Friedman famously claimed that world "free trade", which he fully knew would begin with Chinese and Mexicans earning 1/20th or less of their American counterparts, would almost-immediately begin to normalize wages over there. That is, having "tasted freedom" the workers would essentially force companies to pay competitive world wages and their standard of living would wildly improve. This would turn them into consumers of the very same products they produced and thus greatly expand the economy as a whole. While he acknowledged this distribution would not be even the premise was that the great improvement generally would outweigh any modest declines in established markets.
He was wrong. NAFTA was passed and what Ross Perot said would be the case turned out to be true; wages in Mexico did not normalize with America. We offshored labor to Bangladesh and Vietnam for textiles and nearly everything to China and wages did not normalize with the western world over there.
Likewise in many American cities in the 50s and 60s we built "projects" for low-income housing. Cabrini Green was one of the most-notorious of course but hardly the only one. Some of these were constructed to house displaced people during the Eisenhower Expressway system construction through major cities, but hardly all had that as their excuse. These places turned into hotbeds of crime, drugs and squalor, and we were told it was the concentration that was the problem; dispersing said people with Section 8 vouchers all over the urban and suburban landscape would cause them to experience good culture instead of bad and thus adopt the good elements, at least in part.
That's not what happened. Instead the "bad culture" expanded wildly into the urban and suburban school districts, destroying the quality of education for everyone. The drugs, thuggery and similar nonsense expanded there too, along with the criminal element that inevitably comes with all of it.
Joe Biden nominated Kato Crews for a federal district judgeship. Crews, who is currently a magistrate judge, was asked during his confirmation hearing how he'd evaluate a Brady motion. He did not know what it is yet it forms one of the pillars of due process of law and any graduate of law school or person who passed the bar would know this. Therefore it is fact that irrespective of any alleged credential he may have that allegedly "qualifies" him to be a lawyer -- or judge -- he never actually learned any of that material and thus did not actually earn the credential; how did he manage to get that seat?
Obviously Kato Crews' cultural values do not include actually mastering material before being given a credential, a rather basic precept in any honest society.
That people who fail this basic test are not and will not be immediately removed from any position of power and authority, no matter who they are, points directly toward an impending collapse in our nation's capacity to deliver all manner of things that are utterly-reliant on basic competence. To refuse to demand ALL said persons' removal and back up that demand with whatever is necessary is a choice our society has made and it has consequences you are not going to like.
South Africa infamously had an "apartheid" government structure for 43 years; black people were formally and legally disadvantaged, unable to be treated as equals despite being in the majority of the population, from 1948 to 1994. The nation, despite formal and legal segregation had a functional economy and government structure. In the 25 years since that system was formally ended the nation has essentially devolved into gang violence, thuggery and is teetering on the collapse of basic goods and services such as production of basic foodstuffs (farming), electricity and water supply. Please explain how, if there was no cultural or other significant difference whether in capacity or culture between the two groups this occurred and for extra credit please explain why anyone should consider assistance of any sort to this nation when the majority of the people there, who demanded equality and got it, are in fact fully and completely responsible for this breakdown in the basics of any civilized society and economy.
MASHELE: You've got a political crisis, which started in 1997, where the then-CEO of Eskom alerted government and told them that, if we do not get additional capacity in, we are going to start load shedding from 2007, which is exactly what happened.
Post-apartheid the electrical system operator warned the government that if they did not act to incentivize infrastructure and investment this would happen. The newly-empowered majority government did nothing of the sort -- with fully ten years of fair warning -- and thus collapse it is.
Lest you think I'm bagging on people because of their race -- nope. I'm bagging on people because of their culture and unwillingness to accept that which is when it comes to physical fact and deal with it. Biden and his family anyone? A wife in the family who gets a "payment" for no service of note? A son who likes to smoke meth and, it appears, shower with underage girls in the family, never mind all manner of apparently-corrupt business dealings in multiple nations, being paid huge sums of money when he has zero relevant business or operational experience in the fields at hand. This man winds up President, which tells me everything I need to know about the culture of this nation, particularly when his opponent in the other major political party just got done paying hospitals bonuses in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars per-person for procedures we knew did not work against a novel viral threat -- even when the patient died.
That is functionally equivalent to the Palestinians sending family members $10,000 when one of their sons wears a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of Israelis. If that is an unacceptable act worthy of United States and international sanction tell me why the man who paid hospitals bonuses when they used known worthless treatments on your Grandmother and she died just had a huge crowd show up to cheer him on for a second Presidential run instead of running that rat bastard out of town?
When both major political parties post up candidates such as this and the people through their representative processes allow, enable and cause that to happen the cultural problem resides in us.
