Indian police are looking into the death of a Russian sausage magnate critical of Putin"s war in Ukraine, who died after an alcohol-fueled trip in the jungle

Tyre Nichols died after a confrontation with Memphis police, sparking multiple investigations. Body cam video is due to be released on Friday. A portrait of Tyre Nichols on displayed at a memorial service for him on January 17, 2023 in Memphis, Tennessee.Adrian Sainz/AP Photo Tyre Nichols died after being brutally beaten by five Memphis police officers, city officials have said. The five police officers involved in the beating have been charged with second-degree murder. Here is a timeline of events as they unfolded. Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died three days after he was stopped at a traffic stop and beaten by Memphis police officers.The Memphis Police Department have so far released few details about the incident, but were expected to release video footage of the arrest on Friday evening. Multiple officials warned that the footage is shocking and disturbing, and will likely lead to public protests.Five officers have been charged with Nichols' murder, and have since been released from jail on bond.Here's a timeline of the events, and what we know so far:January 7, around 8:30 p.m: Nichols is stopped, arrested, and beatenMemphis police officers tried to stop Nichols for "reckless driving" near the intersection between Raines Road and Ross Road, according to the department.A confrontation occurred as officers approached his vehicle and Nichols ran away, police said.There was another confrontation when officer tried to arrest him, according to the police.Nichols then said he was experiencing shortness of breath, and an ambulance was called, with Nichols brought to a hospital in "critical condition," according to the police statement.January 10: Nichols diesThe Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced that Nichols had "succumbed to his injuries." It gave no official cause of death.Tyre Nichols, who died in a hospital on January 10, three days after sustaining injuries during his arrest by Memphis police officers, is seen in this undated picture obtained from social media.Facebook/Deandre Nichols/via REUTERSJanuary 15: Police announce first investigationsThe Memphis Police Department announced that it was starting its own administrative investigation, and said that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations and the Shelby County District Attorney's Office were also starting an independent investigation into the use of force by Memphis police officers.January 18: DOJ and FBI announce another investigationKevin G. Ritz, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, announced that the the United States Attorney's Office, working with the FBI and Department of Justice, has opened a civil rights investigation.January 20: Memphis Police says five officers firedMemphis police officers Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Dean, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin, and Desmond Mills Jr. are facing murder charges.Memphis Police DepartmentMemphis police said in a statement that five officers were fired, and that its investigation found the five men "violated multiple department policies, including excessive use of force, duty to intervene, and duty to render aid."It named the officers as Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith.January 23: Attorneys say beating lasted three minutes, with bodycam footage showing Nichols being used as a "human pinata"After Nichols' family and their lawyers viewed the body cam footage from his arrest, attorney Antonio Romanucci said that officers beat Nichols for three minutes.Rodney Wells, Nichols' stepfather, said that "no father, mother should have to witness what I saw today."Wells added that the footage showed Nichols repeatedly calling out for his mother, according to The Washington Post.Romanucci also said that Nichols was "defenseless the entire time.""He was a human pinata for those police officers," he said. "It was unadulterated, unabashed, non-stop beating of this young boy for three minutes."Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis said the footage would be made public at an "appropriate time," when it would not interfere with investigations. Jan. 24: Family autopsy shows he suffered "extensive bleeding"Family attorneys Crump and Romanucci told Insider that their legal team had conducted an independent autopsy of Nichols' body."We can state that preliminary findings indicate Tyre suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating, and that his observed injuries are consistent with what the family and attorneys witnessed on the video of his fatal encounter with police on January 7, 2023," they said.RowVaughn Wells, the mother of Tyre Nichols, cries as she is comforted by Tyre's stepfather Rodney Wells.Gerald Herbert/AP PhotoJanuary 25: Police chief calls the incident "heinous, reckless, and inhumane"Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis condemned the incident, while pledging that her department would cooperate with all investigations.She said that she expects the release of the body cam footage to spark outrage and protests."This incident was heinous, reckless, and inhumane, and in the vein of transparency when the video is released in the coming days, you will see this for yourselves," she said in a statement released late on Wednesday."I expect you to feel what the Nichols family feels, I expect you to feel outrage in the disregard of basic human rights, as our police offers have taken an oath to do the opposite of what transpired on the video."January 26: Fired Memphis police officers charged with murderThe Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced that the five officers would be charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated kidnapping in possession of a deadly weapon, official misconduct, and official oppression. All five were booked into jail, then quickly released after posting bond, according to Fox13Memphis.January 26: Biden says Nichols' death shows the justice system needs workPresident Joe Biden posted a message on Twitter saying he and First Lady Jill Biden "extend our hearts to the family of Tyre Nichols – they deserve a swift, full, and transparent investigation.""Tyre's death is a painful reminder that we must do more to ensure that our justice system lives up to the promise of fairness and dignity for all," Biden said.January 27: Police say they can't substantiate reckless driving claimDavis, the police chief, told CNN her department has not been able to substantiate allegations from the five officers that Nichols was driving recklessly, which was the purported cause of the traffic stop. Davis said investigators have pored over cameras at the scene of the traffic stop, as well as officers' body-worn cameras, and haven't found anything proving reckless driving."We've taken a pretty extensive look to determine what the probable cause was, and we have not been able to substantiate that," Davis said. "It doesn't mean that something didn't happen, but there's no proof."January 27: US cities brace for protests ahead of footage releaseMemphis and other major cities across the US were bracing for protests ahead of the scheduled release of the footage on Friday evening.Authorities in New York City; Washington, DC; San Francisco; and Atlanta all confirmed they had been anticipating protests and preparing their police departments.At a press conference on Friday, members of Nichols' family urged protesters to remain peaceful. Nichols' stepfather, Rodney Wells, told reporters he was "very satisfied" with the swift consequences for the five officers involved, which included second-degree murder charges."More importantly, we want peace, we do not want an uproar," he said. January 27: Memphis officials announce an investigation into the SCORPION Unit the 5 officers were serving onPolice Chief Cerelyn Davis announced a review of the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit, which was first launched in late 2021. All five officers involved in Nichols' beating were assigned to the unit.The SCORPION unit is a specialized force comprising roughly 50 officers patrolling known hotspots for crime throughout the city, often focusing on seizing weapons and investigating gangs. In its first three months, the unit made over 300 arrests and seized 95 weapons, according to local NBC affiliate WMC.Attorneys representing Nichols' family criticized the SCORPION Unit on Friday, calling for its dissolution. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said he has since learned of several excessive force allegations against SCORPION Unit officers, including a man who said one of the officers threatened him at gunpoint just days before the Nichols beating."We are asking chief Davis to disband the SCORPION Unit, effective immediately," Nicholas family attorney Antonio Romanucci said Friday. "The intent of the SCORPION Unit has now been corrupted. It cannot be brought back to center with any sense of morality and dignity."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Decades after Rodney King's police beating was recorded, his daughter says the only difference is footage of Tyre Nichols' encounter is less grainy. A portrait of Tyre Nichols is displayed at a memorial service for him on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023 in Memphis, Tenn. Nichols was killed during a traffic stop with Memphis Police on Jan. 7.Adrian Sainz/AP Photo Rodney King's daughter is sickened by beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. Nearly 32 years after her fathers' beating, she can't comprehend how police brutality continues. Lora King says the race of the 5 officers involved in Nichols' beating is irrelevant.  When Lora King — Rodney King's oldest daughter — first came across news of the police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, she was so sickened she had to take a break from reading.Now 38, King was only 7 in March 1991 when her father was kicked, stunned, and punched by four white Los Angeles Police officers in the San Fernando Valley.The beating — which her dad survived — was caught on video. It was one of the earliest cases in which a civilian's recording of police brutality led to protests. "It's very, very sickening. This is nothing you can explain to children," King told Insider on Wednesday, a day after Nichols' autopsy report was released. Tyre Nichols, 29, was sent to the hospital in critical condition after a January 7 traffic stop and died three days later. On Monday, law enforcement officials allowed Nichols' family and their lawyers to privately view body-camera footage of Nichols' arrest.After seeing the footage, which is has not yet been released to the public, attorney Antonio Romanucci said at a Wednesday press conference that Nichols was "defenseless the entire time" while the five police officers, all of whom were also Black, beat him just 80 yards from his home.Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Nichols was shocked, pepper sprayed, and restrained during the encounter. In a statement Tuesday, Crump said an autopsy commissioned by the Nichols family shows he "suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating, and that his observed injuries are consistent with what the family and attorneys witnessed on the video of his fatal encounter with police on January 7, 2023."The Memphis Police Department said last week that it had fired the five officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Justin Smith, and Desmond Mills Jr. — after an administrative investigation into Nichols' death. Two firefighters who were on scene were also relieved from duty, Reuters reported.In the wake of the killing, attorneys for the Nichols family compared his beating to that of King's. Lora King, who is the executive director of the Rodney King Foundation, told Insider she doesn't understand why it would take five officers to restrain Nichols, who was only 150 pounds. "I just can't wrap my head around it," she said. "People like him and my father shouldn't be crying out for their life."King called it "unfortunate" that the officers involved in Tyre's death were Black but said that, "Even if they were green, it doesn't matter."There is no justification for killing another person during a police encounter, she said: "I would say that if they were white, I would say that if they were Asian, if the police were any other nationality."Rodney KingAP Images"Hashtags and clearer videos"Lora King said she wishes that 32 years after her father's infamous beating the world would have progressed beyond unjustified police killings of Black men.There are many social issues King is passionate about — such as homelessness — but society can't fully address them because police brutality remains a problem all these years later, she said."I was 7 years old when my father was beaten and it's definitely affected my whole entire life," she said. "The only difference between now and then is hashtags and clearer videos." King has a 16-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son.Her daughter, who has researched and written school papers about her grandfather, only knew him as the "foodie" who would come over and do arts and crafts with her before he died in 2012.When she saw his death covered on Oprah, that changed. As for her 3-year-old, he's still too young to understand the concept of police brutality, and King gets anxious thinking about having to one day explain it — and his family's legacy — to him. More worrisome, though, is the thought that he may experience police brutality first-hand, she said. "It's sad that my dad has to be the poster boy for this entire movement," she said, but she's glad his beating wasn't in vein. "It's sad that another family has to go through this forever," she said. "When you think of a legacy of a person, in my dad's case, a big part of him was murdered that day."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The Mega Millions jackpot soared to $1.35 million this week. But for some past lottery winners, life became worse after snagging the win. A lottery ticket vending machine offers Mega Millions tickets for sale on January 09, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson/Getty Images While it may be tempting, buying a lottery ticket is almost certainly not worth it. And even if it does pan out, winning the lottery does not solve all of life's problems. History has countless examples of winners whose lives took a turn for the worse after hitting the jackpot. The Mega Millions jackpot grew to an estimated $1.35 billion — the second largest in history — after no winner claimed the prize in Tuesday night's drawing. But for some previous lottery winners, snagging the jackpot didn't change their lives for the better.YouTube/ABCLara and Roger Griffiths bought their dream home … and then life fell apart.The Daily MailBefore they won a $2.76 million lottery jackpot in 2005, Lara and Roger Griffiths, of England, reportedly never argued.Then they won and bought a million-dollar barn-converted house and a Porsche, not to mention luxurious trips to Dubai, Monaco, and New York City.Media stories say their fortune ended in 2010 when a freak fire gutted their house, which was underinsured, forcing them to shell out for repairs and seven months of temporary accommodations.Shortly after, there were claims that Roger drove away in the Porsche after Lara confronted him over emails suggesting that he was interested in another woman. That ended their 14-year marriage.Bud Post lost $16.2 million within a nightmarish year — and his own brother allegedly put out a hit on him.seksan Mongkhonkhamsao/Getty ImagesWilliam "Bud" Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but he was $1 million in debt within a year."I wish it never happened," Post said. "It was totally a nightmare."A former girlfriend successfully sued him for a third of his winnings, and his brother was arrested for allegedly hiring a hit man to kill him in the hopes he'd inherit a share of the winnings.After sinking money into family businesses, Post sank into debt and spent time in jail for firing a gun over the head of a bill collector."I was much happier when I was broke," he said, according to The Washington Post.Bud lived quietly on $450 a month and food stamps until his death in 2006.Martyn and Kay Tott won a $5 million jackpot, but lost the ticket.REUTERS/Mike SegarMartyn Tott, 33, and his 24-year-old wife Kay, from the UK, missed out on a $5 million lottery fortune after losing their ticket.A seven-week investigation by Camelot Group, the company that runs the UK's national lottery, convinced officials their claim to the winning ticket was legitimate. But since there is a 30-day time limit on reporting lost tickets, the company was not required to pay up, and the jackpot became the largest unclaimed amount since the lottery began in 1994."Thinking you're going to have all that money is really liberating. Having it taken away has the opposite effect," Kay Tott told The Daily Mail. "It drains the life from you and puts a terrible strain on your marriage. It was the cruelest torture imaginable."Sharon Tirabassi won $10 million, but eventually returned to her old life.IBN/screenshotIn 2004, Sharon Tirabassi, a single mother who had been on welfare, cashed a check from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. for more than $10 million Canadian dollars.She spent her winnings on a "big house, fancy cars, designer clothes, lavish parties, exotic trips, handouts to family, loans to friends," and in less than a decade she was back "riding the bus, working part-time, and living in a rented house.""All of that other stuff was fun in the beginning, now it's like, back to life," she told The Hamilton Spectator.Luckily, Tirabassi put some of her windfall in trusts for her six children, who would be able to claim the money when they turned 26.Evelyn Adams gambled it all away in Atlantic City.Atlantic City's boardwalk, featuring the Bally's casino.Photo by Getty ImagesAgainst all odds, Adams won the lottery twice, once in 1985 and again in 1986.The New Jersey native won $5.4 million, but AskMen.com reports that she gambled it away in Atlantic City.Adams also told The New York Times in 1993 that the publicity she received led to a bombardment of requests for financial assistance."I was known," she said, "and I couldn't go anywhere without being recognized."Tonda Lynn Dickerson was forced to pay gift tax.General view outside of Waffle House on March 26, 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesTonda Lynn Dickerson, a former Waffle House waitress, got served a big plate of karma when she reportedly refused to split her winnings with colleagues and was forced to pay the taxman $1,119,347.90.How did it happen? Dickerson placed her winnings in a corporation and granted her family 51% of the stock, qualifying her for the tax.Gerald Muswagon ended up feeling sorry for partying.Hisham Ibrahim/Getty ImagesIn 1998, Gerald Muswagon won the $10 million Super 7 jackpot in Canada.But he couldn't handle the instant fame that came with winning the grand prize, according to Canada's Globe and Mail."He bought several new vehicles for himself and friends, purchased a house that turned into a nightly 'party pad' and often celebrated his new lifestyle with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol," The Globe and Mail reported. "In a single day, he bought eight big-screen televisions for friends."Muswagon also poured money into a logging business that failed because of low sales.He was eventually forced to take a job doing heavy lifting on a friend's farm just to make ends meet, according to The Globe and Mail. According to media reports, Muswagon hanged himself in his parents' garage in 2005.Suzanne Mullins couldn't dig herself out of debt.Bank officer calculates loansSeksan Mongkhonkhamsao/Getty ImagesSuzanne Mullins won $4.2 million in the Virginia lotto in 1993.She split the yearly payments three ways with her husband and daughter, leaving Mullins with about $47,000 a year. She quickly found herself in debt — her lawyer said she shelled out $1 million for her uninsured son-in-law's medical bills."It's been a hard road," Mullins' lawyer Michael Hart told the Associated Press in 2004. "It's not been jet plane trips to the Bahamas."She used future payouts to take out a $200,000 loan with a company that served a specific market — lottery winners who need their money faster.Mullins later switched to a lump-sum payout, but never paid back the debt. The loan company filed suit and won a $154,000 settlement that was all but worthless. Mullins had no assets.Americo Lopes quit his job, lied about winning, and then got sued.AP Images Construction worker Americo Lopes won the New Jersey lottery, quit his job, and lied about it, claiming that he needed foot surgery, according to reports from The New York Times.After coming clean to a former coworker, he and a few others ganged up on Lopes for not splitting the winnings as promised. In a fraud suit, the coworkers claimed they had all pitched in for the winning ticket.The court ordered Lopes to split the prize.Ibi Roncaioli was murdered by her husband after she squandered her winnings.Tim Boyle/Getty ImagesOntario resident Ibi Roncaioli walked away with $5 million in a 1991 Lotto/649 drawing, but she didn't tell her husband how she decided to spend it.When Joseph Roncaioli, a gynecologist, found out Ibi gave $2 million of her fortune to a secret child she'd had with another man, he poisoned her with painkillers, according to reports from the Toronto Star.He was convicted on manslaughter charges and reportedly asked Ibi's family to help foot the bill for her funeral.Michael Carroll lived in the fast lane and blew it all.Screenshot/YouTubeMichael Carroll was just 19 when he won Britain's £9.7 million ($15 million) jackpot in 2002, the Daily Mail reports.But according to media reports from the time, an alleged penchant for crack, parties, prostitutes, and cars put him back at square one in five years.Last we heard, the former garbageman was hoping to get his old job back.Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. was undone by robberies and a casino lawsuit.Screenshot/YouTubeIn 2002, West Virginia building contractor Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. walked away with $114 million, after taxes, on a $315 million multistate Powerball draw.That was just about his last stroke of good fortune.Thieves ran off with $545,000 that Whittaker had stashed in his car in 2003. And he lost $200,000 the same way a year later. He was also sued by Caesar's Atlantic City, which said Whittaker had bounced $1.5 million in checks.Within four years, his fortune was reportedly gone.Billy Bob Harrell Jr. had his prayers answered, but his luck ran out after he couldn't say no.Mary Meisenzahl/InsiderA Pentecostal preacher working as a stock boy at Home Depot got his prayers answered when he hit the $31 million Texas jackpot in 1997.At first life was good, with Billy Bob reportedly quitting his job, traveling to Hawaii, and buying a ranch, six other homes, and new cars. He donated 480 turkeys to the poor, according to Time.But like many others who win the lottery, he just couldn't say no when people asked for a handout. He also ran into financial trouble with a company that gave lottery winners lump sums in exchange for their annual checks, but it left him with far less than what he'd won.Media reports from the time say he eventually divorced and died by suicide. Shortly before his death, he told a financial adviser that "winning the lottery is the worst thing that ever happened to me."Willie Hurt's addiction did him in.A drug addict, not Hurt, lights an improvised crack pipe.YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 1989, Willie won a $3.1 million jackpot in the Michigan Lottery.Two years later, Hurt was divorced, lost custody of his children, and was charged with attempted murder — and according to media reports, picked up a crack-cocaine addiction.Stories from the time say the habit sucked away his entire fortune.Denise Rossi didn't disclose the jackpot in her divorce filing.Reuters/Mark Blinch When Denise Rossi won $1.3 million in the California lotto, she kept the news to herself and abruptly demanded a divorce from her husband Thomas without a word, according to The Los Angeles Times.Thomas was shocked but agreed to divorce her anyway. During the proceedings, Denise continued to keep her good fortune a secret.Two years later, Thomas intercepted a letter at his new Los Angeles home revealing the truth.He sued Denise for not disclosing her winnings in the divorce, and the judge awarded Thomas every cent.Even Denise's lawyer admitted to People that Denise could have kept half her winnings if she had been honest with her then husband. "Her failure to disclose was a fraud," the lawyer said.Meanwhile, Thomas Rossi is enjoying his $48,000-a-year payouts."If it wasn't for the lotto, Denise and I would probably still be together. Things worked out for the best," he said.Janite Lee spent it all on charity and political donations.A Patriotic skimmer hat sits full of bundles of $100 billsGetty ImagesAfter winning an $18 million lottery jackpot in 1993, Janite Lee saw her winnings gone within a decade.The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Lee, a wigmaker from South Korea, blew it on charity.A reading room was named after her at Washington University's law school, and she was a major donor for the Democratic Party.But her giving hand, coupled with a little gambling and a lot of credit-card debt, reportedly did her in. She filed for bankruptcy in 2001.Luke Pittard wound up flipping burgers at McDonald's.Daniel Goodman / Business InsiderWelsh-born Luke Pittard won a £1.3 million jackpot ($1.9 million) in 2006, but spent almost all of it on a trip to the Canary Islands, a wedding, and a house.A year and a half later, Pittard was forced to return to his job at McDonald's."They all think I'm a bit mad but I tell them there's more to life than money," Pittard told the Telegraph in 2008. "I loved working at McDonald's before I became a millionaire and I'm really enjoying being back there again."Rhoda and Alex Toth both landed in court for tax evasion.Wikimedia CommonsAlex and Rhoda Toth hit the $13 million jackpot in Florida in 1990. Within 15 years, they were destitute.According to the Tampa Bay Times, the couple spent heavily on a three-month trip to Las Vegas, which included stays in a $1,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Mirage. Back home, they bought 10 acres of land.The two were eventually accused of tax evasion by the IRS after it was discovered they filed for bankruptcy protections and falsely reported gambling losses. At the time of their indictment, they were said to owe the IRS $2.5 million.Alex died before his case went to trial; Rhoda served two years in prison.Vivian Nicholson was a clotheshorse who couldn't stop shopping.Vivian Nicholson is not pictured.Spencer Platt / Getty ImagesDaily Mail UK reports that Vivian Nicholson got a taste of the good life when her husband Keith won a fortune — £152,300 — in Britain's football pools in 1961.She famously promised the media she would "spend, spend, spend" following the windfall — and she kept her word.The couple blew much of Keith's winnings on haute couture, sports cars, and a new home, their extravagant lifestyle becoming the stuff of headlines. When Keith died in 1965, Vivian was hit with a huge tax bill and declared bankruptcy.She struggled with alcohol and depression before her death in 2011 — two years after a West End musical celebrated her life in the play "Spend, Spend, Spend."Teen mom Callie Rogers was too young to spend her money wisely.iStockCallie Rogers was just 16 when she won £1.9 million (about $3 million) in the UK's lottery in 2003, and she was too young to know how to manage her money or where it would lead her, according to Gawker.After briefly vowing to manage her winnings responsibly, Rogers made quick work of her fortune. She reportedly spent millions on vacations, clothing, cars, breast implants, and (according to British tabloid The Sun) more than $300,000 on cocaine.She also reportedly spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on a bungalow and house for her mother.Rogers eventually became a mom of three, and has said on the record she's teaching them to be careful with money."I'm glad they'll grow up knowing the value of money," she told The Sun."I was too young to win the lottery. It nearly broke me, but thankfully, I'm now stronger than ever."Editor's Note: This is an updated version of an story including reporting from Pamela Engel, Mandi Woodruff, and Michael B. Kelley.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

An Age Of Decay Authored by Chris Buskirk via AmGreatness.com, This essay is adapted from "America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay," by Chris Buskirk (Encounter, 192 pages, $28.99) The fact that American living standards have broadly stagnated, and for some segments of the population have declined, should be cause for real concern to the ruling class... America ran out of frontier when we hit the Pacific Ocean. And that changed things. Alaska and Hawaii were too far away to figure in most people’s aspirations, so for decades, it was the West Coast states and especially California that represented dreams and possibilities in the national imagination. The American dream reached its apotheosis in California. After World War II, the state became our collective tomorrow. But today, it looks more like a future that the rest of the country should avoid—a place where a few coastal enclaves have grown fabulously wealthy while everyone else falls further and further behind. After World War II, California led the way on every front. The population was growing quickly as people moved to the state in search of opportunity and young families had children. The economy was vibrant and diverse. Southern California benefited from the presence of defense contractors. San Diego was a Navy town, and demobilized GIs returning from the Pacific Front decided to stay and put down roots. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area swelled from 4,046,000 to 6,530,000. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was inaugurated in the 1930s by researchers at the California Institute of Technology. One of the founders, Jack Parsons, became a prominent member of an occult sect in the late 1940s based in Pasadena that practiced “Thelemic Magick” in ceremonies called the “Babalon Working.” L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology (1950), was an associate of Parsons and rented rooms in his home. The counterculture, or rather, countercultures, had deep roots in the state. Youth culture was born in California, arising out of a combination of rapid growth, the Baby Boom, the general absence of extended families, plentiful sunshine, the car culture, and the space afforded by newly built suburbs where teenagers could be relatively free from adult supervision. Tom Wolfe memorably described this era in his 1963 essay “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline, Baby.” The student protest movement began in California too. In 1960, hundreds of protesters, many from the University of California at Berkeley, sought to disrupt a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the San Francisco City Hall. The police turned fire hoses on the crowd and arrested over thirty students. The Baby Boomers may have inherited the protest movement, but they didn’t create it. Its founders were part of the Silent Generation. Clark Kerr, the president of the UC system who earned a reputation for giving student protesters what they wanted, was from the Greatest Generation. Something in California, and in America, had already changed. California was a sea of ferment during the 1960s—a turbulent brew of contrasting trends, as Tom O’Neill described it:  The state was the epicenter of the summer of love, but it had also seen the ascent of Reagan and Nixon. It had seen the Watts riots, the birth of the antiwar movement, and the Altamont concert disaster, the Free Speech movement and the Hells Angels. Here, defense contractors, Cold Warriors, and nascent tech companies lived just down the road from hippie communes, love-ins, and surf shops. Hollywood was the entertainment capital of the world, producing a vision of peace and prosperity that it sold to interior America—and to the world as the beau ideal of the American experiment. It was a prosperous life centered around the nuclear family living in a single-family home in the burgeoning suburbs. Doris Day became America’s sweetheart through a series of romantic comedies, but the turbulence in her own life foreshadowed America’s turn from vitality to decay. She was married three times, and her first husband either embezzled or mismanaged her substantial fortune. Her son, Terry Melcher, was closely associated with Charles Manson and the Family, along with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—avatars of the California lifestyle that epitomized the American dream.  The Manson Family spent the summer of 1968 living and partying with Wilson in his Malibu mansion. The Cielo Drive home in the Hollywood Hills where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered in August 1969 had been Melcher’s home and the site of parties that Manson attended. The connections between Doris Day’s son, the Beach Boys, and the Manson Family have a darkly prophetic valence in retrospect. They were young, good-looking, and carefree. But behind the clean-cut image of wholesome American youth was a desperate decadence fueled by titanic drug abuse, sexual outrages that were absurd even by the standards of Hollywood in the 60s, and self-destructiveness clothed in the language of pseudo-spirituality. The California culture of the 1960s now looks like a fin-de-siècle blow-off top. The promise, fulfillment, and destruction of the American dream appears distilled in the Golden State, like an epic tragedy played out against a sunny landscape where the frontier ended. Around 1970, America entered into an age of decay, and California was in the vanguard.   