Newsom’s California: Latest Evidence of a Death Spiral

The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

A new wave of regulations and wage mandates degrade a state that once epitomized the American dream.

. . ."Newsom noted that the state is home to 500,000 fast-food workers who seek better pay, but we’ll need to adjust that number downward a bit. After Christmas, Pizza Hut disclosed to the state’s Employment Development Department (you know, the same agency that paid out as much as $32 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims) that it was laying off all 1,200 of its stores’ delivery drivers.

"That looks like fewer fathers or mothers who can feed their children or put our state’s overpriced gas in their car. That $4-an-hour wage boost sounds good on paper, but not it if means fewer jobs. Who couldn’t see this one coming? As I wrote in the Orange County Register in November: “The unions are claiming a victory for workers, but it’s not hard to guess the result. Higher prices will mean fewer customers and reduced profits. That means fewer restaurants and fewer jobs.”

"Pizza Hut will let third-party delivery services, such as Grub Hub, handle deliveries, but this won’t be the last announcement of fast-food layoffs. In many cases, the jobs will simply dry up as individual franchises reduce shifts, curtail hiring, and shift to automatic kiosks as customers cut back on their restaurant outings. The law doesn’t target mom-and-pop restaurants, but they’ll face wage pressure as they compete for workers who can (theoretically) earn more at national chains.

"None of this will stop Newsom from touting his record of helping low-wage workers. “We’re making it known that the health and wellbeing of workers and their families is of the utmost importance for California’s future,” the governor noted in October when he signed Senate Bill 616, which expands the number of paid sick days (from three to five) that California’s private employers must pay. It also imposes new reporting and regulatory requirements.

"The California Chamber of Commerce is concerned that “far too many small employers simply cannot absorb this new cost, especially when viewed in context of all of California’s other leaves and paid benefits, and they will have to reduce jobs, cut wages, or raise consumer prices to deal with this mandate.” The group warns about the law’s impact on California’s “long-term competitiveness,” but few in the Capitol listen to mere employers." . . .    

Douglas Murray’s spectacular tirade against Palestine supporters

Douglas Murray’s spectacular tirade against Palestine supporters

Why Is Everything So Stupid?

The domination of the stupid in the public square is endlessly annoying, so I only scan what appears before my eyes courtesy of the AI bot who believes I must be re-educated.

 By Elizabeth Nickson (substack.com)   "It is impossible to estimate the opportunity cost of the climate scam, but it is in the quadrillions. Think of all you could have done in the last decades were your family income quadrupled. It should have been. We should be dancing in the stars, the real ones, not among the ghastly baboons of Hollywood. You can always tell an elite scam by the fact that it guts the lower 50%, as it is doing in the demented Dominion where people are actually going without food because of brutal carbon taxes levied all along the food chain. Two million of us are using food banks, 7%, this in the richest country in the world, given our massive resources, our expensively, meticulously educated populace.

"The stupidity of gutting the lower 50% is mindblowing, since all prosperity and peace rests upon people thriving and rising. It was the secret of the past three hundred years. Now reversed. Now going into reversal. In Canada, where the climate scam is most advanced (barring Africa), our GDP is crashing hard - 4.4% in the last three months. Will it pull up? Or will it be annualized to 6%, more? Our media is so dishonest it doesn’t report. In any case, no one under 40, reads or watches the news.

"“If you are under 40, in 2023, it has to be a medical condition that your IQ is low enough that you still watch the news. It’s one hour of propaganda in order to program.”. . . 

Destroying democracy to save it: Maine shows the danger of zealots in our legal system

 Some of these advocates exhibit precisely that zealotry of someone who seems to understand little beyond the next election, as opposed to the next generation.

Jonathan Turley; The Hill    “You had me at hello.” That line from the movie “Jerry Maguire” came to mind this week after yet another Democratic secretary of state moved to prevent citizens from voting for former president Donald Trump.

"Maine’s Shenna Bellows issued a “decision” that declared Trump an “insurrectionist” and ineligible to be president. She joined an ignoble list of Democratic officials in states such as Colorado who claim to safeguard democracy by denying its exercise to millions of Americans.

