UnHerd.

sense. The Rust Belt kid turned Yale graduate is an ideal figure to both troll America’s elites and woo its working-class whites. It is the Rust Belt states, after all, a collection of what was once America’s industrial core, that will decide the race. Stretching from the Upper Midwest to the Northeast, this is Vance’s cultural backyard.

The Rust Belt is my backyard, too. And in Erie, Pennsylvania, where I live, Vance’s schtick plays well. Folks here feel left behind — because they are. In their despair, they want a scapegoat.

In 1950, the Rust Belt was home to 43% of all American jobs. In Vance’s lifetime, industrial jobs have plummeted by 35%; in his early adulthood alone, 5 million factory jobs vanished. Deaths of despair filled the vacuum. Suicide in slow motion, the Rust Belt’s white working class leads the nation in early deaths caused by alcoholism, addiction and risky life choices. Before the term was even coined, Vance wrote in his 2016 Hillbilly Elegy memoir: “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”

Gothamist.

A New Jersey developer is mysteriously walking away from a proposal to build more than 2 million square feet of warehouses in Roxbury, New Jersey after more than two years of negotiations with the township.

Thomas Germinario, an attorney for the township’s planning board, confirmed to Gothamist that the company, Hartz Mountain, withdrew its application to build the warehouses at the former home of Hercules LLC, a powder explosives company that has not operated at the site since the 1990s.

Germinario said that the real estate development firm did not give a reason for withdrawing from the project, which was expected to generate 1,200 construction jobs and an additional 1,200 jobs once the warehouses were completed.

Why does building a warehouses require two years of ‘negotiation’ with the ‘township’s planning board’? Either because the local politicians wanted a bribe, or the company wanted restrictive regulations waived.

If it weren’t for the government, it would have been built. I think that’s safe to say.

Read it.

In Venezuela, there is a tyranny that has held power for more than two decades. Through its elections, Venezuela has tried to maintain an image of a democratic system in the world’s eyes. In 2024, the opposition—led by the conservative María Corina Machado—managed to prevail and overcome all kinds of obstacles to transform the presidential election into a unique opportunity to free Venezuela. Although Machado, who is the most popular person in Venezuela, was illegally disqualified from running for office by the regime, she gave her support to Edmundo González, a moderate Venezuelan diplomat who until recently was an unknown figure.

Read it.

American voters who have bought tote bags decorated with pictures of Mrs Clinton or sweatshirts promoting abortion rights have inadvertently funded disruption in the UK.

Read it.

Last week, President Joe Biden proposed an 18 year term limit and an ethics code for Supreme Court justices, and a repeal of the Court’s presidential immunity decision. Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris promptly agreed. The unseriousness of this proposal is visible in its brevity, at just 500 words. This isn’t a plan, it’s a press release.

It’s a dangerous press release because, though it has no chance of being enacted, it is part of a campaign to undermine the public’s belief in the Supreme Court, with the goal of ending the Court’s independence from progressive mandates.

Since 1953, every Chief Justice has been nominated by a Republican president. Seventeen of the associate justices who have served since then were nominated by Democrat presidents, and 17 by Republican presidents. Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, sought the Republican nomination for president in 1952. He was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower, who, after going on to win the presidency, nominated Warren to serve as Chief Justice. He was confirmed by acclamation and served until 1969, presiding over a transformation of the role and politics of the Supreme Court.

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Roughly 40 percent of Ukraine’s electricity imports pass through the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, which means Hungary is not entirely powerless in the face of a Ukrainian blockade on oil supplies. In fact, Hungary may be forced to cut electricity to its neighbor if push comes to shove.

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Two migrants who bit and attacked two New York City Police officers are…wait for it…back on the street, according to the New York Post.

Manhattan prosecutors reportedly agreed to set them loose back on the streets without bail after both were arrested on Sunday for fighting with traffic cops on Eighth Avenue.

Police confronted suspects outside the Row NYC Hotel at 700 Eighth Ave. after allegedly spotting one of them recklessly riding a moped without ID.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The study surveyed 10,000 licensed drivers and compared all 50 states in nine categories. Some of the categories included drivers who force other cars off the road, drivers who exit their cars to fight with others, tailgating, and honking—each weighted on a percentage basis to equal a total score of 100.

