Author: admin

Authored by Terry Paulding via AmericanThinker.com,

I took a step back from writing about the Wu Flu for a few weeks because there were so many people already writing what I was thinking.  But now the country and the world around us are spiraling downward into panic, and officials are feeding us fear porn recklessly.  It’s time to sift the information, to try to find some clarity.  My all-time favorite word is “perspective,” and that is what seems to be missing right now.  That, and honesty from the “top” levels of our government and our media.

I’m not a medical professional.  Just an observant senior citizen who cares about my own health and that of those around me.  I read and watch multiple sources of information daily because as a grandparent, I’m concerned for my kids and my little grandkids, as well as my own well-being.  

The following are my observations.

Let’s start with this mostly unacknowledged problem: the vaccinated have had the rug pulled right out from under their feet.  They were secure in the knowledge that they did the right thing.  They dutifully rolled up their sleeves, problem solved, COVID could no longer touch them.  Oops!

Cue the needle screeching across the record, painfully.  (Sorry, youngsters, if that’s not an image that makes you cringe as it does us old-timers.)  

Now the vaccinated are aware that there is no truth to the bogus “fact” that they would no longer be in any danger from COVID.  The booster shot is being pushed, and pushed hard — but will it be any better than the first two ineffective shots?  

The fact that the “vaccine” is not a vaccine is becoming obvious.  

The fear is palpable.  No matter how high they hastily build their wall against information contrary to the narrative, that wall is crumbling.  Reports from other countries, and from our own hospital nurses, are that wards are filled with sick, vaccinated people.

There are ample reports that the vaccinated are in fact themselves spreading delta and therefore responsible for the variant’s mayhem.  This may be because their infections are often symptom-free, due to the effects of the vaccine.  Then there are the terrifying reports that the vaccinated have compromised their immune systems.  Nobody wants to mention any of these possibilities, because they would interfere with the program to get everyone vaccinated.  With good reason!

Why, then, is government coming down on the unvaccinated so hard? What’s to be gained by the heavy-handed approach?  

New Yorkers, for instance, no longer have the freedom to live if they aren’t vaccinated.  I can’t imagine (and I’m an ex–New Yorker, so I imagine the city quite well) what that would be like.  I guess grocery and restaurant delivery would be the only options.  You can’t live like that, not in a city that is a rabbit-warren of small apartments stacked on top of one another, next to one another.  It’s a recipe for despair.  Not only for the unvaccinated who have never had COVID, but also for those who have had it and have natural immunity to the virus, immunity that’s far better than the spike protein in the “vaccine” shots.

San Francisco is going in the same direction.  Want to go to a restaurant or bar?  Show your vaccination certificate.  In the Bay Area, people are clearly terrified.  They’ve started wearing their masks alone, in the car, once again.  

That’s a pretty strong indicator.

Those of us who decided not to get the shot are the lucky ones.  If we get COVID, we’ll know, and if we’re smart, we will have arranged in advance to get treatment immediately.  In Florida, Ron DeSantis is setting up clinics for monoclonal antibody infusions.  They’re desperate to shut him down.  Treating people for the infection in a forthright, obvious manner means it will no longer have the power to terrify us all into getting the lucrative jabs.  

We won’t all end up in the hospital; we won’t be dying.  Between the antibody treatments, and ivermectin and its cohort of zinc, Vitamin D, etc., the death toll from the virus should be demonstrably minuscule among the otherwise healthy.

I have to add my own honest feelings about this.  I am not scared of getting the delta variant.  

From all accounts, it will confer great antibody protection from future infections.  It’s not that bad in the healthy, and I’m healthy.  I’ve arranged treatment if I get it.  And I would be making my contribution to herd immunity.  I also think if the kids get delta, it would be far better than subjecting them to the experimental, and likely harmful in the long term, “vaccine.”  Especially since the vaccine has killed 9,000+ Americans and injured countless others with myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and potentially (we just don’t really know yet!) more.  

