You will not be any wiser for having read it

 

FLEX? Global Elite Give Up on Spelling and Grammar..

The best part was the professor who lamented Epstein's typos while he himself misused the word disinterest:

“It was nihilistic almost in its total disinterest in communicating,” Bessner said.  

China expected to expand submarine fleet to 80 by 2035, up to half nuclear-powered, from 60 now, more than half of which are diesel-powered

 

China Building Subs That Can Strike USA From Closer to Home, Navy Warns...

... Brookes cited a Pentagon projection that China’s submarine force will reach 80 vessels by 2035, about half of them nuclear-powered—up from the current estimated fleet of more than 60 subs, most of which are less capable diesel-powered vessels that have a shorter range of movement and must surface more frequently than nuclear-powered ones. This projection has appeared in past Pentagon annual reports on China’s military power. ...

The editor at large for The Wall Street Journal recoiled at the number of falsehoods in Trump's State of the Union address

 

How much will he ask for it?

 

Trump to Sell Economy During State of the Union Address

Meredith McGraw, WSJ

The U.S. state capitalist EV boondoggle comes to an end, shape-shifting automakers take well-deserved $50 billion hit

 

 Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit as EV Bubble Bursts

... Following years of investments into EV technology, the Detroit Big Three ... have announced more than $50 billion in combined write-downs.

EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter, after a $7,500 federal tax credit that had juiced U.S. sales expired in September. ... 

Automakers’ retreats and massive write-downs have come as Republican lawmakers abolished a lucrative federal tax credit for EVs last fall, while also doing away with federal fuel-efficiency mandates. Even with federal support, EV demand was below expectations. ...

Border Czar Tom Homan is so full of shit

 Tom Homan’s Bid for Minnesota Reset Begins With Series of Demands

MINNEAPOLIS—Tom Homan, the White House border czar, arrived here with a series of demands for Minnesota’s Democratic leaders. Topping the list: an agreement from them to turn over more immigrants from the state’s prisons and jails, people familiar with the matter said. ... Walz has said the premise of the demand is false. “They’re taking credit for people that we’ve had in jail for a long time,” he told reporters Sunday. “We always hand them over.”

Oh, so that's why Border Patrol was in front of Glam Doll Donuts on Saturday. They were just looking for inmates.

 

 

OMG, Walter Russell Mead for The Wall Street Journal is ENTERTAINED by the tyrant's show

I'm told the band on the Titanic played well right to the very end. 

 

Trump Captivates the Globe

Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal

... It is not merely that his high-wire act supports and intensifies the drama and excitement that made him the dominant figure in American and then global politics for the past decade. It is also that his ability, real or perceived, to change the course of world politics on a whim increases his leverage at home and abroad. When a man can make war or peace, promote or block trade, make you rich or freeze you out, other people do what they can to stay on his good side. ... 

As usual Trump puts the cart before the horse: If you don't already have total access, you're not in charge

And you don't put protective tariffs on trade when you have nothing to protect.

 

“We’re in charge,” he told reporters. “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”

More. 

They're licking their chops over Venezuela's $17 trillion worth of crude oil

 

U.S. in Prime Position To Unlock Venezuela's Vast Oil Reserves

Eaton, et al., WSJ

In 2018 The Wall Street Journal was still defending China's admission into the WTO, today it pretends it wasn't part of that bipartisan folly

 Then: "The U.S. properly worked for China's inclusion".

Now: "An era of folly began in the new century. Leaders of both political parties supported China's entry into the World Trade Organization".

I can't wait for the Wall Street Journal to admit that America's decline actually began under Reagan forty years ago, not twenty-five, because at this rate I'll be dead before they do.

 

Grand Rapids, Michigan billionaire Doug DeVos admits America hasn't made all that much progress since 1976

... On the eve of the 1976 election, President Gerald Ford wanted to hold a motorcade parade in Grand Rapids, where he grew up ... filled with boarded-up buildings ... a downtrodden place ...  

America on the eve of 2026 feels an awful lot like Grand Rapids in 1976. There’s a palpable sense that the country is struggling, if not starting to fail. It isn’t only the sorry state of big cities. It’s the state of the nation’s schools as kids fall behind in basic math and reading. It’s the state of the body politic as division and violence spread. It’s the sorry feeling that we’re a nation without a rudder, drifting toward inevitable decline. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans say the U.S. can’t solve many of its important problems. ...

More here. 

Trump says inflation has stopped in last night's speech, but what stopped was their collection of the inflation data

 Do you remember when COVID hit and Trump said we should just stop testing to make it go away?

Trump on coronavirus: ‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’

 

So fast forward to today where we get another chart crime, this one for the consumer price index which omits the month of October, and another dose of skepticism about the Trump Regime's honesty about government data.

 

They warned us they would do this, too, even though during the first Trump Regime they collected both the employment and the inflation data during the 2018-2019 government shutdown.

 

This is all deliberate obfuscation. 

 

... Because the October CPI was canceled, Thursday’s report did not have all the usual data points of a typical CPI release. The BLS said it was unable to retroactively collect the October data, but did use some “nonsurvey data sources” to make the index calculations.