The instant rhetoric whenever someone engages in a school shooting is "ban guns." How about banning thugs, virtually all of whom self-identify before the final incident? We just had that happen in Denver, did we not? I don't care how old you are or aren't or what race, sex or other "tribe" you belong to; if you're violent and disruptive you have no right to destroy the rights of others under some rubric of "equity."
You know, this thing called "The Rule of Law" which says when you demonstrate you're unfit to be in polite society through your actions we put you somewhere where you can't harm peaceful citizens.
I think they're called "prisons", but I could be mistaken.
There have always been thugs among humanity who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of others. This is not new. There have also always been narcissists among humanity who are absolutely certain they are the most-important person in the universe.
Positions of power attract these people just like crap attracts flies.
The entire reason we have an alleged "Rule of Law" and no "Divine Right Of Kings" in this nation, and such was ensconced in the Constitution of the United States is that history has shown repeatedly over more than two thousand years that as soon as you allow any group to be exempt from said laws the thugs are attracted there and you wind up with abused and dead people by the score.
Tell me again how Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted and imprisoned for sexually trafficking minors, managed to be convicted for that crime when not one person to whom she trafficked said minors to has been indicted, tried or imprisoned? Its rather difficult to traffic minors for sex without someone consuming that service and in each and every case doing so is a serious felony. If you believe the only person she "trafficked" them to was Epstein you're a few cans short of a sixpack; the flight logs from his aircraft make quite clear an awful lot of people were flying around on that plane, nearly all of them men and underage girls, and in addition no plausible legal explanation for where he got all of his money from has surfaced. So where are the other prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments? You see we still have "The Divine Right of Kings" don't we, and we, as Americans, have not sacked our government for continuing that practice despite it being the very reason this nation exists and why we shot all those British soldiers, ejecting them from America!
I'm supposed to be mad enough to ban guns over the shooting in Nashville despite the fact that a gun in the hands of a non-thug at that instant in time ended the slaughter? At the same time 107 people, as of 3/20/2023 were shot and killed this year in Chicago, all but two of whom were apparently killed by thugs (the other two were, it appears, legitimate police stops of a thug-in-process.
The shooter in Nashville was apparently a 28 year old woman and the "early reports" were that she was apparently "in her teens." Oh really? Why isn't her name all over the place if she was known to be 28 years old and since when is a 28 year old apparently "in her teens"?
Then we find out -- the shooter, according to the Nashville cops, identified as a man and so gee, was biologically a woman. A copy of a social media profile with pronouns has been found. Gee, no culture problem there right? I get it, you didn't like being born with a slot between your legs instead of a hose. I didn't like being born a dude who wasn't really all that good at hand-eye coordination sports because my right eye isn't as good as my left and thus, for example, I will never be any good at hitting a pitched baseball, but there's no "bionic" replacement so there's also nothing I can do about it as I was born this way.
I didn't go shoot up a school because I sucked at baseball when I was a kid nor did I demand people coddle me because I couldn't process an incoming baseball fast enough to accurately swing a bat at it. Not do I have a right to play in the Major Leagues even though, no matter how much effort I put into training, I will never be capable of hitting a fastball. Ever.
We all have something we'd rather be different. The cultural difference between "well, that's how the cookie crumbles; I have to figure out how to deal with it" and "this is reason to scream, shout, demand accommodations and then go kill a bunch of people" is, well, rather profound.
WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AMERICA?
Rational response (this is who I am, like it or not, so I have to deal with it and figure out how to be ok with it) or kowtowing to the screaming demands of those who, when they don't get what they wish they were and can never be or have, turn rabid?
THIS IS THE CHOICE.
Biden's administration immediately tried to frame this as yet more "gun control" nonsense which is a nice attempt from deflection from the fact that he and his administration have funded the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in and around Ukraine which incidentally shielded wild-eyed corruption over there, was a direct beneficiary of our corruption of their political process and then "demanded" literal tanks in the streets -- and got them, from us.
Oh, never mind the LIE that there is no objective reality with it comes to things you cannot change and are fixed at the moment of conception too.
Why do I bring this up specifically?
Because its really all part of the same issue. Prior to 1968 you could literally buy a gun out of the Sears Catalog by mail order and have it delivered to your door by the post office. There was an entire section in the "wish catalog" that came out every fall before Christmas; I remember that catalog as a boy since the back part of it was Christmas toys.
Yet there was no such problem. Indeed it was common for boys to have a shotgun in the rack of the back of their truck in rural areas because they went hunting after school with it.
Why was there no such problem?