"Yet the most striking aspect of this poorly crafted decision was not its litany of conclusory findings, but rather Bellow’s implausible suggestion that she struggled over the decision. Bellows was a natural choice for challengers, who have been searching for any officials or courts willing to embrace this dangerous theory under the Fourteenth Amendment that they can unilaterally bar candidates deemed rebellious or insurrectionalist.

"Challengers knew that they had Bellows at hello. She was one of the first officials to declare the Jan. 6 riot to be an “insurrection” prompted by Trump’s speech.

"Bellows previously declared that “the Jan. 6 insurrection was an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election…The insurrectionists failed, and democracy prevailed.” A year after the riot, Bellows was still denouncing the “violent insurrection.”

"Of course, in the 1996 movie, Jerry Maguire reminded Dorothy that ” we live in a cynical world — a cynical, cynical world — and we work in a business of tough competitors.” However,  he added “you complete me.”

"In our cynical politics, Bellows and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, among others, have become wildly popular for seeking to complete the effort to defeat Trump by removing him from the ballot. This cynicism is captured in statements from pundits who warn that Democrats can no longer rely on the election process, given Trump’s soaring popularity."

Hypocrisy on Hamas Rape

 Rafael Medoff - The Lid (lidblog.com)   

 There was a time when self-described human rights advocates such as Samantha Power, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International earned the international community’s respect for their defense of the innocent and the oppressed. But they have forfeited that respect by failing to defend the human right of Jewish women to not be raped.

 " Rape during the Rwanda genocide? Outrageous. Rape during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia? Abhorrent. Rape by Hamas terrorists? Not worthy of comment.

    "That’s the troubling position taken by Samantha Power, a senior official in the Obama and Biden administrations who has built her career on her concern for victims of genocide, sexual atrocities, and other human rights abuses.

   " Power, a journalist, authored the 2002 book “‘A Problem from Hell’; America and the Age of Genocide,” which blasted the United States and the international community for turning a blind eye to multiple instances of mass murder over the past century. 

    "The book won a Pulitzer Prize and catapulted Power to the position of senior policy adviser to presidential candidate Barack Obama and then the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama administration. Today, as head of the United States Agency for Development (USAID), she remains one of our nation’s most prominent spokespeople on human rights.

    "Power’s declared concerns include the use of rape as a weapon of genocide. Well, the rape of some women, at least. 

    "In her book, she wrote of Turkish forces raping Armenian women in 1915. She described how Serb forces imprisoned Bosnia Muslim women in “rape camps” during the 1990s ethnic cleansing atrocities in the Balkans. She recounted how an international war crimes tribunal convicted a Rwandan mayor of genocide specifically because he used systematic rape against the Tutsi minority in 1994.

    "Power’s X (Twitter) feed since the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel has included dozens of posts about the suffering of Arab civilians in Gaza. Oddly, however, she has never tweeted about the numerous Israeli-Jewish women who were raped by Hamas terrorists.

    "Power is a reasonably prolific tweeter. She posts something almost every day, and sometimes as many as eight to ten messages in a single day. She occasionally even uses her USAID account to circulate posts that stray beyond the agency’s mission, such as the imprisonment of a Russian pacifist or Uganda’s anti-gay law.

    "To be clear, Power does tweet about some rape victims. On November 2, for example, she posted about attacks on women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On December 1, she wrote about “horrific sexual violence” against women in Sudan. She urged her readers to check out the “important reporting by Reuters” on that subject." . . .

Degenerate Animals [Updated] | Power Line   "Glenn Reynolds quotes some of the same accounts of rape and sexual mutilation of Israeli girls and women by Gazans that I wrote about here. What the Arab Muslims did on October 7 isn’t just unspeakable, it is almost unimaginable. Glenn comments:" . . .

‘To make a snowflake’

 J.A. Frascino - American Thinker  . . ."There is nothing natural about the formation of a human snowflake.  The nidus is a normal child seeking identity in a complex society.  The first step is to disconnect him from traditional social foundations, viewed by the left as oppressive, while offering it nothing of substance to replace them.  Teach the child that his nation was built on slavery and is systemically racist, that religion is dictatorial and science-denying, that the traditional family is patriarchal, that gender designation is repressive, and that first names are too restraining.

