggs.

"Don't get your nutrition education from cereal boxes," says Kava.

In fairness, cereal companies don't always try to spin the results. One study funded by Quaker Oats found skipping breakfast was associated with weight loss in people who were overweight. Instead of ignoring the result, Quaker Oats actively pushed the researchers to publish the data.

Even cereal boxes might be better sources of information than television, though.

"Sesame Street" is more reliable than most shows, but even there, Michelle Obama told Grover he was probably tired because he hadn't had a "healthy breakfast!"

While it's true that a hungry child may not do well in school, Obama tells Grover, "Everybody should have a healthy breakfast."

Not true. You need nourishment, but there's no good evidence it has to come at a specific time of day.

"Eat breakfast if you're hungry. If not, eat a little later," advises Kava.

Of course, the key to good health isn't just to do whatever you feel like doing. Our appetites can lead us astray. Smoking kills. Some tempting foods are unhealthy.

But years of consumer reporting have taught me that moderation and common sense are better guides than the hyped warnings from government and the media.

You’re A Sucker If You Don't Know That The System Is Rigged.

Imagine you spent two years completely screwing up at your job, I mean not merely getting every single thing wrong but loudly, proudly getting in everyone else’s face about how right you are. You’d get fired, terminated, 86’d, and Schiff-canned. But not the mainstream media. The media hacks failed for two years-plus, nonstop and without equivocation, but are they ever going to be held to account? No, they’re just going to gather in a big circle and Pulitzer each other.

Imagine you committed a racial hate crime where you falsely accused people who didn’t look or think like you of a horrible atrocity, and that you’d have gladly picked some poor saps with the wrong skin tone out of a line-up and sent them to prison for decades given the chance. Now imagine the two half-wits you hired to help you managed to get caught on video buying their stereotype get-up and spilled it all to the fuzz, though the fact you paid them with a check – because you’re a criminal mastermind – was already enough to get a grand jury to indict your sorry AOC. Now, what are the chances the DA is going to transform your 16 felony counts into a $10K fine and a couple days community servicing? Your chances of said outcome are poor. They are poor because your pals are neither Mrs. Obama or Willie Brown’s gal pal.

Now imagine that you studied really hard while the rich kids partied and smoked dope and splattered water on you by running their BMWs through puddles as you walked home from high school. Imagine your last name is “Chang,” or that your dad is a soldier and not a hedge fund manager, or that your mom is a waitress and not a TV bimbo. Now imagine how you feel when Durwood Richguy IV gets admitted to Harvard when he can’t count past 10 with his Gucci loafers on and you get slotted on a waiting list for Gumbo State.

Imagine you handled classified information and you took it home and put it on your iPad. Do you think the FBI would be super-concerned with your feels about it and give you a pass, like Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit got from Jim Comey, or would you be bunking with Michael Cohen? And speaking of that Looming Doofus, if you lied under oath in front of Congress, do you think you’d be free to wander the country, posting stupid tweets of yourself staring at trees and beaches?

Yeah, sure, that would totally happen.

The American dream has morphed into the American grift. And we normal people are the marks.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop accepting the ruling class’s lies. And let’s stop lying to ourselves. America has changed. There used to be one standard, one set of laws, one set of rules. Now, there are two.

The one set of rules for normal people is designed to jam us up, to keep us down, to ensure that the power of the powerful never gets challenged.

And the one set of rules for the elite can be summed up like this: There are no rules.

The media howls about the rule of law. Democrat poohbahs cry about the rule of law. The Fredocon gimps whimper about the rule of law. But the “rule of law” they aspire to is merely their rule over you. To them, the rule of law is not some transcendent principle. Its purpose is not to ensure equality and fairness in our society. It’s a weapon designed to make sure nothing disrupts their scam.

Why do you think our elite is so eager to pass new laws and regulations? Is it because normal people like you and me are running wild in the streets? No, of course not. They don’t want to regulate political campaigns to make sure elections are fair. They want to regulate them so they will always win and we never will again. They don’t want a Green New Deal because they care about the weather in 2219, but because they want to take our power and our money for themselves. They don’t want to ban our guns because we’re dangerous to other Americans but because, armed and ready to defend our rights, we’re dangerous to their power.