Because if you were a thug or decided that your specific issues meant someone else had to kowtow to you our culture was that you were not allowed to get away with that crap -- you sucked it up or not, but you could not impose your insanity on others. Oh sure, there were exceptions -- the mob in some cities and similar -- but not in the general case. You hit a teacher or threw a chair at her you got expelled and your parents had to deal with finding a way to get you an education at their own expense. You got neither an IEP or a "cry room" if you were incapable of being in the same space with others and not disrupting their learning. If they didn't or couldn't act as parents you wound up having to fend for yourself. If that ended with you in prison for life tough crap. If you attacked someone else you got jailed. If you did it again you got jailed for a lot longer and you got to break rocks or make license plates as your highest and best life achievement. If you believed you were a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa, you were told to suck it up buckwheat -- your chromosomes were set at conception and there's nothing you can do about it. If you wanted to be wild-eyed crazy that was your prerogative until and unless you committed a criminal act against someone else -- and then off to jail you went. If you were a man but liked to dress as a woman that was fine, but we still called you "Joe" and there was nothing you could do about it and no, you could not be on the woman's track or swim team. We did not allow a parade of people to break the law coming into the United States and if you tried that you were summarily ejected, we did not allow a river of fentanyl to flow in via said illegal border crossings and we did not coddle people who committed violent offenses against others no matter their age.
Whatever gifts and abilities, for better or worse, you were born with that's what you had. Our culture instilled the viewpoint that you should make the best use of your unique abilities to the best of your capacity, and if you choose not to for whatever reason that was fine -- but the cost of that decision was on you and nobody else. If you tried to make it someone else's problem you'd be told "NO!" in a firm but compassionate manner -- and if you refused to accept that answer it would be enforced if necessary.
With this culture we advanced in this nation as no other country ever has over a similar period of time. We conquered atomic energy for peaceful purpose, we put men on the moon multiple times, we built reusable spacecraft that could fly to orbit and return and we created and distributed all manner of apparently-miraculous things, including electric lights, electricity on demand, automobiles capable of being bought by the average person's salary, calculators you could hold in your hand, computers in an office, then on your desk and finally in your pocket and more.
But then over the last several decades we decided we could instead create and nurtured a culture where flat-out false claims and demands for "equality" when in fact that is impossible are tolerated and even rewarded, such as the insane "reparations" nonsense out in San Francisco, claims that a man is in fact a woman., that one is entitled to a law or other degree or diploma if one hasn't learned the material and repeatedly releasing violent accused felons on trivial or even no bail whatsoever. Friends of mine vacationing in Nashville a few months ago were held up at gunpoint overnight in their rental by armed thugs. To the best of my knowledge the assailants have not been caught. Anyone care to guess whether they had priors and if so why weren't they in prison?
A couple of years ago violent bands of thugs burned and looted cities all over this nation. How many were imprisoned for a decade for committing arson or commercial looting? Effectively zero. What does that tell you about how our culture has evolved to consider such thuggery nothing more than a nice night out on the town?
It is all the same thing through this article and these examples -- culture. We have enabled and celebrated thuggery in Mexico (drug gangs), China (Uyghurs, Christians, Muslims .et.al.) and right here in the United States (drug gangs, illegal immigrants slaughtering a girl in Iowa, BLM and antifa "mostly-peaceful protestors" and more.)
This has extended into our government with both Trump (paying hospitals a bonus when they kill you) and Biden (mandates that had no basis in law or fact, "defund the police" out of Harris, shielding from prosecution his son for apparent criminal acts and more) never mind our Congress which has enabled repeated scams and schemes (Solyndra and all the various Covid-time period rip-offs anyone) going back decades and accelerating on an unbroken basis over the last 20+ years. Rather than punish the funding source for the 9/11 attacks (Saudi Arabia) we instead waged war on TWO nations that had nothing to do with it (Iran and Iraq) and killed a few million children in one of them; one of the most-outrageous examples of thuggery in human history explicitly endorsed and permitted by the American people.
Spare me the crocodile tears until our culture changes and we decide, as a body politic, that this crap is going to stop -- and mean it.
Friedman famously claimed that world "free trade", which he fully knew would begin with Chinese and Mexicans earning 1/20th or less of their American counterparts, would almost-immediately begin to normalize wages over there. That is, having "tasted freedom" the workers would essentially force companies to pay competitive world wages and their standard would wildly improve. This would turn them into consumers of the very same products and thus greatly expand the economy as a whole. Which he acknowledged this distribution would not be even the premise was that the great improvement generally would outweigh any modest declines in established markets.
He was wrong. NAFTA was passed and what Ross Perot said would be the case turned out to be true; wages in Mexico did not normalize with America. We offshored labor to Bangladesh and Vietnam for textiles and nearly everything to China and wages did not normalize with the western world over there.