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The Chevron Corporation announced Friday that it will be moving its corporate headquarters out of California and into Texas over the Golden State’s hostility.

“The company’s headquarters will move from San Ramon, California, to Houston, Texas,” the gas company said in a press release. “The company expects all corporate functions to migrate to Houston over the next five years.”

Go where you’re treated best.

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If anyone still believes that the U.S. economy is doing just fine, they should take a closer look at what is happening to the retailers that depend upon the faithful American consumer to “shop, shop, shop” to keep the economy afloat. American consumers are rapidly running out of firepower, and now, so too are the retailers that depend on them.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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Beyond the obvious Cloward-Piven agenda in play throughout most of Europe and the US, open border policies accomplish much more than simply erasing western culture with third-world migrants. The introduction of violent peoples from violent countries and ideologies is a perfect way to generate public hostility and getting them to react in anger. When a government refuses to represent the interests of actual citizens that are under attack by foreign elements the only avenue left to that populace is self defense.

Establishment elites understand very well that their malicious activities are going to generate a vengeful response. Their first measure is to shame the public with accusations of “extremism” when the public fights back. When that doesn’t work, the next measure is to use popular riots as an excuse to impose authoritarian controls “in the name of safety.”

In other words, government officials invite brutal people into the society, let those people run amok while refusing to protect the public, then those same officials punish the public for protecting themselves after leaving them no other choice.

Newsbusters.

Google is redirecting users searching for former President Donald Trump’s name toward news about Vice President Kamala Harris in what appears to be another search term switcheroo, an MRC Free Speech America search found.

The MRC findings corroborate reports from X owner Elon Musk and others who noted that when users search for “donald trump” or “trump rally,” the banner with news results listed Harris’s name.

On the latest episode of “The Tony Kinnett Cast,” we don our foreign policy glasses and celebrate the freedom of two Americans formerly held as political prisoners in Moscow, while criticizing the potential release of over a dozen Russian hackers and a plea deal for two terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. For an administration that bragged, “The adults are back in charge,” it certainly doesn’t feel like that’s the case.

An Algerian boxer almost breaks a female athlete’s face in an Olympic boxing match as equity is proclaimed at the top of LGBTQ+ activists’ lungs.

Read it.

Brooklyn prosecutors say Dexter Taylor is a danger to society. The 53-year-old built more than a dozen illegal firearms in his Bushwick apartment and is now serving a 10-year sentence in a maximum-security prison.

But Taylor and his friends say he’s not a threat, he’s a tinkerer — a software engineer, electronic music composer and amateur TikTok philosopher — who made guns as a hobby. They say he doesn’t belong behind bars.

Taylor was convicted earlier this year of various charges, including criminal possession of a weapon, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition and violating New York’s prohibitions on homemade firearms, known as ghost guns. His case blurs the lines of the traditional political debates about gun rights and gun violence.

Of course, the fact that he’s black has absolutely nothing to do with it. Perish the thought!

Read it.

Twenty years ago such an incident would be widely regarded in the UK and Europe as a terrorist attack. In the woke haze of 2024, though, the 17-year-old child of Rwandan migrants who went on a stabbing spree at a kids dance recital in the town of Southport, England is treated as a run-of-the-mill criminal. The response from the British public is one of rage as riots erupt across the country.

Read it.

Los Angeles officials are pushing back on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order this month to start clearing homeless encampments, arguing the effort to clean up the city’s streets won’t work.

Not as long as it’s in the hands of Democrats, it won’t. That’s an obvious truth.

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The nonprofit that has been exposing radical gender ideology in California filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the public school district in Burbank, California, for failing to comply with state law by providing requested documents.

Burbank Unified School District, in Los Angeles County, hasn’t responded to the Center for American Liberty’s repeated records requests, the organization says. This silence violates the California Public Records Act, which requires the state government to disclose records to the public upon request, notes the nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech and civil liberties.

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‘Hundreds’ of cars are being stolen from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport every year, investigators from KING NBC 5 have found.

Car thieves frequently target hotel and motel lots offering “park-n-fly” or “stay-n-fly” packages. Data reviewed by KING NBC 5 shows that some of the most well-known lodging names have the highest crime rates, leaving customers liable.