H. Abernathy/ClassicStock/Getty Images Up, Up, and Away The expectation of constant progress is deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world, and of America in particular. Some metrics do generally keep rising: gross domestic product mostly goes up, and so does the stock market. According to those barometers, things must be headed mostly in the right direction. Sure there are temporary setbacks—the economy has recessions, the stock market has corrections—but the long-term trajectory is upward. Are those metrics telling us that the country is growing more prosperous? Are they signals, or noise? There is much that GDP and the stock market don’t tell us about, such as public and private debt levels, wage trends, and wealth concentration. In fact, during a half-century in which reported GDP grew consistently and the stock market reached the stratosphere, real wages have crept up very slowly, and living standards have flatlined or even declined for the middle and working classes. Many Americans have a feeling that things aren’t going in the right direction or that the country has lost its societal health and vigor, but aren’t sure how to describe or measure the problem. We need broader metrics of national prosperity and vitality, including measures of noneconomic values like family stability or social trust. There are many different criteria for national vitality. First, is the country guarded against foreign aggression and at peace with itself? Are people secure in their homes, free from government harassment, and safe from violent crime? Is prosperity broadly shared? Can the average person get a good job, buy a house, and support a family without doing anything extraordinary? Are families growing? Are people generally healthy, and is life span increasing or at least not decreasing? Is social trust high? Do people have a sense of unity in a common destiny and purpose? Is there a high capacity for collective action? Are people happy? We can sort quantifiable metrics of vitality into three main categories: social, economic, and political. There is a spiritual element too, which for my purposes falls under the social category. The social factors that can readily be measured include things like age at first marriage (an indicator of optimism about the future), median adult stature (is it rising or declining?), life expectancy, and prevalence of disease. Economic measures include real wage trends, wealth concentration, and social mobility. Political metrics relate to polarization and acts of political violence.  Many of these tend to move together over long periods of time. It’s easy to look at an individual metric and miss the forest for the trees, not seeing how it’s one manifestation of a larger problem in a dynamic system. Solutions proposed to deal with one concern may cause unexpected new problems in another part of the system. It’s a society-wide game of whack-a-mole. What’s needed is a more comprehensive understanding of structural trends and what lies behind them. From the founding period in America until about 1830, those factors were generally improving. Life expectancy and median height were increasing, both indicating a society that was mostly at peace and had plentiful food. Real wages roughly tripled during this period as labor supply growth was slow. There was some political violence. But for decades after independence, the country was largely at peace and citizens were secure in their homes. There was an overarching sense of shared purpose in building a new nation.  Those indicators of vitality are no longer trending upward. Let’s start with life expectancy. There is a general impression that up until the last century, people died very young. There’s an element of truth to this: we are now less susceptible to death from infectious disease, especially in early childhood, than were our ancestors before the 20th century. Childhood mortality rates were appalling in the past, but burying a young child is now a rare tragedy. This is a very real form of progress, resulting from more reliable food supplies as a result of improvements in agriculture, better sanitation in cities, and medical advances, particularly the antibiotics and certain vaccines introduced in the first half of the 20th century. A period of rapid progress was then followed by a long period of slow, expensive improvement at the margins. When you factor out childhood mortality, life spans have not grown by much in the past century or two. A study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine says that in mid-Victorian England, life expectancy at age five was 75 for men and 73 for women. In 2016, according to the Social Security Administration, the American male life expectancy at age five was 71.53 (which means living to age 76.53). Once you’ve made it to five years, your life expectancy is not much different from your great-grandfather’s. Moreover, Pliny tells us that Cicero’s wife, Terentia, lived to 103. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of both France and England at different times in the 12th century, died a week shy of her 82nd birthday. A study of 298 famous men born before 100 B.C. who were not murdered, killed in battle, or died by suicide found that their average age at death was 71. More striking is that people who live completely outside of modern civilization without Western medicine today have life expectancies roughly comparable to our own. Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, notes that “foragers who survive the precarious first few years of infancy are most likely to live to be 68 to 78 years old.”  In some ways, they are healthier in old age than the average American, with lower incidences of inflammatory diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis. It should be no surprise that an active life spent outside in the sun, eating wild game and foraged plants, produces good health. Recent research shows that not only are we not living longer, we are less healthy and less mobile during the last decades of our lives than our great-grandfathers were. This points to a decline in overall health. We have new drugs to treat Type I diabetes, but there is more Type I diabetes than in the past. We have new treatments for cancer, but there is more cancer. Something has gone very wrong. What’s more, between 2014 and 2017, median American life expectancy declined every year. In 2017 it was 78.6 years, then it decreased again between 2018 and 2020 to 76.87. The figure for 2020 includes COVID deaths, of course, but the trend was already heading downward for several years, mostly from deaths of despair: diseases associated with chronic alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. The reasons for the increase in deaths of despair are complex, but a major contributing factor is economic: people without good prospects over an extended period of time are more prone to self-destructive behavior. This decline is in contrast to the experience of peer countries. In addition to life expectancy, other upward trends have stalled or reversed in the past few decades. Family formation has slowed. The total fertility rate has dropped to well below replacement level. Real wages have stagnated. Debt levels have soared. Social mobility has stalled and income inequality has grown. Material conditions for most people have improved little except in narrow parts of life such as entertainment. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Trends, Aggregate, and Individuals  The last several decades have been a story of losing ground for much of middle America, away from a handful of wealthy cities on the coasts. The optimistic story that’s been told is that both income and wealth have been rising. That’s true in the aggregate, but when those numbers are broken down the picture is one of a rising gap between a small group of winners and a larger group of losers. Real wages have remained essentially flat over the past 50 years, and the growth in national wealth has been heavily concentrated at the top. The chart below represents the share of national income that went to the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. In 1970 it was 33.3 percent; in 2019 the figure was 45.4 percent. Disparities in wealth have become more closely tied to educational attainment. Between 1989 and 2019, household wealth grew the most for those with the highest level of education. For households with a graduate degree, the increase was 31 percent; with a college degree, it was 17 percent; with a high school degree, about 4 percent. Meanwhile, household wealth declined by a precipitous 60 percent for high school dropouts, including those with a GED. In 1989, households with a college degree had 2.74 times the wealth of those with only a high school diploma; in 2012 it was 3.08 times as much. In 1989, households with a graduate degree had 4.85 times the wealth of the high school group; in 2019, it was 6.12 times as much. The gap between the graduate degree group and the college group increased by 12 percent. The high school group’s wealth grew about 4 percent from 1989 to 2019, the college group’s wealth grew about 17 percent, and the wealth of the graduate degree group increased 31 percent. The gaps between the groups are growing in real dollars. It’s true that people have some control over the level of education they attain, but college has become costlier, and it’s fundamentally unnecessary for many jobs, so the growing wealth disparity by education is a worrying trend. Wealth is relative: if your wealth grew by 4 percent while that of another group increased by 17 percent, then you are poorer. What’s more crucial, however, is purchasing power. If the costs of middle-class staples like healthcare, housing, and college tuition are climbing sharply while wages stagnate, then living standards will decline. More problematic than growing wealth disparity in itself is diminishing economic mobility. A big part of the American story from the beginning has been that children tend to end up better off than their parents were. By most measures, that hasn’t been true for decades. The chart below compares the birth cohorts of 1940 and 1980 in terms of earning more than parents did. The horizontal axis indicates the relative income level of the parents. Among the older generation, over 90 percent earned more than their parents, except for those whose parents were at the very high end of the income scale. Among the younger generation, the percentages were much lower, and also more variable. For those whose parents had a median income, only about 40 percent would do better. In this analysis, low growth and high inequality both suppress mobility. Over time, declining economic mobility becomes an intergenerational problem, as younger people fall behind the preceding generation in wealth accumulation. The graph below illustrates the proportion of the national wealth held by successive generations at the same stage of life, with the horizontal axis indicating the median age for the group. Baby Boomers (birth years 1946–1964) owned a much larger percentage of the national wealth than the two succeeding generations at every point. At a median age of 45, for example, the Boomers owned approximately 40 percent of the national wealth. At the same median age, Generation X (1965–1980) owned about 15 percent. The Boomer generation was 15–18 percent larger than Gen X and it had 2.67 times as much of the national wealth. The Millennial generation (1981–1996) is bigger than Gen X though a little smaller than the Boomers, and it has owned about half of what Gen X did at the same median age. Those are some measurable indicators of the nation’s vitality, and they tell us that something is going wrong. A key reason for stagnant wages, declining mobility, and growing disparities of wealth is that economic growth overall has been sluggish since around 1970. And the main reason for slower growth is that the long-term growth in productivity that created so much wealth for America and the world over the prior two centuries slowed down. Wealth and the New Frontier There are other ways to increase the overall national wealth. One is by acquiring new resources, which has been done in various ways: through territorial conquest, or the incorporation of unsettled frontier lands, or the discovery of valuable resources already in a nation’s territory, such as petroleum reserves in recent history. Getting an advantageous trade agreement can also be a way of increasing resources.  