Likewise in many American cities in the 50s and 60s we built "projects" for low-income housing. Cabrini Green was one of the most-notorious of course but hardly the only one. Some of these were constructed to house displaced people during the Eisenhower Expressway system construction through major cities, but hardly all had that as their excuse. These places turned into hotbeds of crime, drugs and squalor, and we were told it was the concentration that was the problem; dispersing said people with Section 8 vouchers all over the urban and suburban landscape would cause them to experience good culture instead of bad and thus adopt the good elements, at least in part.
That's not what happened. Instead the "bad culture" expanded wildly into the urban and suburban school districts, destroying the quality of education for everyone. The drugs, thuggery and similar nonsense expanded there too, along with the criminal element that inevitably comes with all of it.
Joe Biden nominated Kato Crews for a federal district judgeship. Crews, who is currently a magistrate judge, was asked during his confirmation hearing how he'd evaluate a Brady motion. He did not know what it is yet it forms one of the pillars of due process of law and any graduate of law school or person who passed the bar would know this. Therefore it is fact that irrespective of any alleged credential he may have that allegedly "qualifies" him to be one he never actually learned any of that material and thus did not actually earn the credential; how did he manage to get that seat? Obviously Kato Crews' cultural values do not include actually mastering material before being given a credential, a rather basic precept in any honest society.
South Africa infamously had an "apartheid" government structure for 43 years; black people were formally and legally disadvantaged, unable to be treated as equals despite being in the majority of the population, from 1948 to 1994. The nation, despite formal and legal segregation had a functional economy and government structure. In the 25 years since that system was formally ended the nation has essentially devolved into gang violence, thuggery and is teetering on the collapse of basic goods and services such as production of basic foodstuffs (farming), electricity and water supply. Please explain how, if there was no cultural or other significant difference whether in capacity or culture between the two groups this occurred and for extra credit please explain why anyone should consider assistance of any sort to this nation when the majority of the people there, who demanded equality and got it, are in fact fully and completely responsible for this breakdown in the basics of any civilized society and economy.
MASHELE: You've got a political crisis, which started in 1997, where the then-CEO of Eskom alerted government and told them that, if we do not get additional capacity in, we are going to start load shedding from 2007, which is exactly what happened.
Post-apartheid the electrical system operator warned the government that if they did not act to incentivize infrastructure and investment this would happen. The newly-empowered majority government did nothing of the sort -- with fully ten years of fair warning -- and thus collapse it is.
Lest you think I'm bagging on people because of their race -- nope. I'm bagging on people because of their culture and unwillingness to accept that which is when it comes to physical fact and deal with it. Biden and his family anyone? A wife in the family who gets a "payment" for no service of note? A son who likes to smoke meth and, it appears, shower with underage girls in the family, never mind all manner of apparently-corrupt business dealings in multiple nations, being paid huge sums of money when he has zero relevant business or operational experience in the fields at hand. This man winds up President, which tells me everything I need to know about the culture of this nation, particularly when his opponent in the other major political party just got done paying hospitals bonuses in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars per-person for procedures we knew did not work against a novel viral threat -- even when the patient died.
That is functionally equivalent to the Palestinians sending family members $10,000 when one of their sons wears a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of Israelis. If that is an unacceptable act worthy of United States and international sanction tell me why the man who paid hospitals bonuses when they used known worthless treatments on your Grandmother and she died just had a huge crowd show up to cheer him on for a second Presidential run instead of running that rat bastard out of town?
The instant rhetoric whenever someone engages in a school shooting is "ban guns." How about banning thugs, virtually all of whom self-identify before the final incident? We just had that happen in Denver, did we not? I don't care how old you are or aren't or what race, sex or other "tribe" you belong to; if you're violent and disruptive you have no right to destroy the rights of others under some rubric of "equity."
You know, this thing called "The Rule of Law" which says when you demonstrate you're unfit to be in polite society through your actions we put you somewhere where you can't harm peaceful citizens.
I think they're called "prisons", but I could be mistaken.
There have always been thugs among humanity who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of others. This is not new. There have also always been narcissists among humanity who are absolutely certain they are the most-important person in the universe.
Positions of power attract these people just like crap attracts flies.
The entire reason we have an alleged "Rule of Law" and no "Divine Right Of Kings" in this nation, and such was ensconced in the Constitution of the United States is that history has shown repeatedly over more than two thousand years that as soon as you allow any group to be exempt from said laws the thugs are attracted there and you wind up with abused and dead people by the score.
Tell me again how Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted and imprisoned for sexually trafficking minors, managed to be convicted for that crime when not one person to whom she trafficked said minors to has been indicted, tried or imprisoned? Its rather difficult to traffic minors for sex without someone consuming that service and in each and every case doing so is a serious felony. So where are the other prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments? You see we still have "The Divine Right of Kings" don't we, and we, as Americans, have not sacked our government for continuing that practice despite it being the very reason this nation exists and why we shot all those British soldiers, ejecting them from America!