"Having transformed the child into an isolated, self-immersed entity without an anchor, it is next necessary to weaken his resolve.  Teach the child that speech and events that may make him uncomfortable are an existential threat to his safety and well-being.  Teach him to be alert to microaggressions and to bullying.  Tell him that global warming will destroy the planet.  Allow him to skip classes and attend bereavement counseling when the Orange Man is elected.  Provide him with safe spaces.  Reward him not for accomplishment, but for participation.  Coddle and indulge him.  Capitalize upon his exalted status as the object of permissive parenting.  Discipline might be hurtful, especially for someone showing signs of emotional stress.  Allow him to find identity, escape, and safety in the alternate universe of social media.

"The snowflake is now fully formed — emotionally fragile, sheltered, socially withdrawn, and vulnerable to meltdown.  Just as physical stress builds strong bodies, dealing with emotional stress builds strong psyches.  Creating a stressful culture, and then taking every possible step to shelter the disenfranchised from having to deal with the stress so created, is how to make a snowflake." . . .

"Snowflake creation is but one adverse outcome of leftist “change America” activism — activism that seeks immediate gratification through vengeful attack on the “oppressors,” with apparent disregard for the outcome of its actions.  Save the planet — ban fossil fuels!  Replace nationalistic xenophobia with open borders.  End racism by replacing merit with diversity.  Reduce crime by not prosecuting it.  Support the economy with fiscal stimulus.  Eliminate misogyny by prioritizing career over family.  What could go wrong?" . . .

Ten Degenerate Democrat Scandals: Remember the Media Said the Democrats Were 'The Adults'? - The Lid (lidblog.com)   "As each month passes, there seems to be yet another Democrat arrested for some sexual crime, fired for some scandal, or mired in some sort of degeneracy. But remember in 2019 when the media told us that the Democrats were a more serious party and if they took power, “the adults would be in charge”?

"Well, the debauchery of these “adults” grows by the day.

"In no particular order…"

The Saudi Road to Peace

 Jon Levin - American Thinker 

"Israel is well on its way to defeating Hamas in the field and removing direct Iranian influence in Gaza, one prerequisite for long-term peace.  But that alone is not enough. ". . .

 "Israel winning its war against Iran’s proxies in the Gaza Strip is an opportunity to implement reforms necessary for reconciliation and long-term peace.  Israel, the United States and other western powers lack legitimacy in the Muslim world, and their taking the lead would undermine the project from the outset.  Israel will not empower the UN, UNRWA, or like international institutions that have so amply demonstrated their hostility.  There are few good options, but Saudi Arabia is influential and motivated to deprive Iran of its Mediterranean colony.  It also has a growing desire to be part of the modern world order, and is at least amenable to peace with Israel.  Perhaps most important, the Arab states are more suited to the sort of generational planning necessary to deradicalize an entire society.

"Rebooting an Oslo-style peace process is doomed to fail.  The Iranian, rejectionist faction (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.) has only strengthened in the post-Oslo era, and the Palestinian Authority no longer even pays lip service to the idea of coexistence with Israel.  Hamas intends to destroy Israel and kill every Jew, and it enjoys overwhelming support both in Gaza and the West Bank.  Every peace offer has been met with violence, and the attempt to unilaterally disengage culminated in the worst anti-Jewish attack since the Holocaust.

"Israel is laying the groundwork for the generational changes needed for peace by defeating Hamas.  Hamas had three goals for the 10/7 attack: breach the Israeli border and kill as many Jews as possible; lure the Israel Defense Forces into a bloody quagmire in Gaza and expose the Israeli north to an invasion by Hezb’allah; and scuttle the then-imminent normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.  While Hamas achieved an initial tactical victory, it squandered whatever military advantage it had by perpetrating atrocities against civilians, and once word of the invasion spread, Hamas’ forces were forestalled by ad hoc Israeli forces even before the IDF routed the invaders.  Despite achieving surprise, Hamas’ casualties from the 10/7 attack approached in number the total Israeli casualties. Hamas may have terrorized the population, but showed itself essentially irrelevant as a military force." . . .