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." . . .

According to Revolver: [Nikki Haley] reveals her true self: she wants Trump rotting off in a dustbin somewhere…

 Birdbrain reveals her true self: she wants Trump rotting off in a dustbin somewhere... - Revolver News   "Nikki Haley is a vile political creature. Yes, she’s a warmonger who wouldn’t think twice about sending your son or daughter off to war so she could buy a few more houses. But she’s also funded and supported by some of the crookedest people on the planet. Nikki is an opportunistic vampire, sucking the lifeblood out of everything she touches. According to President Trump, she’s the “kiss of death.”. . .

"But there’s still more to the ruthlessness of Nikki Haley than meets the eye. She recently revealed her true self when speaking about President Trump and the absurd sham indictments against him. Of course, when Haley talks about the charges, she gives them a distinct air of validity. And when asked about what she would do regarding Trump if she were to ever become president, Haley basically made it clear that she’d pardon Trump and shuffle him off to some dusty corner where he could quietly rot away.

Just The News:

“What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail, that continues to divide our country,” she said. “What’s in the best interest of the country would be to pardon him, so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him

 "Well, it appears there’s nothing Ms. Haley would like more than to become president, end the MAGA movement, and make Trump a distant memory. And why not? This is a woman who seems more passionate and focused on Israel than on America." . . .

The anger of Nikki Haley during the Republican election debate and the defense of American aid to Israel.

"It's not that Israel needs America, it's America that needs Israel!" said former US envoy to the UN and presidential candidate Nikki Haley. pic.twitter.com/56Wud1Bp5v

— S p r i n t e r (@Sprinter99800) August 25, 2023. . .

Young kid shreds Haley straight to her face: “You’re basically the new John Kerry”... - Revolver News

 

What ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ Have in Common

Hamas Terrorists Gang-Raped Israeli Woman Before One of the Rapists Shot Her in Head While One Was Still Indulging in Sexual Act: Report (ibtimes.sg)  (possibly not the woman pictured here.)

 Wilfred Reilly, Commentary Magazine  . . ."Same for the Palestinians. In the bluntest possible logical terms, most of the problems of, specifically, Gaza cannot be laid at the feet of Israel…because Israel has not occupied or ruled the Gaza Strip since 2005. Far more of them, in fact, can be laid at the feet of Hamas, the terrorist group that has been in charge of the area since 2007. Among many other objectively insane actions, Hamas’s leaders ordered or allowed the destruction of the great majority of the infrastructure left behind by some 10,000 departing Jews, who fled the region following an Israeli pullback (thus, of course, being “forced to abandon their family lands”)—including the once-legendary floral greenhouses of the Strip.

"Since that point, Hamas has systematically looted the potentially rich lands under its control—at one point rather literally beating plowshares into swords by using miles of state-of-the-art sewer pipe sent by the international aid community to make rocket-launcher tubes. Gaza and the other component region of recognized Palestine (the West Bank) have in fact received many billions of dollars in recent humanitarian aid, because of the sympathetic nature of some Palestinian claims, and much of this lucre has simply vanished or been stolen. Quite a bit of it, to judge from viral retrospectives of what Gaza City looked like before the Israel–Hamas war, was diverted into luxury villas for Hamas commanders and their dependents—some of whom could give even BLM lessons on mansion purchase and maintenance.

"More seriously—although the theft of billions from poor people is serious enough—legitimately unpleasant realities of day-to-day Palestinian life such as Israeli checkpoint monitoring of the Gaza and West Bank borders are also caused almost entirely by the behavior of the Palestinian governments. Tens of thousands of rocket attacks against the Jewish state have taken place just since 2001. " . . .

Degenerate Animals

"Upon re-reading this post, I realize that I may have inadvertently maligned the animal kingdom. To be clear, there is no animal species, no predator, anywhere near as cruel, as heartless, as vicious, as ignorant, as the Muslims who carried out the atrocities of October 7–and the much larger number of Muslims and Western liberals in the press, at Harvard, Penn, MIT, etc., who cheered those atrocities. No animal species has sunk that low."

 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:

It’s as if these people are a bunch of degenerate animals, which is because that’s what they are. Hamas and the — majority — of Palestinians who support them. And their western supporters — including the Western feminists who went crazy about a fictional frat-house rape that left its “victim” alive and unscarred — are utterly complicit as well.

