DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

A Roman Catholic diocese is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court a New York appeals court ruling that requires religious charities to provide abortion coverage in their employee health insurance packages.

ObamaCare: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan … so long as it covers everything WE want it to cover (not YOU) and of course you’ll have to pay through the nose for that extra coverage.”

Read it.

Iran reported raking in nearly $16 billion in profits from its illicit oil trade over the past several months, highlighting the Biden-Harris administration’s perennially lax enforcement of sanctions meant to stymie Tehran’s cash flow.

Tehran exported a total of “$15.7 billion worth of oil in the first four months in the Iranian calendar” year, which lasted from March 21 to July 22, Mohammad Rezvanifar, the head of Iran’s Customs Administration, said on Monday. Most of this crude oil was offloaded in China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and India, according to the country’s state-controlled press.

Iran’s illicit oil trade, which is heavily sanctioned by the United States and other Western nations, has hit a boom period under the Biden-Harris administration, topping around $90 billion as of March. This cash has helped to keep the hardline regime afloat amid economic uncertainty and helps Tehran fund its network of terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Read it.

As California attorney general, Kamala Harris consistently berated staff members, instructed them to stand and call her “general” when she entered the office, and banned many of them from looking her in the eye, according to the father of one of Harris’s former interns.

The father, Terry McAteer, penned a 2019 op-ed recounting the horror stories from his son Gregory’s short time as a public policy intern in Harris’s attorney general’s office.

“Senator Harris vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity constantly in her berating of staff and others,” McAteer wrote. “The staff is in complete fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day.”

The New Neo.

Of course he does.

As Erdogan said: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

Read it.

President Biden called House Speaker Mike Johnson “dead on arrival” during a strange interaction with a reporter on Monday.

The exchange came shortly after Biden called on Congress to impose term limits and a code of conduct on the Supreme Court. In a statement released earlier on Monday, Johnson condemned Biden’s proposal to “radically overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court,” and argued that doing so would “tilt the balance of power” and erode the rule of law.

“This proposal is the logical conclusion to the Biden-Harris Administration and Congressional Democrats’ ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court,” the Louisiana Republican argued. “Their calls to expand and pack the Court will soon resume.”

“It is telling that Democrats want to change the system that has guided our nation since its founding simply because they disagree with some of the Court’s recent decisions,” he added. “This dangerous gambit of the Biden-Harris Administration is dead on arrival in the House.”

Newsweek.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s disputed election victory spells trouble for Vice President Kamala Harris as the U.S.-Mexico border takes center stage in the race for the presidency.

The presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential race faces difficult paths to navigate after Maduro was declared the winner on Sunday, most importantly because the result may lead to what one expert told Newsweek said was likely to be a surge in migration from Venezuelans fleeing his regime.

If that happens, Republican lawmakers who have branded Harris as Biden’s “border czar”—a description seen by her supporters as inaccurate—may attempt to capitalize on her comments about Venezuela to further attack her record on immigration policy and border security, particularly as migrant numbers typically rise between August and October.

Other aspects of the Biden-Harris administration’s policy toward Venezuela, which was an important oil supplier to the U.S. prior to sanctions as well as a source for rare earth elements crucial for emerging technologies, may also come under scrutiny.

Various elements of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies in foreign affairs are likely going to come back to bite Jambalaya right square on the ass–and rightly so.

Maduro’s actions are right out of the standard socialist playbook.

Read it.

On Monday, July 29th, President Joe Biden proposed a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It would impose term limits on the justices and force them to abide by an “ethics code.”

This sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? Well, it is anything but. It is the first salvo of an unabashed attempt by the Democratic Party to fundamentally alter the balance of power between the three branches of the United States government.

The Democrats have long been frustrated with how the Supreme Court can stifle their political agenda by ruling that some of the things they want to do are actually unconstitutional. As long as they could appoint justices that were more aligned with the Democratic Party’s ideology than with the Constitution of the United States, the Democrats were happy. Now that the Court has a solid majority of constitution-friendly justices, the Democrats are frustrated.

Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance (Washington Post)

For 25 Minutes, Secret Service In Command Center Never Notified Trump’s Detail

JD Vance is faltering in the Midwest, a big problem for the GOP (John L. Dorman/Business Insider)

PBS ‘Washington Week’ Panel Defends Harris From GOP Attacks While Mocking JD Vance

Buttigieg Tells Fox Viewers that MAGA Is a Cult (Peter Wade/Rolling Stone)

Ilhan Omar says Trump is ‘losing his memory’ after he confuses her with Rashida Tlaib (John Bowden/The Independent)  I don’t see any effective difference.

“My Beautiful Christians:” Trump’s Pandering to Christian Nationalists (emptywheel)

How to Buy a President – Donald Trump’s joke of a media company is also a $6 billion meme stock … (David Freedlander/New York Magazine)

Trump’s falling legal fees free up campaign cash (Noah Bressner/Axios)

A comprehensive guide to J.D. Vance’s views on women and children (Judd Legum/Popular Information)  Getcher Narrative! Right here!

Trump uses immunity ruling to try to blow up his conviction (Liz Dye/Public Notice)

The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally (McKay Coppins/The Atlantic)  If you hear the dog-whistle, then you’re the dog.

Trump Just Had His Worst Week–Ever (A.B. Stoddard/The Bulwark)

Trump proposed bombing Mexico and it somehow wasn’t a big story (Zack Beauchamp/Vox)

The media fails to take Trump at his word. Again. (Margaret Sullivan/American Crisis)

Trump’s Bro-Pocalypse Advisers Got Him ‘Cat Lady’ Vance (Nell Scovell/The Daily Beast)

These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers (Justin Glawe/Rolling Stone)

Iran Is Working to Undercut Trump in Presidential Election, U.S. Spy Agencies Say (Dustin Volz/Wall Street Journal)  Of course they are. They’d be fools not to.

ABC, CBS, NBC Gush of Kamala’s ‘Strength’, ‘Surge’ Putting Trump ‘On Defense’

Read it.

Well, here’s a story we can safely say you’ve likely never heard before.

An Apache Indian named “Keanu Dude” has been accused of starting a massive wildfire in the state of Arizona…by setting fire to the American flag.

The wildfire eventually burned over 2,200 acres, according to a report by the New York Post.

Dude was arrested Tuesday for allegedly starting the Watch Fire, the report says. The Post wrote the fire “burned 3.4 square miles, destroyed 21 homes, and forced over 400 people to evacuate reservation land before being contained last week, officials said.”

Read it.

The United States’ national debt has reached another milestone. According to the House Budget Committee, the national debt is set to surpass $35 trillion.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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.

ZMan does a deep dive.

A question that does not get asked very much, especially in public, is if Christianity is compatible with democracy. Organized Christians in this age make a point of supporting “democracy” because the people in charge cannot stop talking about it, but that speaks to the sorts of people running organized Christianity. They want to be in good standing with the rulers, an irony that never gets mentioned. The thing they claim to profess evolved in opposition to secular rule.

Putting that aside, the issue of whether democracy, as in the consent of the governed through direct participation in governance by the governed, is compatible with Christianity is an important one. It is clear that as the West has become more democratic, it has become less Christian. Open hostility to Christianity is a feature of the class of people who talk about democracy the most. It certainly seems like the fans of democracy are not fans of Christianity.

Most people today who call themselves Christian or one of the sects of what we think of as Christianity are well aware of the hostility, but they blame secularism or various names for radicalism, rather than democracy. Christians embrace democracy as much as the opponents of Christianity, even if their particular brand of Christianity has no democratic elements. Catholicism, for example, is anti-democratic in structure, but American Catholics love democracy.

Read it.

A San Francisco resident who was attacked by an illegal immigrant in 2008 blamed the incident on then-district attorney Kamala Harris’s soft-on-crime policies, scoffing at the vice president’s record as a California prosecutor in an interview with ABC Monday.