Do you, even for a second, think any of the rules, regulations, statutes or laws they propose are even going to be applied to them? Do you see the DOJ ever indicting some liberal Dem or some pliable submissivecon for “campaign finance violations?” We know the answer to that because Hillary is wandering around the woods, with a goblet of screw-top Chardonnay glass in her withered paw, free as a bird.

Do you see them giving up their SUVs and trudging to work on foot or riding in some greasy, stinky bus? Will they give up their air travel? How about their beef? Tofu veggie burgers are for peasants. And their minions will always have guns even as you are rendered disarmed and defenseless.

Our elite is not elite. Instead, it’s a bunch of bums who somehow got a little money and took the reins of power and are now shaking-down our great nation for every penny they can wring out of it. We owe them nothing – not respect, not gratitude and certainly not obedience.

If you still wonder how we got Trump, just look around you. He’s a cry for help, a scream against the injustice we’re surrounded by. This injustice is poison to our country. This injustice is what makes republics fall apart, when the worthless ruling class pushes its contempt in the people’s collective face so hard and for so long that the population finally screams “The hell with this!”

It can’t continue. It won’t continue.

The Dumbest Generation Yet.

For years, I've seen it coming: the "Dumbing Down" of America's next generation, and the so-called Millenials have finally and proudly "achieved it". There's just no end to their general stupidity and pervasive ignorance. To wit:

• One recent survey found that 74 percent of Millenial Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.
• An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Millenial Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
• Shockingly, only 26 percent of Millenial Americans can name all three branches of government.
• During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Millenial Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.
• North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.
• 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world. Today, we have fallen to 36th place.
• According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young Millenial semi-adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

America Has Become An “Idiocracy”.

What in the world has happened to us? Once upon a time, America had the greatest system of education on the entire planet, and our people were sharp, capable and extremely well-informed. Sadly, none of those things are true anymore.

In 2006, Mike Judge made a movie entitled “Idiocracy” in which an individual of below average intelligence wakes up after being asleep for 500 years thanks to a military hibernation experiment. When he wakes up, he quickly realizes that he is now the smartest man in America, and that is not a good thing. The film became an instant classic, but when I originally watched it I thought that such a thing could never actually happen in this country. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Since 2006 our nation has been “dumbed down” at a pace that is absolutely staggering, and it is difficult to see a positive future for America if this trend continues.

The following are 18 reasons that prove that America has become an “idiocracy".

#1 One recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.
#2 An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
#3 Shockingly, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government.
#4 During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.
#5 North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.
#6 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world. Today, we have fallen to 36th place.
#7 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.
#8 For the very first time, Americans are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than they are in a car accident.
#9 One study discovered that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.
#10 A recent survey found that 45 percent of U.S. teenagers are online “almost constantly”.
#11 Today, the average American spends 86 hours a month using a smartphone.
#12 Overall, the average U.S. adult “logs 6 hours, 43 minutes of total screen time daily”.
#13 In more than half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.
#14 During one seven day period last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaints about human feces were submitted to the city of San Francisco. And apparently the problem is very real because one investigation found 300 piles of human feces on the streets of downtown San Francisco.
#15 Every 24 hours, more than a third of all Americans eat fast food.
#16 Less than half of all Americans know which country used atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
#17 Even though we fought a war in Iraq for eight long years, 6 out of 10 young adults cannot find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. And that same survey found that 75 percent of our young adults cannot locate Israel.
#18 Today, the average college freshman in the United States reads at a 7th grade level.

Sometimes it helps to go into the past to get some much needed perspective on the present.

A few years ago, an eighth grade exam from 1912 was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. To me, it is absolutely amazing what kids living in rural Kentucky were expected to know a little over 100 years ago.

You can find a copy of the exam right here, and as I looked it over I quickly realized that most college students would have an exceedingly difficult time trying to pass such a test today.