Through much of American history, the frontier was a great source of new wealth. The vast supply of mostly free land, along with the other resources it held, was not just an economic boon; it also shaped American culture and politics in ways that were distinct from the long-settled countries of Europe where the frontier had been closed for centuries and all the land was owned space.  But there can be a downside to becoming overly dependent on any one resource. Aside from gaining new resources, real economic growth comes from either population growth or productivity growth. Population growth can add to the national wealth, but it can also put strain on supplies of essential resources. What elevates living standards broadly is productivity growth, making more out of available resources. A farmer who tills his fields with a steel plough pulled by a horse can cultivate more land than a farmer doing it by hand. It allows him to produce more food that can be consumed by a bigger family, or the surplus can be sold or traded for other goods. A farmer driving a plough with an engine and reaping with a mechanical combine can produce even more.  But productivity growth is driven by innovation. In the example above, there is a progression from farming by hand with a simple tool, to the use of metal tools and animal power, to the use of complicated machinery, each of which greatly increases the amount of food produced per farmer. This illustrates the basic truth that technology is a means of reducing scarcity and generating surpluses of essential goods, so labor and resources can be put toward other purposes, and the whole population will be better off. Total factor productivity (TFP) refers to economic output relative to the size of all primary inputs, namely labor and capital. Over time, a nation’s economic output tends to grow faster than its labor force and capital stock. This might owe to better labor skills or capital management, but it is primarily the result of new technology. In economics, productivity growth is used as a proxy for the application of innovation. If productivity is rising, it is understood to mean that applied science is working to reduce scarcity. The countries that lead in technological innovation naturally reap the benefits first and most broadly, and therefore have the highest living standards. Developing countries eventually get the technology too, and then enjoy the benefits in what is called catch-up growth. For example, China first began its national electrification program in the 1950s, when electricity was nearly ubiquitous in the United States. The project took a few decades to complete, and China saw rapid growth as wide access to electric power increased productivity. The United States still leads the way in innovation—though now with more competition than at any time since World War II. But the development of productivity-enhancing new technologies has been slower over the past few decades than in any comparable span of time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century. The obvious advances in a few specific areas, particularly digital technology, are exceptions that prove the rule. The social technologies of recent years facilitate consumption rather than production.As a result, growth in total factor productivity has been slow for a long time. According to a report from Rabobank, “TFP growth deteriorated from an average annual growth of 1.1% over the period 1969–2010 to 0.4% in 2010 to 2018.”  In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen suggested that the conventional productivity measures may be misleading. For example, he noted that productivity growth through 2000–2004 averaged 3.8 percent, a very high figure and an outlier relative to most of the last half-century. Surely some of that growth was real owing to the growth of the internet at the time, but it also coincided with robust growth in the financial sector, which ended very badly in 2008.  “What we measured as value creation actually may have been value destruction, namely too many homes and too much financial innovation of the wrong kind.” Then, productivity shot up by over 5 percent in 2009–2010, but Cohen found that it was mostly the result of firms firing the least productive people. That may have been good business, but it’s not the same as productivity rising because innovation is reducing scarcity and thus leading to better living standards. Over the long term, when productivity growth slows or stalls, overall economic growth is sluggish. Median real wage growth is slow. For most people, living standards don’t just stagnate but decline. Spencer Platt/Getty Images You Owe Me Money As productivity growth has slowed, the economy has become more financialized, which means that resources are increasingly channeled into means of extracting wealth from the productive economy instead of producing goods and services. Peter Thiel said that a simple way to understand financialization is that it represents the increasing influence of companies whose main business or source of value is producing little pieces of paper that essentially say, you owe me money. Wall Street and the companies that make up the financial sector have never been larger or more powerful. Since the early 1970s, financial firms’ share of all corporate earnings has roughly doubled to nearly 25 percent. As a share of real GDP, it grew from 13–15 percent in the early 1970s to nearly 22 percent in 2020.  The profits of financial firms have grown faster than their share of the economy over the past half-century. The examples are everywhere. Many companies that were built to produce real-world, nondigital goods and services have become stealth finance companies, too. General Electric, the manufacturing giant founded by Thomas Edison, transformed itself into a black box of finance businesses, dragging itself down as a result. The total market value of major airlines like American, United, and Delta is less than the value of their loyalty programs, in which people get miles by flying and by spending with airline-branded credit cards. In 2020, American Airlines’ loyalty program was valued at $18–$30 billion while the market capitalization of the entire company was $14 billion. This suggests that the actual airline business—flying people from one place to another—is valuable only insofar as it gets people to participate in a loyalty program. The main result of financialization is best explained by the “Cantillon effect,” which means that money creation, over a long period of time, redistributes wealth upward to the already rich. This effect was first described in the 18th century by Richard Cantillon after he observed the results of introducing a paper money system. He noted that the first people to receive the new money saw their incomes rise, while the last to receive it saw a decline in their purchasing power because of consumer price inflation. The first to receive newly created money are banks and other financial institutions. They are called “Cantillon insiders,” a term coined by Nick Szabo, and they get the most benefit. But all owners of assets—including stocks, real estate, even a home—are enriched to some extent by the Cantillon effect. Those who own a lot of assets benefit the most, and financial assets tend to increase in value faster than other types, but all gain value. This is a version of the Matthew Principle, taken from Jesus’ Parable of the Sower: to those who have, more will be given. The more assets you own, the faster your wealth will increase. Meanwhile, the people without assets fall behind as asset prices rise faster than incomes. Inflation hawks have long worried that America’s decades-long policy of running large government deficits combined with easy money from the Fed will lead to runaway inflation that beggars average Americans. This was seen clearly in 2022 after the massive increase in dollars created by the Fed in 2020 and 2021.  Even so, they’ve mostly been looking for inflation in the wrong place. It’s true that the prices of many raw materials, such as lumber and corn, have soared recently, followed by much more broad-based inflation in everything from food to rent, but inflation in the form of asset price bubbles has been with us for much longer. Those bubbles pop and prices drop, but the next bubble raises them even higher. Asset price inflation benefits asset owners, but not the people with few or no assets, like young people just starting out and finding themselves unable to afford to buy a home. The Cantillon effect has been one of the main vectors of increased wealth concentration over the last 40 years. One way that the large banks use their insider status is by getting short-term loans from the Federal Reserve and lending the money back to the government by buying longer-term treasuries at a slightly higher interest rate and locking in a profit.  Their position in the economy essentially guarantees them profits, and their size and political influence protect them from losses. We’ve seen the pattern of private profits and public losses clearly in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, and in the financial crisis of 2008. Banks and speculators made a lot of money in the years leading up to the crisis, and when the losses on their bad loans came due, they got bailouts. Moral Hazard The Cantillon economy creates moral hazard in that large companies, especially financial institutions, can privatize profits and socialize losses. Insiders, and shareholders more broadly, can reap massive gains when the bets they make with the company’s capital pay off. When the bets go bad, the company gets bailed out. Alan Krueger, the chief economist at theTreasury Department in the Obama Administration, explained years later why banks and not homeowners were rescued from the fallout of the mortgage crisis: “It would have been extremely unfair, and created problems down the road to bail out homeowners who were irresponsible and took on homes they couldn’t afford.” Krueger glossed over the fact that the banks had used predatory and deceptive practices to initiate risky loans, and when they lost hundreds of billions of dollars—or trillions by some estimates—they were bailed out while homeowners were kicked out. That callous indifference alienates and radicalizes the forgotten men and women who have been losing ground. Most people know about the big bailouts in 2008, but the system that joins private profit with socialized losses regularly creates incentives for sloppiness and corruption. The greed sometimes takes ridiculous forms. But once that culture takes over, it poisons everything it touches. Starting in 2002, for example, Wells Fargo began a scam in which it paid employees to open more than 3.5 million unauthorized checking accounts, savings accounts, and credit cards for retail customers. By exaggerating growth in the number of active retail accounts, the bank could give investors a false picture of the health of its retail business. It also charged those customers monthly service fees, which contributed to the bottom line and bolstered the numbers in quarterly earnings reports to Wall Street. Bigger profits led to higher stock prices, enriching senior executives whose compensation packages included large options grants.  