My opinion: Take off the masks, mingle freely, celebrate life.  End the fear porn’s power over all of us.  It’s time.

It what may be the largest “fake vaccine document” seizure to date – following on the heels of one in Memphis – US Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) announced this week that it intercepted a shipment of over 3,000 counterfeit vaccine cards in Anchorage, Alaska at the airport.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to the seizure is that the fake document shipment arrived from China. But according to the US Customs statement, the fakes – which appeared to copy CDC vaccination cards – were easy to spot:

The vaccine cards sought to mirror those distributed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after a person receives their full regimen the coronavirus vaccine. However, CPB stated that the cards were of “low quality printing.” 

The seizure is similar to a bust of China-shipped fakes in Memphis Tennessee just days prior. Area Port Director Lance Robinson was cited in a press release as saying, “Getting these fraudulent cards off the streets and out of the hands of those who would then sell them is important for the safety of the American public.” 

“Looking out for the welfare of our fellow Alaskans is one of the many and varied responsibilities CBP is proud to take on,” he added.

Black market demand for such fake vaxx cards is on the rise in correlation to the number of public venues and events across the country now demanding “proof” of COVID vaccination, whether they be restaurants or concerts and festival venues.

A handful of Americans have been caught with fake vaccine cards, however, it doesn’t appear anyone has as yet spent time in jail for the violation. But both local and federal authorities are increasingly making threats of steep fines and up to a year or even five years in jail for fraudulent activity related to vaccines and medical documentation.

For example in Chicago…

A licensed pharmacist in Chicago was arrested for allegedly selling vaccine cards on eBay, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

According to court documents, prosecutors said Tang-Tang Zhao sold 125 authentic CDC vaccination cards to 11 different buyers for approximately $10 apiece. 

“If you do not wish to receive a vaccine, that is your decision,” one US Customs official said additionally last week. “But don’t order a counterfeit, waste my officer’s time, break the law, and misrepresent yourself.”

Authored by Wesley Smith via The Epoch Times,

The United States’ military mission in Afghanistan has collapsed in chaos and ignominy. The catastrophe has many parents. But surely “the experts” upon which our leader relied bear much blame.

They were the ones who often failed to comprehend the power of religious belief and the role pride in Islam played in the Taliban’s unyielding commitment to victory. They were the ones who thought we could remake Afghanistan into a western liberal image. They were the ones who failed to comprehend the intractable tribal nature of Afghan society.

To say the least, Afghanistan has vividly exposed the utter stupidity of our vaunted foreign policy and national security experts. Our hapless Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, assured us that Kabul would not fall from “Friday to Monday.” He was right. It fell from Friday to Sunday.

And what are we to make of the vaunted internationalists at the United Nations? After President Biden’s godawful speech signifying nothing, the State Department held a press briefing, during which spokesman Ted Price reiterated an unintentionally hilarious United Nations Security Council statement urging the Taliban government to be “inclusive and representative—including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women.” I’m sure the barbarians will get right to including women as soon as they are finished raping them.

The hubris of these whizzes might be tolerable if they were adept at technocracy. But they stink at it. Indeed, every American debacle in my lifetime has “the experts’” fingerprints all over it. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Vietnam. The farce of the missing Iraq WMDs. The list goes on and on.

What’s that you say? The Cuban Missile Crisis worked out very well? Indeed, it did. But that was because JFK ignored the advice of military experts to bomb Cuba.

What about the collapse of the Soviet Union? Once again, that salutary event was hastened because President Reagan ignored experts’ widespread disdain of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program and forged ahead anyway, which helped break the communists’ treasury.

Look at China. Our China-hand experts were sure that if we boosted the country’s economy the Chinese people would demand increased freedom to go along with their improved standard of living. Not only did that demand not materialize—except in the now crushed Hong Kong citizens’ reaction to the loss of their once existing freedoms—but we are looking increasingly like China instead of it looking more like us.

Worse, we are now dependent on that tyranny for much of our manufacturing and mining of crucial natural resources like rare earth metals.

Great job, experts!