In July 2008, Amanda Kiefer was attacked and run down in San Francisco by 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, leaving her with a fractured skull. Izaguirre was arrested months earlier on drug charges but released thanks to then-district attorney Harris’s Back on Track initiative, a soft-on-crime policy that allowed young nonviolent drug offenders to avoid jail by enrolling in a 12-month community service program.

As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris has touted her record as a “tough prosecutor” along the campaign trail, but Kiefer called that message “laughable,” ABC reported.

Read it.

A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.

Matthew Garrett, formerly a tenured history professor at the California community college, will receive $2,245,480 divided into monthly payments for the next 20 years as well as an immediate one-time payment of $154,520 as “compensation for back wages and medical benefits since [his] dismissal,” according to the July 10 settlement agreement.

Also under the terms of the settlement, Garrett agreed to resign from his job with the Kern Community College District. Administrators, in turn, have withdrawn and sealed any and all accusations and reports accusing him of “unprofessional conduct.”

Read it.

This woman was in charge of the Federal Reserve, which may explain why inflation is eating our lunch.

Read it.

Parents in Palo Alto are fuming about the school district’s plans for an upcoming ethnic studies class, saying they’re worried the curriculum is too political and will push left-leaning political activism on impressionable high school students. The district denies the charge and says it’s working on an inclusive model for the class.

The battle in Palo Alto reflects fights that have played out elsewhere in the Bay Area and are expected to escalate when the state mandate to teach ethnic studies is rolled out at all schools starting in the 2025-26 school year.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Outage tracking website Netblocks confirmed on X, “Network data show disruptions to multiple internet providers in France amid reports of a fibre sabotage campaign targeting telecoms infrastructure during the Paris 2024 Olympics.”

Bloomberg reports that fiber lines operated by the telecommunications company SFR were cut during the overnight hours. Internet traffic in the southern and eastern regions of the country was disrupted and has since been rerouted.

Read it.

A new test gauging levels of key proteins in the blood was far more accurate than doctor assessments in spotting Alzheimer’s disease in people with early-stage illness.

The test, called APS2 (the amyloid probability score 2), was 91% accurate in diagnosing Alzheimer’s in people with mild cognitive decline or early dementia, compared to the 61% success rate of primary care doctors who examined the same patients.

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.

UnHerd.

For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the first woman of colour to ascend to the presidency; she will be a woman without children of her own.

Harris, 59, has been married for 10 years to attorney Douglas Emhoff, and is stepmother to his two adult children who famously (and, let’s be honest, adorably) refer to her as “Momala”. It’s her first marriage; before that, she had several high-profile relationships with men including television personality Montel Williams and San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who is 30 years Harris’s senior and is credited with helping jump-start her career as a district attorney.

There are various ways to describe Harris’s romantic history and current family background: non-traditional, blended, modern, messy. The youths, possibly, might call it “brat”, a lifestyle vibe characterised by chaotic fun (along with cocaine use and the occasional emotional breakdown). But whatever you want to call it, it’s remarkable to consider how far we’ve come from the days of rigidly defined “family values” in politics, when extramarital affairs could be career-ending scandals, and even just being divorced was vaguely suspicious.

The Spectator.

Diosdado Cabello, a Chavista deputy, who has served as vice president, acting president, among others, addresses his base. “Brothers and sisters, how are you? Look, once and for all, let’s not think about it anymore, let’s go to the streets, the people to the electoral centers, because they do not understand reasons, but rather popular mobilization.”

“So let’s move, let’s move. They do not understand the reason for the people’s vote, that the people came out to vote in a majority, that there are some results that the [electoral council] is going to give and those results they know do not favor them and they are going to seek to generate violence. So let’s take the before, during and after plan at once. Defense of the vote. Give him a hug with Bolívar, with Chávez, with Maduro, with the people. We will win.”

Unconfirmed pictures are leaking. On FaceTime calls, family members dotted around the world are asking, “how will they steal it?”

Read it.

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.

Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.

She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”

Read it.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic system that has emerged in the digital era. It is characterized by the unilateral claim of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. In this version of capitalism, predicting and influencing behavior (political and economic) rather than producing goods and services is the primary product. This economic logic prioritizes extracting, processing, and trading personal data to predict and influence human behavior by exploiting those predictions for various economic (marketing) and political objectives.