In fact, I think that I would have a very hard time getting a passing grade. Here are just a few of the questions on the exam…

• Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?
• How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body?
• How long of a rope is required to reach from the top of a building 40 feet high to the ground 30 feet from the base of a building?
• Compare arteries and veins as to function. Where is the blood carried to be purified?
• During which wars were the following battles fought: Brandywine, Great Meadows, Lundy’s Lane, Antietam, Buena Vista?

If you would like to know the answers to all of the questions on the exam, you can find them right here.

In contrast, our system of education today is a total joke. Most of our students have never learned how to communicate effectively, they are fed an endless stream of “tests” that consist of multiple choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions, and when they get out of school most of them have absolutely no idea how to succeed in the real world.

Perhaps that helps to explain why our kids are in the bottom half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math and science literacy.

If we do not educate our children well, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the world, and it will be just a matter of time before we lose our status as a global power.

Of course that assumes that we actually have enough time left to turn things around. At that rate that we are currently degenerating, we might not.

How Best to Age? Do it Your Way.

I can hit the golf ball any way I can and laugh if it goes in the lake. That's the breaks. I'm just happy I can still hit that golf ball.

As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world, too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging.

When we're kids, we can't wait to grow-up. When we're grown-up and getting older, we just hope time will slow down.

Whose business is it, if I choose to read, or play, on the computer, until 4 AM, or sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 50, 60 & 70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love, I will.

I will walk the beach, in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves, with abandon, if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They too, will get old.

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And, I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years, my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break, when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet passes? But, broken hearts are what give us strength, and understanding, and compassion. A heart never broken, is pristine, and sterile, and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I believe in simple things, like the miracle this day brings.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face.

So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong.

So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. Though, as the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years pass, I do occasionally think about it. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it).

Why Do So Many Young People Embrace Socialism?

It’s not youth and inexperience. It’s not even government-run schools and idiotic celebrities. Not primarily.

Why do so many young people embrace socialism?

For the same reason any middle-aged or older person embraces socialism: Anxiety and envy.

By “anxiety” I mean neurotic anxiety, which means a false or exaggerated belief that one will be unable to properly survive or take care of oneself, so that unspecified help is needed to ensure survival.

Envy is often a byproduct of anxiety. If one starts out feeling, “I’m unable to care for myself,” then it’s not a stretch to look at someone else who has more than enough and say, “That’s not fair. He can more than provide for himself, and I’m unable to do so for myself”.

What about the fact that young people have not yet earned much money, and therefore don’t appreciate the value and justice of private ownership, i.e., being able to keep what you earn? Not all young people feel this way. Some young people understand the justice of keeping what you earn. Some do, and change their minds later and become socialists in middle-age.

Regardless, unless you have a significant amount of neurotic fear and/or envy, it’s unlikely socialism would grab your fancy for even five minutes, much less for years (and elections) on end.

It’s true that public schools are teaching the ideology of self-sacrifice and blind service to others (the same premises as Nazism and Communism) as self-evident givens in today’s government-run schools. But these faulty ideas are not new to the present era. Yet in earlier eras, the majority of young people did not turn as socialist as they appear to be doing today.

The more likely contribution of today’s mediocre schools — as well as an increasingly irrational culture — is that young people don’t know how to think. Thinking is your basic tool and precondition of survival. If you feel inadequate to think critically, rationally and objectively, you’ll develop a neurotic and pervasive sense that, “I’m not equipped to survive.” In a land of plenty, particularly, it seems logically appealing when someone comes along and says, “No worries. We’ll pick up your college tuition. And health care. And tons of other things too. You’re entitled to it, after all.” It comes as a relief to the anxiety-ridden souls who embrace socialism.

In older folk, and in some young people born into wealth, there’s the factor of guilt and atonement. That’s a form of anxiety, too. “I’m rich and I don’t deserve to be. It’s not fair.” So it becomes a form of virtue-signaling merged with a psychological tonic to make sure others see you support socialism.

It’s not that most young people are depraved and stupid any more than most older people are totally depraved and stupid. And it’s not just inexperience. It’s fear. And the envy that gets ignited by fear.

It’s truly sad. And yes, it’s dangerous for the future of a free society, but dangerous most of all for those young people who now seek to embrace socialism. It’s not going to end any better for them than it did for anyone else. And if they get their wish, and socialism gets enacted completely, then their fears will quickly become rational.