Foreign policy is far from the only field afflicted with debilitating expertitis.

The public health failures during COVID could—and no doubt will—fill several books. But the botched investigations and repeated mendacity surrounding the question of whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are particularly enraging—not to mention the U.S. funding of “gain of function” research conducted there championed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Speaking of the hubris of the expert class, Fauci wrote last year that WHO and the UN should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” in order to avoid future pandemics. Considering their repeated record of abject failure, putting the international experts in charge of such an all-encompassing project would probably return us to the caves

And look what has happened in the medical sector where our experts are helping drive the transgender moral panic. Major medical journals and associations even promote puberty blocking for children despite its being, at best, entirely experimental and potentially physically harmful to the patients. Good grief, the American Medical Association even urges that we stop listing the sex of children on birth certificates!

And we haven’t even yet mentioned the misbegotten California public policies recommended by climate change experts that have reduced the once Golden State to a third world environment of rolling blackouts, out-of-control wildfires, and inadequate water storage because no new reservoirs have been built for decades—this, even though the state’s population grew exponentially. Good grief, farmers in the Central Valley have begun plowing under their precious almond trees!

Failure after dismal failure has caused mass distrust in the expert class and a concomitant collapse of confidence in our institutions.

This is a profound crisis. We need expertise. People who know what they are talking about and who can explain complicated issues to policy makers and the people are essential to the proper operation of sophisticated democratic societies.

But to do that job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats. Most of all, they need to put personal ideology aside in the performance of their duties and welcome heterodox opinions. For example, it wasn’t ideology that created the triumph of the moon landing. It was dispassionate excellence in rocket science and engineering.

The problem is that too many of our current “experts”—in foreign policy, law enforcement, science, education, the medical intelligentsia, the list goes on and on—have become highly politicized. Some even now think they should be deciders rather than advisers. That attitude doesn’t make policy more expertly based, it makes expertise more politically motivated, which is to say, it ceases being expert at all.

Creating a paradigm in which we can again safely rely on experts will require a great culling of the faux specialists now perched in powerful government and think tank sinecures. Frankly, mass resignations or firings may be the only efficacious remedy for what ails us. The time has come for that great sorting out to begin.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) decided that Florida company Rare Breed Trigger, LLC’s special trigger is converting semi-automatic rifles into machine guns. 

FRT-15 is a drop-in trigger for an AR-15 rifle and forces the trigger to be reset. The force reset dramatically speeds up the rate of fire of the rifle. 

On July 26, the ATF sent a letter to Rare Breed stating the FRT-15 trigger has been classified as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and that Rare Breed needs to cease all sales. 

The ATF declared the Rare Breed trigger a mixture of parts designed and intended to convert a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. The ATF’s investigation found that the trigger allows a firearm to “shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single continuous pull of the trigger.”

According to Baltimore-based The Machine Gun Nest, Rare Breed had to contact the ATF within five days of receiving the letter to develop a plan to address those so-called “machine guns” already distributed.

Rare Breed has challenged the ATF’s decision and is set to explain how their trigger mechanism still fits the definition of a semi-automatic weapon. 

The Machine Gun Nest said the ATF is going rogue again due to former President Trump setting dangerous precedence with the bump stock ban because the Biden administration could, at any moment, say an AR-15 is a machine gun. 

“While I’ve handled one [FRT-15], I understand that they still require one pull of the trigger to function. The user pulls the trigger, the weapon fires, and the FRT-15 forces a reset of the trigger. If the user keeps continuous force on the trigger, it will fire again,” The Truth About Guns’ Travis Pike said. 

Pike added, “This is not an automatic function by any means, and the weapon fires one shot per trigger pull.” 

In a video released by Rare Breeds, the company explains how the FRT-15 mechanism doesn’t classify a rifle as a machine gun. 

The Machine Gun Nest ends by saying, “When we have a law enforcement agency acting through executive fiat by just changing these rules and criminalizing people – it sets terrifying precedence – what if the CDC changed a rule that would criminalize you overnight? If you think this okay, then they haven’t come for something important to you yet – and this is the precedent that is giving the government too much power.” 