According to public records, the airport Marriott tops the list for crimes at hotel and “park-n-fly” lots. Data from the King County Sheriff’s Office shows 94 car thefts and prowls in 2023, including 27 stolen vehicles. In 2022, there were 74 reported incidents, according to KING NBC 5.

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“We are putting parents on notice,” then-California attorney general Kamala Harris warned at her 2011 inauguration. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Two years later, Cheree Peoples, a single mom of a special needs child, was jailed under a truancy law that Vice President Harris championed as San Francisco district attorney and later as attorney general.

Read it.

Two-thirds of California fast food restaurant operators who responded to an online survey believe their costs will increase at least $100,000 annually per location, according to a report released July 19 by the Employment Policies Institute—a Washington D.C.-based lobby group.

Approximately 26 percent of respondents said they expect costs to increase by more than $200,000 at each location.

In June and July, 182 operators were polled on their thoughts about a new minimum wage law requiring quick service restaurants with at least 60 locations nationwide to pay employees a minimum of $20 per hour. The law took effect April 1.

“People aren’t getting paid enough! I know! Let’s pass a law that forces businesses to eliminate their jobs entirely! Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

The American Mind.

The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is in full swing, and in keeping with the Democrats’ safe space neo-segregationist principles, it organized a series of mass Zoom calls oriented to different demographic groups. Inspired by a supposedly organic gathering of 90,000 black women on Zoom, other “identity groups” wanted in, with conclaves planned for “Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women, and white men.” Not wishing to intrude on anyone’s curated spaces, I logged on to “White Dudes for Harris” on Monday night to see what the Harris campaign was asking of me and 100 million other white American men.

The moderator of the event was a scraggly-bearded and top-knotted Democrat political operative called Ross Morales Rocketto, who kicked off the meeting by “addressing the elephant in the room,” namely the problematic nature of an assembly of white men, “because throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on.” Rocketto explained that “masculinity as a trope has been coopted by the MAGA Right into something that feeds into the loneliness epidemic,” leading ultimately to destructive behaviors.

Rocketto introduced the evening’s introductory speaker who, unsurprisingly, was black. Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, served as a kind of validator, reassuring anyone concerned about an all-white gathering of men that he “represents millions of members who come from all ethnicities, including a lot of white dudes.” Mitchell cautioned that “white nationalists in MAGA want to speak for you,” and the failure to denounce them signals our acceptance. “Don’t allow this fringe cult to speak for you,” he urged us, but stand up “in the spirit of solidarity” with Kamala Harris and “get in formation with the forces uniting against fascism.”

Quillette.

More than a million square kilometres of modern Russia once belonged to China. Or at least it once belonged to the Qing, the last of the region’s imperial dynasties. The territory was handed over as a result of two treaties in the late nineteenth century: just two among a long list of unequal accords inflicted on the hollowed-out Qing. Chief among the dispossessions was Outer Manchuria. This sprawling tract of land in the Eurasian far east includes Vladivostok—previously China’s “city of eternal light,” now Russia’s largest Pacific port.

…

Moscow’s military struggles have come as a shock to Beijing. After years of joint drills involving both the PLA and the Russian Armed Forces, Beijing has finally observed its partner in live action for the first time. It has all been a sobering experience: the failures of planning and logistics; the corruption and missing supplies; the faulty equipment; the demoralised troops; the years of grinding attrition. As the CCP hastily reevaluates its notion of Russian competence, the temptation to retake Outer Manchuria is likely to grow.

Read it.

Coverage of the ongoing unrest in Venezuela, in the wake of dictator Nicolas Maduro’s claim to re-election via rampant fraud, was mixed at best, and left out a very significant detail: the various Biden policy failures that directly led to this moment in history.

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I guess they don’t want to ‘pay their fair share’.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says that Kamala Harris ‘will work with Congress’ to provide a ‘pathway to citizenship’ for tens of millions of illegal migrants.

“I believe we need to create a pathway to citizenship,” Warren told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday. “All of that is part of what we need to do for comprehensive immigration reform. Kamala Harris will work with Congress and get that done.”

We already have a ‘pathway to citizenship’–and it starts by obeying the law.

The American Mind.