Economists may be hesitant to read too much into this report as the start of a downward trend in inflation because of the lack of October comparison data in the release. ...

More here. 

 

 

Trump isn't interested in Venezuela because of the drugs, it's the oil

This entire drug war is a charade. 

Trump, April 2011: "I'm only interested in Libya if we take the oil".

He just pardoned the former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years over cocaine, but he's going after the Venezuelan president over drugs?

Venezuela has 4x the proven oil reserves of the United States, tops in the world, and it's right in our backyard.

Trump isn't interested in peace and freedom in Ukraine, either. All he wants is a piece of action.

All that lizard brain cares about is money. 

 

 

Imagine sitting in the dark to save on electricity when you make $115k

 Reported here:

... The effort to keep up with higher prices feels relentless to Teri Kopp, who lives in Southbury, Conn., and works as an administrator at a synagogue. “I’m tired,” she said.

Kopp and her husband Bill, an HVAC technician, earn a combined $115,000 a year. They often sit in the dark with only strings of LED lights on to save on electric costs. She is considering painting rocks to send to friends as Christmas gifts. Their biggest vacation this year, a road trip to Maine, was mostly covered by cash back from a shopping-rewards program.

Kopp, 59 years old, doesn’t see any way to quickly pay off the $15,000 in credit-card debt the family took on largely to cover medical bills for knee surgeries. She also has $30,000 in debt from her daughter’s undergraduate degree in biology, which has yet to yield any job offers in a tough labor market for new graduates.

Kopp voted for Trump last November in part because she wasn’t happy with how Biden handled the economy. She approves of the job Trump is doing but is skeptical that it will lead to any relief on costs soon. “I think Trump has a hard nut to crack to bring all this stuff down,” she said. ...

Do the two Rachels at the Wall Street Journal who write this sob story about the middle class "buckling" realize that about half the country makes $45k or less? What about those people? Well, they don't read the Journal anyway, right?

You have to be in the 64th percentile to be like Teri and Bill, the high end of the middle 33-66%. 

 

Sandwich guy acquitted in assault trial

 ROFLMAO.

 

 

Will Trump be tried for murdering drug traffickers like former Philippine president Duterte is being tried?

 

... Duterte was arrested in March by Philippine authorities on a warrant issued by the ICC. He is now being held at an ICC facility in the Netherlands.

Supporters of Duterte criticized the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's political rival, for arresting and surrendering the former leader to a court whose jurisdiction his supporters dispute. ...

More. 

I suppose it depends on a future president giving Trump up to arrest by the International Criminal Court somehow.

... The strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. “Trump just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers,” Mr. Roth tweeted. Venezuela is a Rome Statute party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S. officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the precedents it needs.

Mr. Trump has thus far taken an incremental approach to the ICC. He revived a first-term executive order authorizing sanctions against the court and applied it against four ICC officials. None of this has significantly reduced the risk to the U.S. or led the ICC to change its ways.

The ICC’s supporters don’t see the existing sanctions as an “existential threat.” The tribunal can easily ride it out by lying low until a Democratic president lifts the sanctions, as Joe Biden did. The court takes a long view—its prosecutors and judges have nine-year terms, and its other staffers are part of a global deep state who can expect to remain at their jobs indefinitely.

International lawyers are already developing multiple lines of attack against the administration and its officials. ...

More.

Peggy Pot Noonan warned MAGA Kettle about emotionalism in July lol

 

 ... A last note. If I were a fervent Trump supporter, I would worry about that movement’s hyperemotionalism. We have written in this space that with the rise of social media, Americans are becoming a people of feeling and not of thinking, a people in search of sensation and not reflection. It isn’t promising that this is increasingly true in our political sphere. I follow on social media fixtures of the MAGA movement. They say of each other in public what in politics 40 years ago people said in private and when drunk. FRAUD, LIAR, GRIFTER, WHORE. What a hothouse. Do they expect that with a nature like that they can go into the future as a serious force and a movement that coheres? They don’t seem to worry about it. Why not? ...

Here.

And here she was the week before lol:

Isolationism is essentially emotional. You’re angry at the cost in blood and treasure of your country’s international forays and adventures and want to withdraw from the world. Emotionalism can hold sway and dominate politics for a time, even an era, but you can’t build anything on it. It doesn’t last because emotions change because facts change. ...

 

 

It's an American tradition: Peggy Noonan loses her head

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point: What a disaster for the young. It will forever shape their understanding of politics in America, Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion, September 11, 2025

... We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.

But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...

 

No, we are not in big trouble.

We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.

But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.

Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?

Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again? 

Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.

We found out that we were not going to die.

We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.

The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.

The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.

But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.

We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.

Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men. 

-- I Corinthians 14:20 

The Wall Street Journal: Just 35% of high school seniors in 2024 were proficient in reading, and only 22% in math

 ... Twelfth-graders’ average math score was the worst since the current test began in 2005, and reading was below any point since that assessment started in 1992. The share of 12th-graders who were proficient slid by 2 percentage points between 2019 and 2024—to 35% in reading and 22% in math. ...

More.

And they can vote. 

When the deck should have been the headline