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled “It’s Saigon In Afghanistan,” invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was “perhaps not as dramatic” as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago.

But that was six weeks ago.

Now, it looks like the end of the US’s war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the US regime’s final defeat in Vietnam.

When Paul was writing his article in early July, we were already getting hints of the direction things were going. US forces abandoned Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, and the US didn’t even tell its allies what was going on. Afghan officials discovered the US was gone hours later. Shortly thereafter, looters ransacked the base.

But that, it seems, was just the beginning. Over a period of a mere ten days, provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen one after the other. On Sunday, the Taliban entered the strategically key capital Kabul. The Taliban’s reconquest of the country was so fast that even the US regime’s spokesman admitted “the militants’ progress came much more quickly than the U.S. had anticipated.”

Now, after spending twenty years implementing “regime change” in Afghanistan, and after spending more than $800 billion—an official figure that’s likely far smaller than the real monetary cost—the US’s strategy in Afghanistan has completely collapsed.

Indeed, for the US’s local allies, the situation is far worse now than what it was in 2001. Those who were unwise enough to ally themselves with the Americans over the past twenty years now face reprisals from the Taliban. Death will likely be the result for many.

Not surprisingly, then, Afghanis in recent days have flocked to Kabul International Airport, desperate to find some way out of the country as the Taliban closes in.

Crowds of people desperate to escape Afghanistan stormed Kabul’s international airport, rushing onto the tarmac.

People clung to the sides of military planes, even as one taxied down the runway, in a bid to flee as the Taliban takes control.https://t.co/BMfaEkDykr pic.twitter.com/WkX0JQx3io

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 16, 2021

It’s doesn’t take an immense amount of imagination to recall the images of those who were desperate to escape from the US embassy in Saigon.

Blame the Generals and the Pentagon

So now we reach the stage of figuring out who is to blame for this total strategic failure in Afghanistan.

Some politicians will try and use the US regime’s failure in Afghanistan to score points against the Biden administration. We already see it with some Republicans who still haven’t figured out that the American public long ago stopped caring about the war. 

It’s easy to see the partisan reasons for this, but if we want to honestly focus on who’s to blame for the utter waste of time and resources that was the war in Afghanistan, we have to look far beyond just a handful of civilian politicians.

Yes, much of the blame should go to the civilian bureaucrats, because they share an immense amount of the blame in bringing about this strategic blunder. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Madeleine Albright are just a few of the politicos who encouraged the continuation of this lost war.

But the fact is the civilian war architects were encouraged and enabled every step of the way by Pentagon bureaucrats (i.e., the generals), who were only more than happy to have an excuse to pad their budgets and increase their relevance on Capitol Hill. As Ron Paul put it this week:

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

And of course, the Pentagon allied itself with the “private” sector industries that supplied the materiel.

Paul continues:

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

Or, as Timothy Kudo describes it,

Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”

Nor did the military officers counsel caution or peace. Douglas MacGregor at the American Conservative correctly recalls:

All that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021, none of the senior officers expressed opposition to the policies of intervention and occupation strongly enough to warrant their removal. None felt compelled to leave the service and take their opposing views to the public forum.

When it became clear that the collective strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq were failing, not only General David Petraeus, but most of America’s senior military leaders chose to prevaricate and distort facts in public to show progress when there was none. How many American lives might have been saved had someone only told the truth will never be known.

Moreover, Petraeus and countless military technocrats continued to call for more military action while trying to place the blame on others. Doug Bandow sums it up:

Many of those once responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan while in authority have taken the lead in trying to perpetuate the mission. For instance, David Petraeus is busy trying to shield his reputation and shift blame to Biden as the Afghan project collapses. Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently co-chaired the congressionally mandated Afghanistan Study Group, which predictably insisted that the United States should stay in the country. What other conclusion was imaginable? As the entire geopolitical enterprise collapses, its promoters insist that American forces should stick around with no good purpose and no realistic plan of action.