The stunning events of the last several weeks have highlighted the great weaknesses in the corporate media, an essential part of modern America’s political system. They have, as they constantly remind us, a vital role to play. But they betrayed that role by their open partisanship.

For one brief shining moment, it seemed as if the media would live up to the promise of Adolph Ochs, the founder of the modern New York Times: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” In the month after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the media raised and vigorously pressed the questions about his fitness for office that had to be addressed for the good of the country.

Yet this spasm of critical curiosity about the fitness of our Democratic president turned out to be just an interlude. Everybody can remember that right before the debate the media (including the New York Times, which later called for Biden to leave the race) were saying that Biden was fine and questions about his decline were based on out-of-context video clips, labeled “cheap fakes” by the White House press office. But now that Biden has left the race, the media have reverted to their usual lack of interest in anything that sheds negative light on the national Democratic Party.

The American Mind.

Most of the excitement and action regarding the “From the River to the Sea” college student encampment movement has petered out as attention has shifted to other matters. The 20-year-old cultural revolutionaries behind it have gone home to their upper middle-class neighborhoods and are enjoying a relaxing summer of poolside reading of the collected works of Edward Said.

For the rest of us, it is time to probe the causes and consequences and to figure out what needs to be done to ensure their ideas have minimal impact on anything important.

Since the middle of the sixties, there has been significant media and scholarly interest in radical student activism. But very typically it has consisted more of cheerleading for it, or despair over its absence, rather than any concentrated effort to objectively understand, profile, and explain it.

Read it.

Wright didn’t hurt Obama, so I doubt that this clown will hurt Harris. But it’s a good reminder of where she’s coming from.

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For the past two years, Chicago has received more than 45,000 foreign nationals from the southern U.S. border, where border communities have been inundated with border crossers. The taxpayer costs for Illinois and the city of Chicago continue with the new state budget that started this month setting aside more than $900 million for health care, housing, food and even legal subsidies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently went on record with his plan to continue busing people to Chicago, where local law enforcement are prohibited from assisting enforcement of federal immigration laws. Earlier this week, a Chicago City Council committee heard from the budget director they have not budgeted for the expected surge.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was asked about the potential of thousands of more non-citizen migrants being transported to the city leading up to the Democratic National Convention next month.

Read it.

Nearly every American teen has access to a smartphone or tablet and actively uses multiple social media platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. In recent years, the number of social media challenges has skyrocketed and become increasingly dangerous, such as the “Tide pod challenge” and “Benadryl challenge.” Some teens are engaging in risky stunts and even orchestrating events in the real world that pose significant risks to themselves and others—all to get the clicks.

A 17-year-old Nebraska teenager has been slapped with two felony counts of criminal mischief after he was accused of derailing a BNSF Railway freight train while filming the incident for a YouTube video.

Read it.

Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute.

The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era.

They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke.

In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.

Go Woke, go broke. Reality is what sticks around even after you quit believing in it.

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On Saturday, the organizers of the Paris Olympics scrambled to pressure social media platforms, such as X, to censor users who mocked and criticized Friday night’s shocking Opening Ceremony. The event, which featured drag queens, nudity, and scenes deemed highly disrespectful to Christians, sparked outrage worldwide. When the International Olympic Committee’s social media 1984-style censorship efforts failed (read: here), the committee had no choice but to apologize for the drag queen parody of Jesus’ Last Supper on Sunday morning.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

I was outwitted by a Finnish outhouse.

I have never encountered a fully electronic and mechanized, high-efficiency outhouse before. This one, once the door slid shut, was totally dark inside. The door locked and could only be unlocked from inside, using a push-button on a panel. Which was not lit. I ended up digging out my phone, using the light to locate the facility I needed, then had enough light to wash my hands. I managed to find the proper control panel to let myself out. I never did locate the light switch. I guess if you use the fancy facility often enough, you learn where everything was. Intuitive the biffie was not.

Alma Boykin is an excellent writer of Speculative Fiction. Highly recommended.

Read it.

The so-called protest in Washington, DC over Netanyahu’s address to Congress was a riot.

…

A city that probably has more law enforcement agencies than any other city in the US, and which had plenty of time to plan for Netanyahu’s visit, the response was an epic fail. An epic fail that may involve an effort to try and avoid losing votes from the Hamas wing of the Democrat Party.