DemokkkRATs' Wet Dreams.

Rather than deal with Illegal immigrant wave number 2, the Democrats on the Hill engage in wet dreams and socialism.

A 70% tax rate?? This is the proposal that will bring in American votes – Yeah Right.

Government run healthcare "Medicare for all". Yeah Obamacare skyrocketed premiums. So instead lets Tax them to a literal death with European style healthcare.

Abolish the Electoral College so that New York, California, and Illinois rules – the little states be Damned.

100% renewable Energy. Lets just ban gasoline and diesel vehicles like Trucks and Cars, and depend on wind and solar energy for our needs even though they are not dependable nor sufficient.

Ban Guns. Who cares if illegal Aliens come across the border with them. Our Ranchers deserve to die and don't need no stinking 2nd Amendment. For that matter so do US Citizens, they don't need to protect themselves from MS-13, we Democrats will get around to protecting them eventually.

Democrats please engage in some more wet dreams. We are excessively entertained during this Shutdown.

Where's The Chaos?

The government shut down Dec. 21 over Sen. Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi petulantly not wanting Trump to have any border wall funding. The federal government spends $4.4 trillion a year; the $5 billion Trump wanted is one-tenth of 1 percent of that. About the same percent that Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren is Native American.

If you are like me, you are more worried about government starting back up than it being shut down.

Who will open our open-air national parks? Who will answer the phones when we call? Who will give us the runaround at the IRS? Who will put us into intractable wars? Who will use the Justice Department to go after political opponents? Who will put us $22 trillion in debt?

Most of NASA is shut down, including the division that we pay to monitor to see if aliens in outer space try to contact us. I trust they put their “Out of Office” message on their email before they went home, in case aliens contact us.

Shouldn’t there be chaos? Why are you not looting Target for a flat-screen TV? Who will let me know when the panda cam is back on at the Washington Zoo?

Two things become clear during a government shutdown: how little we need most of government, and how petulant public servants can be when they do not get their funding. Under Obama, there was much petty government intimidation. Remember how he hired extra people to make sure our open-air national parks were kept shut so citizens could not just walk through them?

Heavy-handed goons run a swollen government monster that intimidates its funders, the taxpayers. It is structurally incapable of spending just a little less than it did the year before and seeks revenge when asked to live within its means. This shutdown teaches us that it is no big deal getting 25 percent of the government out of our lives. Americans will adapt. Let’s shut down most of the government and just hire back any part that we miss.

With historically high employment, I suggest we let about one-third of government employees find real jobs in the real world. You know, jobs that require accountability and productivity. Trump should keep government closed. If you can find it in the Yellow Pages or online, government does not need to be doing it.

Washington and the Deep State hate Trump no matter what he does, even when he does Obama-like things. He has done prison reform, run a huge deficit, is pulling troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, etc. If Trump doesn’t stop acting like Obama, he might ask to see his own birth certificate.

Since the Democrats won the House, the stock market has cratered. The Dems want to investigate, not legislate. House Speaker Paul Ryan has ceded power and decided to let someone else not get anything done.

Schumer, Pelosi and fellow libs run our overreaching, ineffective and expensive government. Should we be happy when government is back? It feels to me like my niece got back together with an abusive husband when that happens.

Trump made an unannounced trip to Iraq over Christmas. With Mueller on his tail and Democrats spending inordinate time wanting to use the blunt force of the federal judiciary to investigate him further, Trump stands as the only president to go to a war-torn area for peace and quiet.

Government shutdowns have become a well-worn path of a dysfunctional Washington. It is like Schumer and Pelosi are walking the marble halls of the Capitol and 20 feet ahead of them they see a banana peel. They both say, “Here we go again.”

The government shutdown over border wall funding is petulant politics at its best. Government means more to Democrats like Schumer and Pelosi because it is their lives. There is no easy off ramp for either side on this standoff. Now it is a waiting game to see who blinks first. And Nancy Pelosi has had so much work done on her face that she can’t blink anymore. So expect her to not rest until she fully embarrasses Trump (a particularly hard man to embarrass) or she captures all 101 Dalmatians.