Indeed, the incompetence of the US’s military leadership has been on clear display in recent weeks as the US-trained and US-armed military personnel have been impotent in the face of Taliban advances. The US’s military hierarchy was specifically tasked with training these Afghan forces, yet it’s now clear how well that directive was carried out.

Unwarranted Trust in Military Brass

The complicity of the military brass’s role has always been especially damaging, because the generals have long banked on the unwarranted amount of credibility they enjoy with the public. As Kudo notes:

The promise that victory was just around the corner proved intoxicating to presidents and politicians, not to mention everyday Americans, who blindly trusted anyone with four stars on his epaulettes. Despite the partisanship and institutional mistrust of the past two decades, the military consistently has been the most trusted institution in the country, rated highly by roughly 70 percent of Americans. Cloaked in near-universal trust, these officers repeatedly argued that an unwinnable war could be won.

Unfortunately, because of this, military personnel are likely to continue to be shielded from the criticism they deserve.

After all, there is a persistent habit among many Americans to repeat the narrative that all wars will be won if only the politicians listen to the generals, and “let the generals do their job.” One still hears this today from those who still engage in wishful thinking about the Vietnam War and who still cling to the idea that the war could have been won if only the military “experts” had been in charge. In actual experience, however, the lost war in Afghanistan is what we get when we listen to the generals. 

But don’t expect any meaningful reform. In the United States, when bureaucrats fail, they usually get rewarded with larger budgets, such as when the US’s “intelligence community” allowed 9/11 to occur right under its collective nose. The same is likely—at least in the short term—for the Pentagon. The generals will simply “pivot” to argue for ever-larger military budgets in the name of fighting China, Iran, Russia, and other perceived enemies. 

In other words, the generals and the civilian politicians are hard at work planning the next Afghanistan. Let’s just hope the taxpayers who pay for it all may be a little less naïve next time.

Both VW and Toyota have announced they are temporarily cutting output due to the ongoing global chip shortage, with Volkswagen being the latest to disclose the production pause. 

VW’s main plant in Wolfsburg is only going to be running on its early shift after summer break due to the lack of supply, Bloomberg reported this morning.

Its plant in Wolfsburg is the “world’s biggest car plant” and employs about 60,000 people. Audi is also pausing production temporarily, extending its summer break by one week, the report notes. 

Global shortages of semiconductors could wind up cutting worldwide production of autos this year by about 7.1 million vehicles, Bloomberg predicted this morning. 

IHS predicts that 2.1 million units could wind up being lost in the third quarter of 2021 alone. 

There is still little in the way of normalization to be optimistic about until the second quarter of 2022, IHS estimates. 

An IHS report stated: “The situation is still fraught with challenges. We are also seeing additional volatility due to Covid-19 lockdown measures in Malaysia where many back-end chip packaging and testing operations are performed.”

Toyota also said it was planning to temporarily stop 14 plants next month while lowering its production by 40%. 

Toyota Purchasing Group Chief Officer Kazunari Kumakura said this week: “Especially in Southeast Asia, the spread of Covid and lockdowns are impacting our local suppliers.”

The rise of the Delta variant in Southeast Asia has once again slowed production, just as most countries were getting ready to “officially” re-open, on the heels of numerous vaccines becoming available. 

Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

It’s easy to find politicians saying dumb things. Television news gives them plenty of coverage. Viewers like colorful voices, which are often the most extreme.

The resulting Kardashianization of politics doesn’t matter much unless these caricatures tarnish an entire political party, define its public perception, and compromise its chances of passing legislation and winning elections.

That’s the Democrats’ problem with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This problem arose again last week when squad member Cori Bush told a national TV audience how eager she is to defund the police. She said nothing to convince anyone who rejects her views. She probably made matters worse with her transparent hypocrisy, defending her right to hire expensive private security guards while advocating less police protection for everyone else.