They ought to give it back to Maryland, as was done in 1846 with the portion of D.C. south of the Potomac, and let Maryland deal with it. Having a separate political entity for the nation’s capital is a stupid idea, as was moving it from Philadelphia, which was a perfectly adequate location and historically more appropriate.

Associated Press.

“Move fast and break things,” a high-tech mantra popularized 20 years ago by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was supposed to be a rallying cry for game-changing innovation. It now seems more like an elegy for a society perched on a digital foundation too fragile to withstand a defective software program that was supposed to help protect computers — not crash them.

The worldwide technology meltdown caused by a flawed update installed earlier this month on computers running on Microsoft’s dominant Windows software by cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike was so serious that some affected businesses such as Delta Air Lines were still recovering from it days later.

It’s a tell-tale moment — one that illustrates the digital pitfalls looming in a culture that takes the magic of technology for granted until it implodes into a horror show that exposes our ignorance and vulnerability.

Read it.

Whenever I see an unusually coloured car, I stare. Especially if it is pink. Recently, one particular vehicle did not startle me simply due to its garish paint job, but the slogan plastered across its door: “Unleash my big vagina energy”.

That someone chose to adorn their most public belongings with nonsense I am embarrassed to even type, reveals a lot about how our culture’s boundaries are on life support. Equally does one of its new, likely fleeting heroes: the so-called “Hawk Tuah Girl”. 22-year-old American woman Haliey Welch was dubbed so after uttering the eponymous catchphrase to a YouTube vlogger, it being an onomatopoeia for expectoration on a man during oral sex. The clip later went viral on TikTok.

The people I feel sorry for are her parents.

Washington Free Beacon.

When I entered Cornell University in 1964, I could not have imagined that given the thousands of future doctors, lawyers, scholars, engineers, architects, and executives in my class, the person destined to have possibly the greatest influence on America’s future would not be one of them. Instead, that role may have been achieved by a fellow member of Cornell’s debate association, a tall, loudmouthed Brooklynite who proudly bore the cognomen Rick “The Pr*ck” Mann.

Mann soon achieved a local notoriety when he and his partner/sidekick, chosen to represent Cornell at the prestigious Georgetown University debate tournament, stood up to issue a loud “Boo!” when the dinner speaker, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was announced. For their misbehavior, Mann and partner were dismissed from the association, and I never encountered (nor expected to hear of) them again. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2020, when Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement, which organized violent riots in many American cities following the George Floyd killing, described herself as a “trained Marxist” thanks to the tutelage of Mr. Mann.

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Many claim the problem with fractional reserve banking is that it loans money into existence. It does, but under normal circumstances the money created by commercial banks disappears when loans are repaid or defaulted on, which therefore doesn’t create a permanent inflation of the money supply.

Government intervention, however, converts temporary money into permanent money through bailouts like the Troubled Asset Relief Program. They purchase loans that would have been defaulted on, preventing the evaporation of credit. When banks hold loans that are at risk of default, they face having to write them off, which would remove this part of the money supply. Bailouts turn such disappearing credit into permanent money, in effect giving banks free money.

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If it’s one thing that Eurocrats can agree on, it’s to leave no fortune nnplundered nor any pocket unpicked.

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Big Lots said in a June filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it plans to open three stores nationwide this year and close 35 to 40.

Prior to the announcement, Big Lots had 1,392 stores throughout the United States.

In its SEC filing, the Columbus, Ohio-headquartered company said the planned closures follow “macroeconomic challenges” within the U.S. economy, such as inflation, that had “adversely impacted” the buying power of its customers.

The retailer also warned in its SEC filing that, based on current cash and liquidity projections, it has “substantial doubts” about its ability to continue. It also cited a “significant likelihood” that Big Lots won’t meet the terms of a 2022 credit agreement.

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Lufkin believes lifestyle is key to preventing chronic disease and writes about his advice in the new book, “Lies I Taught in Medical School: How Conventional Medicine Is Making You Sicker and What You Can Do to Save Your Own Life.”

He doesn’t believe they’re intentional lies since medical knowledge is always evolving and doctors have to constantly re-evaluate things they thought were true. But he’s critical of what he calls the “currently accepted dogma” in medical school, which is often presented without any alternative theories, he notes.

