Biden’s Ukraine War Judgment: Fool You Twice, Shame on You

With the track record he earned throughout the Iraq debacle, Biden should never have been trusted with regard to Ukraine. And now the Ukraine self-inflicted adventure is clearly and predictably turning into a debacle that risks nuclear war. The video in the Tweet (below) is a stunning reminder of how Biden shut down debate on Iraq, just as he has now done on Ukraine.

Biden had no end game in mind on either of these imperialist oil-driven excursions. And BTW, still no mention of Biden's culpability (based on Sy Hersh's article) regarding the Nord Stream pipeline in NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR or MSNBC. Biden is as good at shutting down the corporate left-leaning "news" media as he is in shutting down the Nord Stream Pipeline. He bragged that he was going to shut down the Nord Stream. There is evidence that he gave the order to blow it up and then the news media became clueless about who did it, lacking even a drop of curiosity once Biden ludicrously blamed Russia for blowing up its own pipe line. That nonsensical claim was code for the corporate media to get in line and take orders from the White House. That's what goes for journalism these days.

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The Social Collapse of California

Michael Shellenberger describes the social collapse of California in his recent article at City Journal, "America’s Shadow Self: Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation."

[California] has become America’s shadow self. True, it is more prosperous than ever, surpassing Germany last year to become the world’s fourth-largest economy. But Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and smaller cities are today overrun by homeless encampments, which European researchers more accurately describe as “open drug scenes.” Crime has become so rampant that many have simply stopped reporting it, with nearly half of San Franciscans telling pollsters that they were a victim of theft in the last five years and a shocking one-quarter saying that they had been assaulted or threatened with assault.

These pathologies are just the most visible manifestations of a deeper rot. Less than half of California’s public school students are proficient in reading, and just one-third are proficient in math (with a stunning 9 percent of African-Americans and 12 percent of Latinos in L.A. public schools proficient in eighth-grade math). Education achievement declined precipitously in California in 2021, as the state kept children studying at home well after kids in other states had returned to the classroom. Californians pay the most income tax, gasoline tax, and sales tax in the United States, yet suffer from electricity blackouts and abysmal public services. Residential electricity prices grew three times faster in 2021 than they did in the rest of the United States. And the state government, dependent on income taxes, faces a projected $23 billion budget deficit that will only grow if the nation’s economy enters a recession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these trends, California’s population stopped expanding in 2014 and has slightly declined since, resulting in the loss of a congressional seat after the 2020 Census.

Homelessness and disorder loom as the biggest problems. Most of the assaults and threats that San Franciscans reported came from the city’s large number of homeless and mentally ill addicts, who are allowed to sleep, defecate, and use drugs in public. Los Angeles is in even worse shape, as the city is so much larger than San Francisco and the local government is, against stereotype, even more progressive. Skid Row can no longer contain its massive population of street homeless; the city’s government has all but legalized open-air drug dealing and use. Over the last decade, homelessness increased 43 percent in California, even as it fell 7 percent nationally.

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Robert Malone’s Concerns About Imminent American Collapse

Robert Malone:

As I consider the evidence, I think we are observing more than just the mundane banality of evil. I think we are observing the consequences of the last gasps of Imperial Pax Americana play out in real time before our eyes. American imperialism is quite literally running out of gas, teetering on the edge, awaiting some push (from BRICS? From the CCP?) over the knife’s edge towards dollar-based fiat currency collapse and imperial decline such as the British empire saw during the 20th century.

Here is the thesis. The rise and fall of empires is not driven by failures of leaders, or the madness (or senility) of presidents, kings and emperors. The longevity and durability of empires are self limited by the accumulated weight and inefficiency of their own bureaucracies. And, in turn, these bureaucracies are the consequence of a million tiny cuts, each rationalized as being in the best interests of the empire and its citizens. The United States is dying under the weight of the administrative state, abetted by a lazy and corrupt two party political system which cares more for the preservation of its own privilege than for the Constitution and Nation-state that it ostensibly serves.

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Whistle-Blower Speaks Out at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital

In November, 2022, Jamie Reed quit her job at the The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital because she came to the conclusion that the way the Center treated its young patients was "morally and medically appalling." Here are the opening paragraphs of her detailed story at The Free Press: "I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle."

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.”

Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care. Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

[More . . . .]

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About Hamilton 68

Matt Taibbi replies in detail to Hamilton 68's belated response:

"A group of not-very-bright people rolled out a “dashboard,” hyped it as a magic Russian influence barometer to a stampede of willing reporters, and basked in every opportunity to speak on TV and to newspapers and at schools and think tanks and even congress, offering themselves as primary witnesses for a tale about ongoing “cyber attacks.” Then, once they caught blowback from Twitter and a reporter or two about the contents of their magic box, they retreated to an “attributable” model, but only after roughly 18 months of outright fakery. Now they’re trying to say they were misunderstood. To quote Yoel Roth, bullshit."

The whole backstory here.

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