I'm supposed to be mad enough to ban guns over the shooting in Nashville despite the fact that a gun in the hands of a non-thug at that instant in time ended the slaughter? At the same time 107 people, as of 3/20/2023 were shot and killed this year in Chicago, all but two of whom were apparently killed by thugs (the other two were, it appears, legitimate police stops of a thug-in-process.
The shooter in Nashville was apparently a 28 year old woman and the "early reports" were that she was apparently "in her teens." Oh really? Why isn't her name all over the place if she was known to be 28 years old and since when is a 28 year old apparently "in her teens"?
Then we find out -- the shooter, according to the Nashville cops, identified as a man and so gee, was biologically a woman. A copy of a social media profile with pronouns has been found. Gee, no culture problem there right? I get it, you didn't like being born with a slot between your legs instead of a hose. I didn't like being born a dude who wasn't really all that good at hand-eye coordination sports because my right eye isn't as good as my left and thus, for example, I will never be any good at hitting a pitched baseball, but there's no "bionic" replacement so there's also nothing I can do about it as I was born this way.
I didn't go shoot up a school because I sucked at baseball when I was a kid nor did I demand people coddle me because I couldn't process an incoming baseball fast enough to accurately swing a bat at it. Not do I have a right to play in the Major Leagues even though, no matter how much effort I put into training, I will never be capable of hitting a fastball. Ever.
We all have something we'd rather be different. The cultural difference between "well, that's how the cookie crumbles; I have to figure out how to deal with it" and "this is reason to scream, shout, demand accommodations and then go kill a bunch of people" is, well, rather profound.
WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AMERICA?
Rational response (this is who I am, like it or not, so I have to deal with it and figure out how to be ok with it) or kowtowing to the screaming demands of those who, when they don't get what they wish they were and can never be or have, turn rabid?
THIS IS THE CHOICE.
Biden's administration immediately tried to frame this as yet more "gun control" nonsense which is a nice attempt from deflection from the fact that he and his administration have funded the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in and around Ukraine which incidentally shielded wild-eyed corruption over there, was a direct beneficiary of our corruption of their political process and then "demanded" literal tanks in the streets -- and got them, from us.
Oh, never mind the LIE that there is no objective reality with it comes to things you cannot change and are fixed at the moment of conception too.
Why do I bring this up specifically?
Because its really all part of the same issue. Prior to 1968 you could literally buy a gun out of the Sears Catalog by mail order and have it delivered to your door by the post office. There was an entire section in the "wish catalog" that came out every fall before Christmas; I remember that catalog as a boy since the back part of it was Christmas toys.
Yet there was no such problem. Indeed it was common for boys to have a shotgun in the rack of the back of their truck in rural areas because they went hunting after school with it.
Why was there no such problem?
Because if you were a thug or decided that your specific issues meant someone else had to kowtow to you our culture was that you were not allowed to get away with crap -- you sucked it up or not, but you could not impose your insanity on others. Oh sure, there were exceptions -- the mob in some cities and similar -- but not in the general case. You hit a teacher or threw a chair at her you got expelled and your parents had to deal with finding a way to get you an education at their own expense. If they didn't or couldn't you wound up having to fend for yourself. If that ended with you in prison for life tough crap. If you attacked someone else you got jailed. If you did it again you got jailed for a lot longer and you got to break rocks or make license plates as your highest and best life achievement. If you believed you were a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa, you were told to suck it up buckwheat -- your chromosomes were set at conception and there's nothing you can do about it. If you wanted to be wild-eyed crazy that was your prerogative until and unless you committed a criminal act against someone else -- and then off to jail you went. We did not allow a parade of people to break the law coming into the United States and if you tried that you were summarily ejected, we did not allow a river of fentanyl to flow in via said illegal border crossings and we did not coddle people who committed violent offenses against others no matter their age.
Whatever gifts and abilities, for better or worse, you were born with that's what you had. Our culture instilled the viewpoint that you should make the best use of your unique abilities to the best of your capacity, and if you choose not to for whatever reason that was fine -- but the cost of that decision was on you and nobody else. If you tried to make it someone else's problem you'd be told "NO!" in a firm but compassion manner -- and if you refused to accept that answer it would be enforced if necessary.
With this culture we advanced in this nation as no other country ever has over a similar period of time. We conquered atomic energy for peaceful purpose, we put men on the moon multiple times, we built reusable spacecraft that could fly to orbit and return and we created and distributed all manner of apparently-miraculous things, including electric lights, electricity on demand, automobiles capable of being bought by the average person's salary, calculators you could hold in your hand, computers in an office, then on your desk and finally in your pocket and more.