Rep. Bush hasn’t learned the single most important lesson about being stuck in a hole: Stop digging. The St. Louis Democrat doesn’t dig with shovels, either. She bought an industrial-size excavator and went to work. The hole she’s digging is “defund the police,” and polls show she’s mining for fool’s gold. The defund movement may be popular with some wealthy (white) elites, activists on the extreme left and, at least temporarily, some African Americans in congressional districts like Bush’s, though its popularity even in those precincts will fade as violence continues to rise. Everyone else is already staunchly opposed. They fear, quite reasonably, that defunding will lead to more crime, not only because there will be fewer cops on the beat but because those who remain will limit their active policing because they lack political support.

A new poll, just completed by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll, shows that 75% of respondents want more police and only 25% want less. About the same number, 72%, oppose defunding the police. A slight majority even favors restoring “stop and frisk” policies to “deter gun crime,” something New York did under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg before ending the practice because so many young minority men were being searched.

Pollster Mark Penn, co-leader of the Harvard/Harris survey, now says rising violence is the single most important issue for the 2022 midterms. “Crime is becoming the next crisis in America,” he concluded, “with overwhelming numbers seeing an increase in crime and Americans want stricter, not looser, enforcement of laws.” There’s no question which party has the advantage on that issue. The question for Democrats is: What can they do to recover?

Of course, many voters also want to see police reforms and greater transparency. Both are being put in place across the country. Most of all, Americans want police, prosecutors, and judges to do their respective jobs and protect them from predators. That means the left’s push to slash police funding has become a major electoral liability for mainstream Democrats, both nationally and locally. One sign that the political winds have changed is that two progressive cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, which gutted their police budgets last year, now want to increase them. They are not alone.

Cori Bush spit directly into that wind last week during her CBS interview. Correspondent Vladimir Duthiers asked Bush her response to critics who say it is hypocritical for you to support defunding police departments while she is spending lavishly on her own personal security.

Bush’s bizarre response: 

“They would rather I die? You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die? You know, because that could be the alternative. So either I spent $70,000 on private security over the last few months, and I’m here standing now and able to speak, able to help save 11 million people from being evicted.”

As if that answer wasn’t bad enough, she added,

“I have private security because my body is worth being on this planet right now. … I have too much work to do. There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that.  So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend 10, 10, 10 more dollars on it, you know what, I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.”

The only way to summarize her response is:

“I’m far more important than ordinary people, which means protecting me is far more important than protecting them.”

That’s not an appealing message.

There’s nothing wrong with Bush wanting to stay alive. She might want to acknowledge that other people do, too. Since they can’t afford private security, they count on the police to help. She wants to deny them that help.

It is political malpractice for Cori Bush to embrace this kind of narcissism, hypocrisy, and cringing victimization on national TV. It’s even worse when your own party is scrambling to limit the self-inflicted damage done by the movement she advocates. Republicans will be happy to re-air that interview again and again. It’s that bad.

Voters now connect defunding the police with rising crime, and they connect both with the Democrats. Even though party leaders, including Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, have repeatedly tried to distance themselves from progressive demands to cut police budgets, they haven’t succeeded in the public eye, at least not yet.

Why do Democrats have such trouble with the crime issue, despite unwavering support from the mainstream media? The problem is all that darn evidence. All the cities that actually did defund police are governed by Democratic mayors and city councils. All the lax prosecutors, so reluctant to charge violent offenders and brazen shoplifters, are self-proclaimed “Justice Democrats.” Almost all the local judges who release prisoners are Democrats. Almost all the support for “no cash bail” comes from Democrats and has been implemented in blue cities and states. Those policies, supported by leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, put perps back on the streets only hours after they’ve been charged with violent crimes. It was the Democrats who held a national convention last year and didn’t mention the rioting and looting going on for months. To their credit, party leaders now have to routinely say they oppose defunding police. But no top Democrat — not Biden, not Schumer, not Pelosi — has been brave enough to flatly condemn the progressives who support it and take them on.  The public has noticed. Voters realize that strident demands to cut police budgets, eliminate cash bail, and reduce serious crime to misdemeanors are elements of a larger progressive wish list that would limit all facets of law enforcement and criminal punishment.