John Stumpf, the company’s CEO from 2007 to 2016, was forced to resign and disgorge around $40 million in repayments to Wells Fargo and fines to the federal government. Bloomberg estimates that he retained more than $100 million. Wells Fargo paid a $3 billion fine, which amounted to less than two months’ profit, as the bank’s annual profits averaged around $19.7 billion from 2017 to 2019. And this was for a scam that lasted nearly 15 years. What is perhaps most absurd and despicable about this scheme is that Wells Fargo was conducting it during and even after the credit bubble, when the bank received billions of dollars in bailouts from the government. The alliance between the largest corporations and the state leads to corrupt and abusive practices. This is one of the second-order effects of the Cantillon economy. Another effect is that managers respond to short-term financial incentives in a way that undermines the long-term vitality of their own company. An excessive focus on quarterly earnings is sometimes referred to as short-termism. Senior managers, especially at the C-suite level of public companies, are largely compensated with stock options, so they have a strong incentive to see the stock rise. In principle, a rising stock price should reflect a healthy, growing, profitable company. But managers figured out how to game the system: with the Fed keeping long-term rates low, corporations can borrow money at a much lower rate than the expected return in the stock market. Many companies have taken on long-term debt to finance stock repurchases, which helps inflate the stock price. This practice is one reason that corporate debt has soared since 1980. The Cantillon effect distorts resource allocation, incentivizing rent-seeking in the financial industry and rewarding nonfinancial companies for becoming stealth financial firms. Profits are quicker and easier in finance than in other industries. As a result, many smart, ambitious people go to Wall Street instead of trying to invent useful products or seeking a new source of abundant power—endeavors that don’t have as much assurance of a payoff. How different might America be if the incentives were structured to reward the people who put their brain power and energy into those sorts of projects rather than into quantitative trading algorithms and financial derivatives of home mortgages. While the financial industry does well, the manufacturing sector lags. Because of COVID-19, Americans discovered that the United States has very limited capacity to make the personal protective equipment that was in such urgent demand in 2020. We do not manufacture any of the most widely prescribed antibiotics, or drugs for heart disease or diabetes, nor any of the chemical precursors required to make them. A close look at other vital industries reveals the same penury. The rare earth minerals necessary for batteries and electronic screens mostly come from China because we have intentionally shuttered domestic sources or failed to develop them. We’re dependent on Taiwan for the computer chips that go into everything from phones to cars to appliances, and broken supply chains in 2021 led to widespread shortages. The list of necessities we import because we have exported our manufacturing base goes on. Financialization of the economy amplifies the resource curse that has come with dollar supremacy. Richard Cantillon described a similar effect when he observed what happened to Spain and Portugal when they acquired large amounts of silver and gold from the New World. The new wealth raised prices, but it went largely into purchasing imported goods, which ruined the manufactures of the state and led to general impoverishment. In America today, a fiat currency that serves as the world’s reserve is the resource curse that erodes the manufacturing base while the financial sector flourishes. Since the dollar’s value was formally dissociated from gold in 1976, it now rests on American economic prosperity, political stability, and military supremacy. If these advantages diminish relative to competitors, so will the value of the dollar. Dollar supremacy has also encouraged a debt-based economy. Federal debt as a share of GDP has risen from around 38 percent in 1970 to nearly 140 percent in 2020. Corporate debt has had peaks and troughs over those decades, but each new peak is higher than the last. In the 1970s, total nonfinancial corporate debt in the United States ranged between 30 and 35 percent of GDP. It peaked at about 43 percent in 1990, then at 45 percent with the dot-com bubble in 2001, then at slightly higher with the housing bubble in 2008, and now it’s approximately 47 percent. As asset prices have climbed faster than wages, consumer debt has soared from 43.2 percent of GDP in 1970 to over 75 percent in 2020.  Student loan debt has soared even faster in recent years: in 2003, it totaled $240 billion—basically a rounding error—but by 2020, the sum had ballooned to six times as large, at $1.68 trillion, which amounts to around 8 percent of GDP. Increases in aggregate debt throughout society are a predictable result of the Cantillon effect in a financialized economy. The Rise of the Two-Income Family The Cantillon effect generates big gains for those closest to the money spigot, and especially those at the top of the financial industry, while the people furthest away fall behind. Average families find it more difficult to buy a home and maintain a middle-class life. In 90 percent of U.S. counties today, the median-priced single-family home is unaffordable on the median wage. One of the ways that families try to make ends meet is with the promiscuous use of credit. It’s one of the reasons that personal and household debt levels have risen across the board. People borrow money to cover the gap between expectations and reality, hoping that economic growth will soon pull them out of debt. But for many, it’s a trap they can never escape. Another way that families have tried to keep up is by adding a second income. In 2018, over 60 percent of families were two-income households, up from about 30 percent in 1970. This change is not a result of a simple desire to do wage work outside the home or of “increased opportunities,” as we are often told. The reason is that it now takes two incomes to support the needs of a middle-class family, whereas 50 years ago, it required only one. As more people entered the labor market, the value of labor declined, setting up a vicious cycle in which a second income came to be more necessary. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 put more downward pressure on the value of labor. When people laud the fact that we have so many more two-income families—generally meaning more women working outside the home—as evidence that there are so many great opportunities, what they’re really doing is retconning something usually done out of economic necessity. Needing twice as much labor to get the same result is the opposite of what happens when productivity growth is robust. It also means that the raising of children is increasingly outsourced. That’s not an improvement. Another response to stagnant wages is to delay family formation and have fewer children. In 1960, the median age of a first marriage was about 20.5 years. In 2010, it was approximately 27, and in 2020 it was an all-time high of over 29.18  At the same time, the total fertility rate of American women was dropping: from 3.65 in 1960 down to 2.1, a little below replacement level, in the early 1970s. Currently, it hovers around 1.8. Some people may look on this approvingly, worried as they are about overpopulation and the impact of humans on the environment. But when people choose to have few or no children, it is usually not a political choice. That doesn’t mean it is simply a “revealed preference,” a lower desire for a family and children, rather than a reflection of personal challenges or how people view their prospects for the future. Surely it’s no coincidence that the shrinking of families has happened at the same time that real wages have stagnated or grown very slowly, while the costs of housing, health care, and higher education have soared. The fact that American living standards have broadly stagnated, and for some segments of the population have declined, should be cause for real concern to the ruling class. Americans expect economic mobility and a chance for prosperity. Without it, many will believe that the government has failed to deliver on its promises. The Chinese Communist Party is regarded as legitimate by the Chinese people because it has presided over a large, broad, multigenerational rise in living standards. If stagnation or decline in the United States is not addressed effectively, it will threaten the legitimacy of the governing institutions.  But instead of meeting the challenge head-on, America’s political and business leaders have pursued policies and strategies that exacerbate the problem. Woke policies in academia, government, and big business have created a stultifying environment that is openly hostile to heterodox views. Witness the response to views on COVID that contradicted official opinion. And all this happens against a backdrop of destructive fiscal and monetary policies. Low growth and low mobility tend to increase political instability when the legitimacy of the political order is predicated upon opportunity and egalitarianism. One source of national unity has been the understanding that every individual has an equal right to pursue happiness, that a dignified life is well within reach of the average person, and that the possibility of rising higher is open to all. When too many people feel they cannot rise, and when even the basics of a middle-class life are difficult to secure, disappointment can breed a sense of injustice that leads to social and political conflict. At first, that conflict acts as a drag on what American society can accomplish. Left unchecked, it will consume energy and resources that could otherwise be put into more productive activities. Thwarted personal aspirations are often channeled into politics and zero-sum factional conflict. The rise of identity politics represents a redirection of the frustrations born of broken dreams. But identity politics further divides us into hostile camps. We’ve already seen increased social unrest lately, and more is likely to follow. High levels of social and political conflict are dangerous for a country that hopes to maintain a popular form of government. Not so long ago, we could find unity in civic rituals and were encouraged to be proud of our country. Now our history is denigrated in schools and by other sensemaking institutions, leading to cultural dysphoria, social atomization, and alienation. In exchange, you can choose your pronouns, which doesn’t seem like such a great trade. Just as important as regaining broad-based material prosperity and rising standards of living—perhaps more important—is unifying the nation around a common understanding of who we Americans are and why we’re here. Tyler Durden Sat, 01/07/2023 - 23:30.....»»