But then over the last several decades we decided we could instead create and nurtured a culture where flat-out false claims and demands for "equality" when in fact that is impossible are tolerated and even rewarded, such as the insane "reparations" nonsense out in San Francisco, claims that a man is in fact a woman., that one is entitled to a law or other degree or diploma if one hasn't learned the material and repeatedly releasing violent accused felons on trivial or even no bail whatsoever. Friends of mine vacationing in Nashville a few months ago were held up at gunpoint overnight in their rental by armed thugs. To the best of my knowledge the assailants have not been caught. Anyone care to guess whether they had priors and if so why weren't they in prison?
A couple of years ago violent bands of thugs burned and looted cities all over this nation. How many were imprisoned for a decade for committing arson or commercial looting? Effectively zero. What does that tell you about how our culture has evolved to consider such thuggery nothing more than a nice night out on the town?
It is all the same thing through this article and these examples -- culture. We have enabled and celebrated thuggery in Mexico (drug gangs), China (Uyghurs, Christians, Muslims .et.al.) and right here in the United States (drug gangs, illegal immigrants slaughtering a girl in Iowa, BLM and antifa "mostly-peaceful protestors" and more.)
This has extended into our government with both Trump (paying hospitals a bonus when they kill you) and Biden (mandates that had no basis in law or fact, "defund the police" out of Harris, shielding from prosecution his son for apparent criminal acts and more) never mind our Congress which has enabled repeated scams and schemes (Solyndra and all the various Covid-time period rip-offs anyone) going back decades and accelerating on an unbroken basis over the last 20+ years. Rather than punish the funding source for the 9/11 attacks (Saudi Arabia) we instead waged war on TWO nations that had nothing to do with it (Iran and Iraq) and killed a few million children in one of them; one of the most-outrageous examples of thuggery in human history explicitly endorsed and permitted by the American people.
Spare me the crocodile tears until our culture changes and we decide, as a body politic, that this crap is going to stop -- and mean it.
If you're not done with this crap -- and insist that it stop, no matter what it means, our economy is going to collapse as there will simply be an insufficient number of people who can actually perform the basic functions of a civilized society -- like making change for a $20.
This "suspect" was being patted down as a claimed "mitigation" to be allowed in school at all. That means he had a history of doing violent things involving threats to other people and/or had been caught with contraband on school property.
It is utterly common these days for students to assault teachers, bus drivers and other students. Every one of these incidents results in everyone else, who is not violent and/or disruptive, being denied an education.
State Constitutions may provide, and the Federal government may demand, that a "free public education" and "to the limits of each student's ability" each district is "obligated" to provide same, irrespective of cost disparity, but the last 20+ years of this crap has led to the premise that a student who is incapable of doing grade-level work or is disruptive to the class or school environment, whether with outbursts or even violence, cannot be and is not immediately and permanently removed from said class environment.
This must end now.
These two school employees were shot because we refused to remove that person on a permanent basis when they previously engaged in threatening, violent behavior. That is why he was on a "pat down" list in the first place.
Nobody who can actually teach or administrate would or should accept employment -- new or continued -- under these conditions. The amount of money offered and paid is irrelevant. This crap was happening a long time ago but it was much less-frequent. Nonetheless if you were the victim of that sort of aggressive and even violent behavior you got screwed and the "child" who was doing it was not removed on a permanent basis from the environment.
Equal protection of the law is not a suggestion and children have every right to it just like everyone else. You don't have a right to rob banks without interference because you're "emotionally disturbed" or simply "like money."
I don't give a crap what the so-called "Advocates" and "BLM" people think about this nor do I give a wet crap what Randi Weingarten screams forth next. She, and every other person who thinks little degenerate, violent monsters "must be accommodated" can fuck right off and I do not care if they have an elected office, wear a black robe or claim to be acting "for the chillllllens."
If you advocate for leaving such individuals in the school system where other, peaceful kids are -- no matter the mix between the two in terms of percentages -- you are a criminal and should be expelled from society to starve and when you die of starvation your carcass and that of your entire family should be left to rot so your highest and best function, that of food for turkey vultures, is fulfilled.
Enough of this crap.
If the schools and governments will not remove these monsters from the school system and force them into what is effectively a secure, jailed environment on the first offense for such violent, threatening behavior then the people should and indeed must force the immediate and PERMANENT cessation of collection of ALL school-related taxes and funds no matter what is required to do so.
That will free those who have children who wish to learn in a peaceful and reasonable environment to keep the funds in their own wallets to pursue same for their kids -- and if those little monsters wish to continue then they can come get some from those of us who are done with this shit and not going to put up with any more of it -- period.