More accurately ‘surveillance socialism’.

Read it.

The medical establishment is teeing up for the launch of another “pandemic,” this one centering around H5N8 Influenza, also known as avian influenza or bird flu.

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.

New York Times.

Linda Yaccarino, the C.E.O. of X, has worked hard to bring back advertisers and fix the platform’s business. But its owner, Elon Musk, is always one whim away from undoing her work.

Read it.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Sunday to invade Israel in order to support the Palestinians as the Israel Defense Forces continues to battle Hamas terrorists in Gaza, The Times of Israel reported.

I see a number of Turkish cities glowing in the dark….

Newsbusters.

We were reliably told that attacks against the courts were attacks against our very institutions, and therefore on Democracy™ itself. That is, unless you are a Democrat appearing on a Regime Media Sunday political affairs show and attacking a majority-conservative Supreme Court. In which case, fire at will. Figuratively, hopefully.

WATCH as CBS’s Robert Costa, filling in for Margaret Brennan on deFace The Nation, enables Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as he attacks the Court, accusing it of “threatening democracy” without any sort of pushback or followup:

Read it.

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.

Trump tries to sharpen Harris attacks as she blunts his momentum (Politico)

5 Excerpts From JD Vance’s Emails to a Transgender Classmate (New York Times)  Don’t communicate with left-wing crazies. It will always prove a pretext to attack you.

Trump tells Christian voters “they won’t have to vote anymore” if he is elected in November (CBS News)

Rebuke Of Trump Calling Kamala ‘Bum’ Sends MSNBC Host Into Frenzy! ‘Hear Hear!’

Trump’s superpower is plausible deniability (Jason Sattler/I Know How Much You Care)

German Publisher Stops All Printing Of JD Vance’s Book Hillbilly Elegy

Buttigieg says voters have transferred their concerns about age to Trump (Isabella Ramírez/Politico)

Read it.

Before Joe Biden’s stumbling and incoherent debate performance led panicked journalists to join Democrats in bullying the presumptive Democratic nominee out of the 2024 campaign, the media airwaves were full of praise for Biden’s “enormously consequential” and “extraordinarily successful” presidency.

The “successes” that so impressed journalists, of course, were the *multiple* trillion-dollar-plus legislative packages passed by a friendly Democratic Congress during Biden’s first two years — “accomplishments” that have stoked the awful inflation that’s led most Americans to say the President’s economic policies have failed.

“If you add up those seven pieces of legislation, it’s a $3.5 trillion agenda that Biden and the Democrats have passed since early last year,” political analyst Ryan Lizza gushed on CNN in 2022. “There’s really nothing like that in terms of that scale….He’s sort of in that modern pantheon now.”

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The most expensive member of the oldest profession.

The Cloud People will be throwing money at her for the next three months in an attempt to buy their way to retaining power. We will find out whether that actually works.

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.

Tyler Cowen.

The minimum wage will tend to increase unemployment among low-skill workers, often minorities. To many people that’s an argument against the minimum wage. But to progressives at the opening of the 20th century that was an argument for the minimum wage–progressive’s demanded minimum wages to get women and racial minorities out of the work force.

Something similar may be happening with rent control. Rent control reduces new development. Bug or feature? California Republican Tony Strickland argues that reduced development is a feature. New state laws in California prevent cities from restricting development but if rent control was legal cities could be used it to do the same thing just by making it unprofitable to build.

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.

“The solution to a lot of problems is to just keep shooting.” — Lee Andersen

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.

Read it.

The so-called Extremism Commission (Ekstremismekommisjonen) was appointed by the Labour-led Støre government in Norway in June 2022. They published their report in the spring of 2024.[2]

The commission, which was supported by key figures in the Norwegian Labour Party, seems to conclude that people who disagree with the Social Democrats and their immigration policy are suspected extremists and possibly potential terrorists. This is perhaps not so surprising.

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.

Read it.

We can’t have any of this democracy nonsense! We’re Democrats!

Read it.

Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, then you’re the dog.

Read it.

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.