And we’re supposed to pretend somehow that these degenerate animals aren’t degenerate animals because of a bullsh*t Cultural Marxist theory created by people whose goal was always to undermine Western civilization and replace it with something that looks a lot like a cross between Hamas and Stalin. Garbage ideas from garbage people who deserve to be treated like the garbage that they are, but that are instead amplified and legitimized by our academic/media/political complex, which is itself no better. It is important to make that truth utterly clear and to repeat it and throw it in their faces.

"The purported leaders of our society–the liberal ones, anyway, which they pretty much all are–are morally bankrupt. They habitually pretend to occupy some sort of high ground, when in fact they are well below the average ethical standard. This is true internationally, too. The United Nations, for example, has zero moral authority, and one thing Israel will need to do after Gaza is finally ridded of terrorists is to keep the U.N. and its enablers out." . . .

This Isn’t ‘Bibi’s War’—It’s Israel’s - Seth Mandel, Commentary Magazine

The prime minister before Netanyahu, and the man who pieced together a motley coalition to replace him, was Yair Lapid. At a recent speech in Berlin, Lapid had this to say: “I came here to tell you, on German soil, we will win this war. On the seventh of October, Jews were murdered, babies were massacred, women were raped, the elderly were burned alive, families were taken hostage. The next day, October the eighth, anti-Semites already told the world, like always, that the Jews were to blame for being murdered.… The state of Israel wasn’t founded with the belief that anti-Semitism will disappear. It was founded so that we can tell anti-Semites they can go screw themselves. It was founded so we can tell the world we will defend ourselves, by ourselves, in any way we must.”

The Corruption of Everything

 "There is a lot more corruption than I have space for here, but I do sense the worm turning.  We’ve had enough time to assess the damage the left has done, and we abhor it.  We will rise up." . . .one would hope. 

M.B. Mathews - American Thinker  "As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left.

"The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else.  We on the right can reliably depend on being prosecuted for “misgendering,” contributing to conservative causes, being a Christian or a Jew, speaking out against the barbaric transing of children, defending ourselves with a firearm, and not being a Democrat.  We can depend upon getting arrested for protesting peacefully as the corrupt “Justice” Department singles us out for jail, bankruptcy, or keeping us off election ballots, while really destructive rioters go free.

"Medical research has been corrupted by the deliberate downgrading of meritorious research that just so happens to be at odds with the latest leftist perversion du jour.  For example, there are research grants for hamster fights.

"Elections have been corrupted.  Mail-in ballots, demonstrated to be extremely susceptible to fraudulent inflation of Democrat votes, are ready for the next fraud.  Dead people vote; people vote multiple times; non-residents vote in other states; and phony ballots are printed and signed with the same handwriting, then run through counting machines multiple times.  Computer problems pop up so as to skew the vote.

"Education has been corrupted.  Universities do not teach students how to get a job, be prosperous, and succeed.  Instead, they teach antisemitism, anti-white racism in the guise of “systemic racism” and “anti-racism,” identity politics, and sexual deviancy.  Everything on the left is about cultural identity matters: Are you gay?  Are you black?  Are you trans?  Are you non-binary?  Are you a Jew-hater?  A Christian?  It seems as though the left has an aversion to other people being happy, and so leftists tear everything apart in their insecurities and unwarranted anger and envy.  They are despicable people.

"The American standard of living has been corrupted.  We like our gas cars, our gas stoves, our air-conditioning, our steaks and chops, and our suburban life.  Enjoyment is forbidden.  So is comfort.  And so these things must go in order to satisfy the WEF and the American Marxists’ lust for revenge and degradation of our standard of living because...climate change.

Déjà Vu All Over Again: Biden Gets Leveled by His Own Words to Jimmy Carter About Running for Reelection

 Nick Arama – RedState

"Joe Biden is not a man who likes to face reality or to be challenged. 

"We saw that again when he was asked about the economy and got snippy with a reporter, scolding him to "Start reporting it the right way."  . . .

. . ."Now, Biden's own words about Jimmy Carter back in the 1980 race are coming back to bite him, as they seem to eerily mirror his own situation now.

'That man's in trouble, politically in trouble,' Biden said at the time, according to comments found in the Wilmington Evening Journal. 

The U.S. senator from Delaware expressed that he was holding off endorsing Carter because he wanted to back a candidate who could retain the White House for the Democrats in 1980. 

'I'm not certain that's Jimmy Carter right now,' Biden told his local paper. 

"Why? The bad inflation that Carter seemed clueless about. And Carter wasn't even trying to sell us the nonsense that Biden has been doing--about how everything is actually good, just believe him. Biden criticized Carter over inflation." . . .