Today every bit of what you need to learn all the way through college level is available at zero or near-zero cost online. There is no longer an "imperative" to erect, maintain and fund edifices for violent thugs and disruptive, unruly "special" minors who have been given the capacity to destroy the learning environment and force the achievement of others, who are not so-inclined, down to their level.
It is well past the time to make clear to every single government employee involved that they WILL stop this now and we will not give them one more of our dollars until they do, 100% of the time, with no excuses accepted.
If you want a functional society ten or twenty years from now you better issue exactly this mandate today -- and mean it.
..... go over there and shoot him yourself?
Who am I talking about? Everyone who thinks we should go to war with, or support a war against, Putin.
If you think the Ukraine war is just then get off your fat ass, hump a rifle and go get you some.
You can, you know. Got passport? Use it.
Its not even illegal. Stupid, well, that's up to you; as a "privateer" if you get your ass blown off or captured that's too bad. Geneva Conventions? What are those; you're not entitled to those protections as a privateer but then again those spouting this crap don't believe Putin obeys the Conventions anyway, so, as to steal from Hillary, what difference does it make?
Why aren't your entitled to them? Because the point of the Geneva Conventions is to disincentivize people to fight out of uniform because if you do that then the opposing army has every reason to blow civilians and anywhere they find them to Mars as they cannot determine who is an actual combatant and who is not. Since being wrong makes you dead doing things like putting military personnel in a civilian school, hospital or church turns such a place into a valid target -- and fighting "out of uniform" makes you subject to immediate execution if caught.
So where are all these "Mr. Nutsack" screamers who want to send billions of dollars over to Mr. Gaydar Grift and a whole crap-ton of weaponry that will work oh so well when handed to untrained personnel which, incidentally, is about all they got left over there.
I think it will be most-interesting when China decides to negotiate the purchase of some land in Mexico and places a military detachment there, possibly including nuclear weapons. What's the cruise missile flight time to San Diego's naval port from there, may I ask?
Oh, that'll never happen? Well perhaps it will and perhaps it won't but if you think this situation over near Russia with NATO isn't basically the same thing you're a few cans short of a six-pack. Indeed it was our emplacement of nuclear missiles in Turkey that led the USSR to place them in Cuba. It was our withdrawal of them from Turkey that ended that tit-for-tat and we started it.
Just like we did here, except for a minor little difference, which is a whole bunch of politically-connected people on both sides of the aisle running money through Ukraine, one of the most-corrupt nations on the planet.
That should not surprise either given that the people there are roughly divided into four or so factions, have been for something like a thousand years as that land has been a crossroads and fertile piece of dirt forever, and they have always wanted to kill one another at the slightest provocation, which incidentally is why Moscow considered them ungovernable and essentially allowed them to have their own quasi-government -- albeit still formally part of the USSR -- during the Soviet years.
Our decision in 2014 to unlawfully interfere in Ukraine domestic political affairs, which we did openly in a form and fashion that were Russia to do it here would get them all arrested is why the mess over there exists today. You do remember the speeches at Maidan yes, and who among others delivered them? You do remember the snipers firing on unarmed civilians over there and all of them were not run down and prosecuted, which is rather odd if in fact the people currently in power weren't the ones behind those doing the shooting, right?
At the same time how many people has China poisoned by running fentanyl precursors into Mexico and then in finished form into the US over the last fifteen years? Oh, those couple of million illegals and all the poison hidden among them isn't an invasion? Is that so? Dump just one load of that crap in the Chicago water supply and you'd have bodies all over the street, so save me the BS about how this isn't the exact same thing as an invading army when it comes to body count.
It is.
Did Trump use his authority as CiC to declare that an invasion? Nope. Biden hasn't either, of course.
Now add to this Trump's insane belief that you can run zero and even negative interest rates without consequence which, I remind you, he advocated for while in office. Credit Suisse anyone? Who else? The better question is who isn't impaired and its not just about bank runs either.
Let's get down to brass tacks -- the reason SVB blew up as it did was that there was no incoming deposit flow. That is, the ordinary way this works is you take a loan to buy a truck, the dealer cashes the check and deposits it into a bank. There are lots of banks so on balance while you and the dealer probably don't use the same bank it all evens out because while your transaction leaves your bank cash short and the dealer's cash long someone else commits a transaction that does the opposite. The overnight money moves (which incidentally had better exist and is 99% of what The Fed actually does) balances those books between the banks but when they're not balanced and one has to borrow overnight and the other can lend, there is money paid for that privilege.