When the federal government was not working, Trump probably called Tech Support in India to get advice. He told the guy government isn’t working, and the Tech Support guy said, “Just try turning it off for a while, then back on and see if that does the trick.”

The Fake News Media Doesn’t Even Put Up A Pretense Anymore.

All fake news, all the time. If you still do not believe that our national media establishment is 100% in the pocket of the Democrat Party and coordinates messaging with that political party on a daily basis, consider the following story.

We are now in Day 9 of a partial “government shutdown” that exists over the issue of illegal immigration. Early this week, in the midst of this “government shutdown,” a California law enforcement officer was murdered by an illegal alien who he was attempting to arrest for what would have been the illegal’s THIRD DUI crime. Yes, that’s right: thanks to California’s sanctuary laws, this illegal had already been arrested for and convicted of two DUIs, has known gang affiliation, and despite all of that had been allowed to just get out of jail and roam free on the state’s highways to put more lives in danger.

Anyway, that murder took place four days ago now, and in all that time, not one Democrat officeholder has been asked by one intrepid “journalist” to comment on the situation. Think about that: California has 53 members of the house and 2 U.S. senators, and not one of them has had to field a single question about how they can continue to support open borders and sanctuary laws when their state’s police officers and citizens are being murdered by illegal aliens.

The reason why is obvious: The media and the Democrats are coordinating on a narrative, and that narrative dictates that only Republicans must field difficult questions about illegal immigration. Any “journalist” who violates the narrative runs the risk of being dis-invited from all the best dinner parties. This is not complicated, folks.

Speaking of fake news... – two other fake news stories dominated the fake media this week, and boy, were they doozies.

First, you had the “bone spurs” story. This story, which we’ve heard many, many times before, made a comeback this week, with “new” information. That “new” information came in the form of the two daughters of the doctor who treated Donald Trump for bone spurs in 1968 claiming that her father – who is conveniently dead – told them that he faked the diagnosis on orders from Trump’s father Fred Trump, so that Donald Trump could avoid the military draft in effect at the time.

1968 is half a century ago, for those who are chronologically challenged.

So, first of all, who cares? Other than a bunch of pedantic Millenial soy boys and valley girls staffing the fake reporter desks at CNN and MSNBC, that is.

Second of all, why should we believe these two women? In all seriousness – there is literally no reason at all to believe they are anything other than liberal attention-seekers. They bring with them zero supporting evidence – no documentation, no statements from their father or any other doctor. No media outlet would have dreamed of going forward with this story were it leveled at a Democrat president, yet every media outlet in America has parroted the claim this week.

Third of all, who cares? Yes, that deserves repeating.

The next big fake story of the week came from the pathetic McClatchy News Service, which updated its claim from earlier this year that ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague during the 2016 campaign to hold secret meetings with Russian agents. This story has been debunked more times than the one about the moon landings being faked, but that didn’t stop McClatchy running with an update claiming that...

“A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.”

Those “four people with knowledge of the matter”? They are not merely anonymous sources – they are anonymous sources being quoted by other anonymous sources, as Brit Hume so ably pointed out:

Brit Hume? @brithume It turns out that the new McClatchy story on Michael Cohen in Prague is not based on intel their sources saw but what their sources’ sources said they saw. The story remains exclusive. (https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/28/michael-cohen-prague-mcclatchy/)

5,914 11:42 AM – Dec 28, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy

Michael Cohen Report Is Based On Third-Hand Information, Reporter Reveals McClatchy reporters did not see Cohen intelligence for themselves.

(dailycaller.com) 3,741 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy The reason why McClatchy’s story remains “exclusive” is that it is so obviously faked that none of the other fake media outlets want to touch it.

This is the sort of nonsense your OUR President has to put up with on a daily basis. It is intentional, it is relentless and it is unending.

The lowlife filth at AP clearly demonstrated their fake plan and hatred for Conservatives in the obit for Bre Payton, a conservative writer at The Federalist and frequent guest on television news outlets including Fox News Channel. AP is filth.