Many of those wishes are being granted. In city after city, police know they no longer have the support of top elected officials. They know many of their arrests won’t be prosecuted. The predictable result is that more police are retiring and those who remain are spending more time sitting in squad cars and less time chasing criminals. They know hoodlums can walk into a store, scoop up $950 worth of merchandise, and stroll out to their car with implicit permission from city officials. District attorneys in several major cities, all of them Democrats, consider these thefts only misdemeanors and won’t bother prosecuting. So, police figure, “Why bother trying to catch the robbers?”

The inevitable public revulsion poses a political challenge that goes well beyond one or two Squad members with bad ideas and bully pulpits. True, some have pushed the defunding agenda more aggressively than others, but voters believe the whole party is implicated. Now that moderate members want to change course, those on the left, like Cori Bush, want to keep digging and proudly shouting their message to the world. Their colleagues on the center-left haven’t figured a way to climb out of the hole.

Next November, voters will bury them even deeper if their main concerns are rising crime and lawlessness on the southern border. If that reckoning comes, Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

Last week we warned that the US economy was facing a “sudden negative change” as consumer spending was set to collapse, and we even warned that the retail sales data this week would be atrocious. Well it was, and whether due to the end of stimmy checks, the evaporation of savings, or a fresh round of Delta covid restrictions, suddenly the worst kept secret – that the US consumer is once again on the verge of tapping out – is fully in the public, leading to many prominent banks slashing their GDP forecasts for the current and future quarters, most notably Goldman which took a machete to its 8.5% Q3 GDP forecast and now sees just 5.5% even as it warns of a stagflationary burst of even higher inflation.

And with Goldman also pointing out – well after the fact, and well after its chief equity strategist hiked his S&P price target to 4,700 from 4,300 as if the two are now completely unlinked (spoiler alert: in today’s centrally planned markets they are) – that consumer spending declined 3% in just the past few weeks…

… other banks are joining in the fray, with Bank of America’s Michelle Meyer pointing out on Thursday that total card spending, based on BAC aggregated credit and debit cards, has hit a “summer chill” slowing to just 11% 2-year growth rate for the 7-days ending August 14th, while the 1-year growth rate is similarly at 11% as the 1 and 2-year rates have now converged for total spending although remain wide apart for a number of categories.

The charts below shows just how sharp the slowdown and normalization in spending has been in recent weeks as US consumers are reverting to their pre-covid spending patterns, albeit in a time when prices are exploding, and it is only a matter of time before we enter the “trapdoor” plunge phase once all accumulated purchasing power disappears.

According to Meyer, the main reason behind the moderation over the last several weeks has been due to a pullback in spending on leisure services, which are defined as travel (airlines + lodging), entertainment and restaurants/bars. The 2-year growth rate of this composite is running at 0.6% for the latest week, down from the recent high of 2.5% in late June.

A more detailed look shows a slowdown across virtually all leisure sectors, from airlines to lodging and entertainment, although one can see that spending on durable goods is also starting to take on water.

When netting out leisure service spending, BofA still sees a drop in the growth rate of spending from early July but some stability over the last few weeks. According to Meyer, the weakening in leisure services spending is responsible for just more than a quarter of the slowdown in total card spending over the last four weeks. Which also means that non-leisure spending is taking a big hit too as the next series of charts shows. Tangentially, as exhibit 28 shows, the pool bubble has also burst.

Finally, what about the stimmies? Well, with the bulk of Biden’s trillions now spent, there was a modest bounce in household spending when the welfare president started sending out child tax credit. However, while CTC recipients did spend in excess of others for 2 weeks after they got the check, they then fell below for the following two weeks as they spent the entire stimulus and then hunkered down more than non-recipient households until the next child tax credit.

One can’t help but dread what happens to the US economy – and society – when one day the stimmies, the universal basic income, the emergency benefits and so on, finally come to an end.