So long as that balance is reasonably close the amount of money spent to maintain that balance is trivially small and nobody cares. In a rational economy this is the case because there are lots of banks and if they act reasonably and do not irrationally and unsoundly concentrate risk in their book of business the ordinary flow of commerce is such that the interest paid on the amount of money required to balance their books every night is an inconsequential part of the total cash flow picture.
So what happens when you're not part of that ordinary commerce stream and the only way you become "cash long" as a bank is when there is another venture-funded deal put out into the market, most of which are woke fantasy bullshit that will never turn a profit because they're all climate-screaming or "diversity-driven" garbage? Oh, and by the way your own board is full of directors that (1) are directors at the regulator of your firm or (2) have in their past being part of firms that blew up doing similar stupid crap in 2008?
All of this sort of nonsense seems to be great right up until the flow of said new and impending bankrupt woke garbage slows down or stops because you can't borrow at no cost! Similarly and in the same vein Facebook (META) and several others are rumored to have paid people six-figure salaries when they had no work for them simply to keep them from going to work for someone else. That's all fine and well as a strategy when you can do it by paying $1,000 in interest (1%) per year to keep that person from going to work for a competitor and never pay back the $100,000, simply rolling it over. That's a pretty-cheap "investment" in screwing your competitor out of a brain he might want to hire, right? The "employee" loves it too because they don't have to actually do anything productive; if they yank their pud to Redtube videos all day or play Call of Duty that's all good from their point of view, especially if they have a sushi bar and espresso paid for by the company in the cafeteria!
Oh that isn't what the last 15 years has been about and specifically all four of Trump's Presidency?
Bullshit.
What happens when you can't do it anymore because the natural limit of such uneconomic actions is reached and continuing it doubles the price of gasoline, triples the price of natural gas and doubles the price of eggs and other groceries, never mind already doubling the price of houses? It stops. Now SVB is short of cash and every paycheck cleared out of one of their client's accounts makes it more-so, as none of that money comes back in deposits to them. Their cost of overnight funding ratchets up and while their book of debt is guaranteed to pay principal and interest the interest isn't enough to cover the operating expenses, including the interest on the overnight book-balancing loans they must take to remain solvent.
Oops.
Oh, this is just SVB? Like hell it is. The entire house of cards in finance for the last fifteen years since 2008 was built on exactly this and yet those book-balancing loans have a real cost and must because you can't force someone to make them. No matter who buys yours they are doing it instead of buying something else and if the "something else" has a higher yield they'd be out of their mind to buy yours, whether overnight or for any other duration.
Nobody ever intentionally lends at a loss; when governments appear to do so they aren't taking the loss they're forcing you to take the loss at gunpoint.
Trump intentionally cranked that risk higher and bragged about being "The King of Debt", that is he was going to force you to eat the losses before being elected. May I remind you what he said in 2016 in his own words?
“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me,” Trump told Norah O’Donnell in an interview that aired on “CBS This Morning.” “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing.”
Oh really? It's a smart thing when it doesn't work out for the entire nation? Who do you think you will "renegotiate" that with when the holders of same are right here? On a national basis its very different than it is when you're at arms-length in a combative, commercial situation. There its perfectly ok for you to win and the other guy to lose but on a national basis there is no "other guy" to do the losing; the nation loses and since nobody works for free the net is a loss as the laws of thermodynamics are not suggestions, every transaction involves cost and both sides of the transaction ARE HERE IN THIS NATION.
When you're President you're not just the President of the rich, moneyed jackasses bidding up commercial and residential property, never mind bank and other executives buying back stock and with the proceeds buying condos in Aspen and Cessna Citations with which to go to Paris for lunch. You're also the President of the people who are on the other side of that transaction as they're the guy working for a salary who gets 0.1% interest on his checking account because the executives stole all the rest of the money through the policies you promoted and directly caused.
When that deal blows up and is "renegotiated" that same schlub working for a paycheck gets the bill for the "renegotiation" in the form of $4.00 gas prices, skyrocketing property taxes and $4.00/dozen eggs while the executive(s) who "renegotiated" keep their business jets and mansions in Aspen.
If you think it was just oil executives and bankers how about the hospitals paid bounties for Covid+ test, ventilator use which we knew killed people 90% of the time in Wuhan and Remdesivir which, we now know by a huge International study does not work and is dangerous, giving rise to the risk of destruction of the person's kidneys and thus killing them. Oh, never mind legal immunity for what would otherwise be wild-eyed and trivially proved medical malpractice given that Remdesivir had twice previously failed for other indications on safety.
But nooooo!
We must run more money to Ukraine and further imbalance our books.
So says Lindsey, Mike Pence and, of course exactly zero of any of these people will take any responsibility for what looks to be an outright international economic disaster that has just poked a tiny little piece of said iceberg above the water in the form of SVB and Credit Suisse.