January 6: A Day That Will Live In Alchemy Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com, A few weeks before Christmas, federal authorities arrested a Washington state couple for their participation in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. The FBI investigated Scott and Holly Christensen for more than 14 months; agents interrogated coworkers, scoured social media accounts, reviewed hours of security video from inside the Capitol building and body cam footage from law enforcement, and issued a search warrant to confirm the couple’s whereabouts that day.  “According to records obtained through legal process served on AT&T, cellphones associated with [the Christensens] were identified as having utilized a cell site consistent with providing service to a geographic area that included the interior of the United States Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, from 2:43 EST to 3:51 EST. AT&T records confirm that both devices belong to Scott CHRISTENSEN of Puyallup, Washington,” an unidentified agent on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force wrote in a November 2022 criminal complaint. So, what exactly did these alleged “domestic terrorists” do? They entered the Capitol through open doors as police officers stood by. Carrying no weapons, the couple took photos inside the Rotunda and wandered through some hallways; surveillance video shows Holly Christensen talking to a Capitol police officer. At another point, Scott Christensen chatted with a D.C. Metro police officer, a conversation captured on a body-worn camera. Police led the pair toward an exit door about 45 minutes later without arresting them. For that uneventful jaunt through a public building that posed a threat to no one, the Christensens will now be destroyed by the Department of Justice, the federal court system, and the news media. Although both were charged with nonviolent misdemeanors—the same four offenses that represent the overwhelming majority of charges—journalists dishonestly portrayed the couple as traitors to their country. “Washington state couple to face Jan. 6 insurrection charges,” an Associated Press headline blared on December 12. Which, of course, is music to the ears of the Biden regime. Two years after the events of January 6, the Justice Department is preparing to accelerate its retaliatory, destructive manhunt for Trump supporters. More than 950 people have been arrested and charged so far, a figure expected to at least double by the time the dust settles. Last year, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, the Biden appointee handling every January 6 case, hinted the total number of defendants could reach 2,000. The newly-appointed head of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office warned this week the agency’s work on January 6 cases will continue for “months and years to come.” Attorney General Merrick Garland released a statement to commemorate the second anniversary of the “attack on the Capitol” with a similar sentiment. “Our work is far from over,” Garland said, boasting how the prosecution “continues to move forward at an unprecedented speed and scale.” And why shouldn’t it? After all, 18 GOP senators voted to pass the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill last month, which included a $3.5 billion raise for the Justice Department, millions of which will be spent on hiring more government lawyers to prosecute January 6 cases. The FBI won a $570 million boost, bringing the bureau’s total annual budget to more than $11 billion. Nothing like feeding the wolves eating your herd. Joe Biden continues to fixate on January 6 in an attempt to brand Trump supporters, or any American who does not blindly embrace the Dear Leader, as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists” endangering the safety of the country. To honor the second anniversary of January 6, Biden will make remarks and hand out Presidential Citizens Medals to individuals who gave televised performances before the January 6 select committee. The family of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick will receive a posthumous medal for “[losing] his life protecting our representatives.” Biden, who has difficulty telling the truth about the circumstances of his own son’s death, shamelessly perpetuates the falsehood that Sicknick and several other police officers died as a result of January 6. (In his statement, Garland claimed five police officers died.) Of course, January 6 propagandists have to lie about what happened to justify comparisons to Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9/11. Their hope is to rally support around the new war on terror, one taking direct aim at Americans on the Right. If Trump supporters are truly America’s version of ISIS, as the regime and the news media insist, then no amount of funding is too much and no criminal prosecution is too excessive to defeat the sworn enemy. Any dissent is unpatriotic. It’s a feat of political sorcery—fueled by lies, cover-ups, and careerism, not entirely unlike the first war on terror—to transform an unruly, four-hour protest into an act of domestic terror. American families such as the Christensens are merely collateral damage along the way. Tyler Durden Fri, 01/06/2023 - 16:20.....»»

Pavel Antov died Sunday after falling from a hotel window in India, making him the second critic of President Vladimir Putin to die this way in 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin.Contributor/Getty Images A second critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin has died this year after falling from a window. Pavel Antov, 65, died Sunday at a hotel in India just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. A June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine. A second critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin died Sunday after falling out of a window, the Russian media outlet TASS reported.According to reports, Pavel Antov fell from a hotel window in Rayagada, India, just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. He was visiting the state of Odisha in eastern India.Antov was the chair of the committee on agrarian policy, nature management, and ecology of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region and was well-known in the area, according to TASS. "Our colleague, a successful entrepreneur, philanthropist Pavel Antov passed away," Vyacheslav Kartukhin, the vice speaker of the regional parliament, said on his Telegram channel, TASS reported. "On behalf of the deputies of the United Russia faction, I express my deep condolences to relatives and friends."The speaker of the legislative assembly, Vladimir Kiselyov, called Antov's death a "difficult and irreparable loss" in a statement on the website of the regional parliament, TASS reported.Antov was a known critic of Putin, the BBC reported. The BBC reported that a since deleted June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account — and shared after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, killed a man and left his wife and 7-year-old daughter wounded — was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine. "It's extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror," the WhatsApp message said.Antov quickly deflected on social media, insisting he was a supporter of the war and Putin, adding that the message came from a war critic with whom he did not agree and it was all a misunderstanding, the BBC reported. He is the second Putin critic to die after falling from a window this year. In September, the Russian energy oligarch Ravil Maganov, 67, died after falling from a hospital window, Insider reported at the time.The 67-year-old oil tycoon died after his oil company, Lukoil, released a statement expressing "deepest concerns" about the war in Ukraine.  A Russian traveling with Antov died Friday at the same hotel in India, The BBC reported. The BBC reported Vivekanand Sharma, the Odisha police superintendent, said the man, Vladimir Budanov, died of a stroke. Sharma added that Antov "was depressed after his death and he too died."Alexei Idamkin, the Russian consul in Kolkata, told TASS that police did not see a "criminal element in these tragic events," The BBC reported. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Pavel Antov died Sunday after falling from a hotel window in India, making him the second critic of President Vladimir Putin to die this way in 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin.Contributor/Getty Images A second Vladimir Putin critic has died this year after falling from a window.  Pavel Antov, 65, died Sunday at a hotel in India just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. A June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine.  A second critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin died Sunday after falling out of a window, the Russian media outlet TASS reported.According to reports, Pavel Antov fell from a hotel window in Rayagada, India, just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. He was visiting the state of Odisha in eastern India.Antov was the chair of the committee on agrarian policy, nature management, and ecology of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region and was well-known in the area, according to TASS. "Our colleague, a successful entrepreneur, philanthropist Pavel Antov passed away," Vyacheslav Kartukhin, the vice speaker of the regional parliament, said on his Telegram channel, TASS reported. "On behalf of the deputies of the United Russia faction, I express my deep condolences to relatives and friends."The speaker of the legislative assembly, Vladimir Kiselyov, called Antov's death a "difficult and irreparable loss" in a statement on the website of the regional parliament, TASS reported.Antov was a known critic of Putin, the BBC reported. The BBC reported that a since deleted June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account — and shared after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, killed a man and left his wife and 7-year-old daughter wounded — was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine. "It's extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror," the WhatsApp message said.Antov quickly deflected on social media, insisting he was a supporter of the war and Putin, adding that the message came from a war critic with whom he did not agree and it was all a misunderstanding, the BBC reported. He is the second Putin critic to die after falling from a window this year. In September, the Russian energy oligarch Ravil Maganov, 67, died after falling from a hospital window, Insider reported at the time.The 67-year-old oil tycoon died after his oil company, Lukoil, released a statement expressing "deepest concerns" about the war in Ukraine.  A Russian traveling with Antov died Friday at the same hotel in India, The BBC reported. The BBC reported Vivekanand Sharma, the Odisha police superintendent, said the man, Vladimir Budanov, died of a stroke. Sharma added that Antov "was depressed after his death and he too died."Alexei Idamkin, the Russian consul in Kolkata, told TASS that police did not see a "criminal element in these tragic events," The BBC reported. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