Lufkin says these are three of the “lies” he taught in medical school. TODAY.com also reached out to medical specialists in each field for their take on his views. The interviews were edited and condensed for clarity:

Yeah, I’ll rush right out to buy a book by somebody who admits to teaching lies in medical school.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I was unsure what to do for a show this week. The nonstop firehose of craziness from the political class has fried my brain a bit. That and the events of the last week have broken the gauge on my clown meter. The absurdity of the Kamala Harris campaign on the heels of Nursing Home Joe getting bumped off in a midnight coup highlights the utter fakeness of our politics.

Instead of trying to make any sense of it, I just turned the mic on and started talking for an hour in a drug fueled stream of consciousness. Okay, there were no drugs involved, even though drugs would make it easier to follow the election. Instead, I meandered around from one topic to another, all revolving around the fact that our politics have been fake and gay for a long time.

In fact, I was going to call the show “Fake & Gay” but that ran into problems with the platforms I post this to, so I went with something less salty. That is, however, the prevailing sentiment of the show. It is not just that things are fake now, but they have been fake for a long time. What we are seeing now is the approach to peak fakeness, which most likely comes just before collapse.

Reuters.

At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills. Such deals are astonishingly easy – and reveal how drug traffickers are eluding efforts to halt the deadly trade behind the fentanyl crisis.

UPDATE: Markets in Everything: Fentanyl Precursors (Tyler Cowen)

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Princeton University is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The university has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees. Peralta already has tenure, but the promotion would make him eligible for university leadership roles, including deanships.

“I’m sure you will want to join me in congratulating Dan-el on his promotion to a full professorship,” the chair of the classics department, Barbara Graziosi, wrote to her colleagues on July 18. “This is still ‘unofficial’ news, because the Board of Trustees will have to rubber stamp the recommendation made by the committee that oversees promotions, but I was told I am allowed to share the news internally and do so with glee.”

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One of the most damaging impacts of Illinois’ people loss to other states is the destruction of Illinois’ tax base. When people leave in a given year, they take their incomes (adjusted gross incomes, or AGI) with them, and that means the state’s tax base suffers.

A smaller tax base, everything else equal, means less tax revenues for safety, education, road repair and every other core government service – or, as is typically the case in Illinois, more debts and more tax hikes.

Unfortunately, Illinois’ out-migration problem is much bigger than just a one year loss: the state has lost people and AGI every single year since at least 2000, the first year of Wirepoints’ out-migration analysis. The AGI losses pile up on top of each other year after year, slashing Illinois’ tax revenue growth and destroying Illinois’ overall prosperity.

Time to leave.

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A North Korean military intelligence operative has been indicted in a conspiracy to hack into American health care providers, NASA, U.S. military bases and international entities, stealing sensitive information and installing ransomware to fund more attacks, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.

The indictment of Rim Jong Hyok by a grand jury in Kansas City, Kansas, accuses him of laundering the money through a Chinese bank and then using it to buy computer servers and fund more cyberattacks on defense, technology and government entities around the world.

The hacks on American hospitals and other health care providers disrupted the treatment of patients, officials said. He’s accused of targeting of 17 entities across 11 U.S. states, including NASA and U.S. military bases, as well as defense and energy companies in China, Taiwan and South Korea.

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Alameda County, home to Oakland, ranked No. 1 in homicides in the state per capita in 2023, according to a report released earlier this month, by the California Attorney General’s office.

Meanwhile, Merced County – in the central region of the state – which topped the list in 2022, showed a sharp decrease in homicides and fell out of the state’s top five.

Los Angeles County, despite accounting for more than one-third of homicides in the state, also was not on the top five list.

Statewide, 1,892 homicide cases were reported in 2023 – a nearly 16 percent decrease compared to 2022. This is the first time the number of homicides has dropped below 2,000 since 2020.

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Francis Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as the optimal political system because it allowed all to satisfy their “desire for recognition” but, he warned, absent an external threat, such a society could become moribund, the levelling of recognition dissuading any from pursuing it through the achievement of great deeds. “It would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging; its technology second rate.” Look around and say it is not so.