EVERYTHING Can Be Blamed On Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Here is the short list of things the media blamed on AGW:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Alaska reshaped, moves, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk, anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn, Arctic warming (not), Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty, atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, Baghdad snow, Bahrain under water, bananas grow, barbarisation, beer shortage, beetle infestation, bet for $10,000, better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects, billion homeless, billions face risk, billions of deaths, Behold a pale horse, and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hell was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with plague and by the wild beasts of the earth. bird distributions change, bird loss accelerating, birds shrinking, bird strikes, bird visitors drop, birds confused, birds decline (Wales), birds driven north, birds return early, bittern boom ends, blackbirds stop singing, blackbirds threatened, Black Hawk down, blood contaminated, blue mussels return, bluetongue, brain eating amoebae, brains shrink, bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain one big city, Britain Siberian, brothels struggle, brown Ireland, bubonic plague, budget increases, Buddhist temple threatened, building collapse, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, camel deaths, cancer deaths in England,cannibalism, cannibalism again, caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened, childhood insomnia, Cholera, circumcision in decline, cirrus disappearance, civil unrest, cloud increase, coast beauty spots lost, cockroach migration, coffee threatened, cold climate creatures survive, cold spells (Australia), cold wave (India), computer models, conferences, conflict, conflict with Russia, consumers foot the bill, coral bleaching, coral fish suffer, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight, cost of trillions, cougar attacks, crabgrass menace, cradle of civilisation threatened, creatures move uphill, crime increase, crocodile sex, crops devastated, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, curriculum change, cyclones (Australia), danger to kid’s health, Darfur, Dartford Warbler plague, death rate increase (US), deaths to reach 6 million, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, depression, desert advance, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, disappearance of coastal cities, disasters, diseases move from animals to humans, diseases move north, dog disease, Dolomites collapse, dozen deadly diseases, drought, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early marriages, early spring, earlier pollen season, Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down, Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down, earthquakes, earthquakes redux, earthquakes redux 2, Egypt revolt, El Niño intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing, eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilisation, logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod, ladybirds, pikas, polar bears, possums, walrus, toads, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species, not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, salamanders, tropical insects) experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, fading fall foliage, fainting, famine, farmers benefit, farmers go under, farm output boost, fashion disaster, fever, figurehead sacked, fir cone bonanza, fish bigger, fish catches drop, fish downsize, fish catches rise, fish deaf, fish get lost, fish head north, fish stocks at risk, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, flames stoked, flesh eating disease, flood patterns change, floods, floods of beaches and cities, flood of migrants, flood preparation for crisis, Florida economic decline, flowers in peril, fog (more) in San Francisco, fog (less) in San Francisco, food poisoning, food prices rise, food prices soar, food security threat (SA), football team migration, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frog with extra heads, frostbite, frost damage increased, frosts, fungi fruitful, fungi invasion, games change, Garden of Eden wilts, geese decline in Hampshire, genetic diversity decline, gene pools slashed, giant oysters invade, giant pythons invade, giant squid migrate, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial earthquakes, glacial retreat, glacial growth, glacier grows (California), glacier wrapped, global cooling, global dimming, glowing clouds, golf course to drown, golf Masters wrecked, grandstanding, grasslands wetter, Great Barrier Reef 95% dead, Great Lakes drop, great tits cope, greening of the North, Grey whales lose weight, Gulf Stream failure, habitat loss, haggis threatened, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harmful algae, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, health affected, health of children harmed, health risks, heart disease, heart attacks and strokes (Australia), heat waves, hibernation affected, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, HIV epidemic, homeless 50 million, hornets, high court debates, human development faces unprecedented reversal, human fertility reduced, human health risk, human race oblivion, hurricanes, hurricane reduction, hurricanes fewer, hurricanes not, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice age, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, icebergs, illegal immigration, illness and death, inclement weather, India drowning, infrastructure failure (Canada), industry threatened, infectious diseases, inflation in China, insect explosion, insurance premium rises, Inuit displacement, Inuit poisoned, Inuit suing, invasion of cats, invasion of crabgrass, invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, invasion of king crabs, invasion of midges, island disappears, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, jets fall from sky, jet stream drifts north, Kew Gardens taxed, kidney stones, kidney stones again, killer cornflakes, killing us, kitten boom, koalas under threat, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake empties, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lawyers want more, legionnaires’ surge, lives saved, Loch Ness monster dead, locust plagues suppressed, Lopsided Earth, lush growth in rain forests, Malaria, mammoth dung melt, mango harvest fails, Maple production advanced, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), Mediterranean rises, megacryometeors, Melanoma, Melanoma decline, methane emissions from plants, methane burps, methane runaway, melting permafrost, Middle Kingdom convulses, migration, migration difficult (birds), migratory birds huge losses, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, minorities hit, monkeys on the move, Mont Blanc grows, monuments imperiled, moose dying, more bad air days, more research needed, mortality increased, mountain (Everest) shrinking, mountaineers fears, mountains break up, mountains green and flowering, mountains taller, mortality lower, Myanmar cyclone, narwhals at risk, National security implications, native wildlife overwhelmed, natural disasters quadruple, new islands, next ice age, NFL threatened, Nile delta damaged, noctilucent clouds, no effect in India, Northwest Passage opened, nuclear plants bloom, oaks dying, oaks move north, ocean acidification, ocean acidification faster, ocean dead zones unleashed, ocean deserts expand, ocean waves speed up, oceans noisier, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, Pacific dead zone, penguin chicks frozen, personal carbon rationing, pest outbreaks, pests increase, phenology shifts, plankton blooms, plankton destabilised, plants lose protein, plants march north, plants move uphill, polar bears aggressive, polar bears cannibalistic, polar bears deaf, polar bears drowning, polar bears eating themselves, polar tours scrapped, popcorn rise, porpoise astray, profits collapse, prostitution, psychiatric illness, puffin decline, radars taken out, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rape wave, refugees, reindeer endangered, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rice threatened, rice yields crash, rift on Capitol Hill, rioting and nuclear war, Rise and Fall of Rome, river flow impacted, rivers raised, roads wear out, robins rampant, rocky peaks crack apart, roof of the world a desert, rooftop bars, Ross river disease, ruins ruined, Russia under pressure, salinity reduction, salinity increase, Salmonella, Salmon Decline, satellites accelerate, school closures, sea level rise, sea level rise faster, seals mating more, sewer bills rise, severe thunderstorms, sex change, sexual promiscuity, shark attacks, sharks booming, sharks moving north, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered, shrinking ponds, shrinking shrine, ski resorts threatened, skin cancer, slow death, smaller brains, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall heavy, soaring food prices, societal collapse, soil change, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, space problem, spectacular orchids, spiders invade Scotland, squid aggressive giants, squid population explosion, squid tamed, squirrels reproduce earlier, stingray invasion, storms wetter, stormwater drains stressed, street crime to increase, subsidence, suicide, swordfish in the Baltic, Tabasco tragedy, taxes, tectonic plate movement, teenage drinking, terrorism, threat to peace, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tigers eat people, tomatoes rot, tornado outbreak, tourism increase, trade barriers, trade winds weakened, traffic jams, transportation threatened, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees in trouble, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, trees lush, tropics expansion, tropopause raised, truffle shortage, truffles down, turtles crash, turtle feminised, turtles lay earlier, UFO sightings, UK coastal impact, UK Katrina, uprooted - 6 million, Vampire bats, Vampire moths, Venice flooded, violin decline, volcanic eruptions, volcanic eruptions redux, Iceland volcano eruption, walrus pups orphaned, walrus stampede, war, war between US and Canada, wars over water, wars sparked, wars threaten billions, wasps, water bills double, water scarcity (20% of increase), water stress, weather out of its mind, weather patterns awry, Western aid cancelled out, West Nile fever, whales lose weight, whales move north, whales wiped out, wheat yields crushed in Australia, wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced, wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine - more English, wine - England too hot, wine - German boon, wine - no more French, wine passé (Napa), wine stronger, winters in Britain colder, winter in Britain dead, witchcraft executions, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World at war, World War III, World War IV, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.