People who criticise Putin have, in a number of cases, ended up dead. Vladimir Putin stands with a gun at a shooting gallery of the new GRU military intelligence headquarters building as he visits it in Moscow November 8, 2006.Reuters Individuals linked to Putin's government have died in violent or mysterious circumstances. Putin, a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB and ex-head of the FSB, has been suspected of assassinating critics.  Here's a list of people who have been critical of Putin and the Russian president is suspected of assassinating:  Pavel AntovRussian tycoon reportedly fell from a hotel window in Rayagada, India, on December 25 days after his 65th birthday. The politician and millionaire criticized Putin's war with Ukraine following a missile attack in Kyiv earlier this year on WhatsApp but quickly deleted the message and claimed that someone else wrote it, the BBC reported."Our colleague, a successful entrepreneur, philanthropist Pavel Antov passed away," Vice Speaker of the Regional Parliament Vyacheslav Kartukhin said on his Telegram channel, Russian media outlet TASS reported. "On behalf of the deputies of the United Russia faction, I express my deep condolences to relatives and friends."Mikhail LesinRussian press minister Mikhail Lesin was found dead of "blunt force trauma to the head" in a Washington, DC, hotel room in November 2015.Lesin, who founded the English-language television network Russia Today (RT),  was considering making a deal with the FBI to protect himself from corruption charges before his death, per The The Daily Beast.For years, Lesin had been at the heart of political life in Russia and would have known a lot about the inner workings of the rich and powerful.Alexander LitvinenkoAlexander Litvinenko.via The TelegraphAlexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea at a London hotel that had been laced with deadly polonium-210.A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by FSB agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had "probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin."Litvinenko was very critical of Putin, accusing him of, among other things, blowing up an apartment block and ordering the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.Anna PolitkovskayaAnna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was critical of Putin. In her book "Putin's Russia," she accused Putin of turning his country into a police state. She was murdered by contract killers who shot her at point blank range in the lift outside her flat.Five men were convicted of her murder, but the judge found that it was a contract killing, with $150,000 paid by "a person unknown."A picture of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya is shown during a candlelight vigil in front of the Russian Embassy.Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesNatalia EstemirovaNatalia Estemirova was a journalist who sometimes worked with Politkovskaya.She specialised in uncovering human-rights abuses carried out by the Russian state in Chechnya.She was abducted from outside her home and later found in nearby woodland with gunshot wounds to her head. No one has been convicted of her murder.Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia BaburovaHuman-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov represented Politkovskaya and other journalists who had been critical of Putin.He was shot by a masked gunman near the Kremlin. Journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was walking with him, was also shot when she tried to help him.Boris Nemtsov speaks at a news conference on "Corruption and Abuse in Sochi Olympics."Alex Wong/Getty ImagesBoris NemtsovBoris Nemtsov was a former deputy prime minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin who went on to become a big critic of Putin — accusing him of being in the pay of oligarchs.He was shot four times in the back just yards from the Kremlin as he walked home from a restaurant. Despite Putin taking "personal control" of the investigation into Nemtsov's murder, the killer has not been found.Boris BerezovskyBoris Berezovsky was a Russian oligarch who fled to Britain after he fell out with Putin. During his exile he threatened to bring down Putin by force. He was found dead at his Berkshire home in March 2013 in an apparent suicide, although an inquest into his death recorded an open verdict.Berezovsky was found dead inside a locked bathroom with a ligature around his neck. The coroner couldn't explain how he had died.The British police had on several occasions investigated alleged assassination attempts against him.Boris Berezovsky wears a mask showing the face of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, as he leaves Bow Street Magistrates Court.Graeme Robertson/Getty ImagesPaul KlebnikovPaul Klebnikov was the chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes. He had written about corruption and dug into the lives of wealthy Russians.He was killed in a drive-by shooting in an apparent contract killing.Sergei YushenkovSergei Yushenkov was a Russian politician who was attempting to prove the Russian state was behind the bombing of an apartment block.He was killed in an assassination by a single shot to the chest just hours after his political organisation, Liberal Russia, had been recognised by the Justice Ministry as a party.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Pavel Antov died after falling from a hotel window in India Sunday, making him the second Vladimir Putin critic to die this way in 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives to the welcoming ceremony in Yerevan, Armenia, on November 23, 2022.Contributor/Getty Images A second Vladimir Putin critic has died after falling from a hotel window.  Pavel Antov, 65, died Sunday in India just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. A June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine.  A second critic of Vladimir Putin died Sunday after reportedly falling out of a window, Russian media outlet TASS reported.According to reports, Pavel Antov fell from a hotel window in Rayagada, India, just days after celebrating his 65th birthday. He was visiting the state of Odisha in eastern India.Antov was the chairman of the Committee on Agrarian Policy, Nature Management and Ecology of the Legislative Assembly of the Vladimir Region and was well known in the region, according to TASS. "Our colleague, a successful entrepreneur, philanthropist Pavel Antov passed away," Vice Speaker of the Regional Parliament Vyacheslav Kartukhin said on his Telegram channel, TASS reported. "On behalf of the deputies of the United Russia faction, I express my deep condolences to relatives and friends."The speaker of the legislative assembly, Vladimir Kiselyov, called Antov's death a "difficult and irreparable loss" in a statement on the website of the regional parliament, TASS reported.Antov was a known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the BBC reported. The BBC reported that a since-deleted June WhatsApp message linked to Antov's account — and shared after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv that killed a man and left his wife and seven-year-old daughter wounded — was seen as critical of Putin's war in Ukraine. "It's extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror," the WhatsApp message said. Antov quickly deflected on social media, insisting he was a supporter of the war and Putin, adding that the message came from a war critic with whom he does not agree and it was all a misunderstanding, the BBC reported. Antov is the second Putin critic to die after falling from a window. In September, Russian energy oligarch Ravil Maganov, 67, died after falling from a hospital window, Insider reported at the time.The 67-year-old oil tycoon died after his oil company, Lukoil, released a statement expressing "deepest concerns" about President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.  Another Russian traveling with Antov also reportedly died at the hotel in India on Friday, according to The BBC. The BBC reported Odisha police Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma said Budanov died of a stroke. Sharma added that Antov "was depressed after his death and he too died."Alexei Idamkin, The Russian consul in Kolkata, told the TASS that police did not see a "criminal element in these tragic events," The BBC reported. Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Will The Fallout From "Qatargate" Splatter The European Commission? Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com, As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the Commission, the EU’s executive branch. Recent revelations suggest the EU’s Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be implicated. Since erupting last weekend with police raids on MEPs’ homes and offices in the European parliament, the Qatargate scandal has done nothing but mushroom. What began as a criminal probe into current and former MEPs and parliamentary assistants implicated in a bribery ring aimed at burnishing the public image of the current World Cup host has widened significantly — not only in terms of the number of people involved but also the number of organizations and third countries, which now also include Morocco. As the scandal grows, both the Parliament and the European Commission are locked in a frantic damage control mission. European Parliament president Roberta Metsola on Thursday (15 December) pledged to unveil a “wide-ranging reform package” in January, which will include  measures to bolster whistleblower protections, a ban on all unofficial parliamentary friendship groups (groups of MEPs discussing relations with non-EU countries) and a review of enforcement of code of conduct rules for MEPs.  Read More Fallout Spreads For the moment almost all of the focus is understandably on the European Parliament, but questions are beginning to be asked as to whether the fallout will spread to the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission. Asked whether he is worried about such an outcome, Didier Reynders, the EU Commissioner for justice, told Politico that it is “all the time a possibility”. Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, herself no stranger to corruption allegations, both in her native Germany and in Brussels, said the following in a Monday morning press conference: The allegations against the VP of Parliament [Eva Kaili] are of the most concern, very serious. It’s a question of confidence of our people in our institutions, it needs highest standards. I proposed the creation of an independent ethnics body that covers all EU institutions (in March).[1] For us it is very critical to have not only strong rules, but the same rules covering all the EU institutions, and not to allow for any exemptions. Von der Leyen added that the Commission is looking at its own transparency register for all logged meetings between staff and Qatari officials. That is not as comforting as it may sound given the flagrant disregard for transparency and accountability her Commission has shown in its acquisition of billions of COVID-19 vaccines. What’s more, as the non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory notes, the Commission’s 2014 transparency reforms apply only to the top 250 most senior officials in the Commission. Many lower level officials from among the 30,000+ Commission staff regularly meet with lobbyists but they are not included within the rules. EU’s Biggest Corruption Scandal in Years Von der Leyen also refused to answer questions about the European Vice President Margaritis Schinas’ connections with Qatar, provoking umbrage from the Brussels press corps. Margaritis, also from Greece, represented the EU at the opening ceremony of the World Cup, and has been heavily criticized for lavishing praise on the “improving” labor conditions in Qatar, where at least 6,500 migrants workers from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan died between 2011, the year the World Cup was awarded to the country, and 2020. Politico describes Qatargate as the biggest corruption scandal to hit the EU in years, though it faces a run for its money from the blossoming scandal over the Commission’s deeply opaque dealings with Pfizer and other vaccine makers, which is now the subject of an investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The EU’s ombudsman Emily O’Reilly branded the Commission’s refusal to disclose the text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as “maladministration.” In contrast to Qatargate, that scandal has been studiously ignored by Europe’s legacy media despite the staggering sums of money involved (tens of billions of dollars to date to buy up to 1.8 billion COVID-19 vaccines), the number of people affected (anyone who pays taxes in the EU and felt compelled by the EU’s vaccine passport rules to take a medical product they didn’t want) and the seniority of those implicated, including Von der Leyen herself and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Von der Leyen herself has come under fire for concealing and/or deleting records of her conversations with Bourla prior to the Commission’s purchase of up to 1.8 billion vaccines. As for Bourla, he has twice refused to give testimony to a European Parliament special committee on the matter. Borrell in the Mix? For his part, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy Josep Borrell described Qatargate “very, very worrisome.” But he was also at pains to emphasize that no one in the European Commission’s diplomatic service, which he heads, is under investigation: “There is nothing and no one being referred to neither from the External Action Service nor from the delegations.” But that may change in the coming days or weeks. Former European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, who is at the center of the bribery allegations, denies receiving the €1.5 million of cash found at her home and in her father’s possession [2] and claims she was acting exclusively on orders from above. According to Kaili’s lawyer, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, those orders came directly from EU Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Borrell. From Euractiv: In an interview with Greek MEGA TV channel, Dimitrakopoulos said Kaili has nothing to do with bribery from Qatar. “What the public opinion needs to know is that Qatar did not need to bribe Ms Kaili because she went to Qatar as a representative of the European Parliament, the speeches, the interviews she gave were after the agreement and order of the President Roberta Metsola,” Dimitrakopoulos said. He added that documents prove this and explained that Kaili did not take any initiative or have an agenda. “Ms Metsola sent her to Qatar, what she was going to say had Ms Metsola’s approval […] Ms Metsola had also sent EU official Mr Roberto Bendini with her to watch all of Ms Kaili’s meetings”, he explained. “I am telling you the words of Ms Kaili, she was carrying out a plan that had started in 2019, High Representative Josep Borrell and Ylva Johansson [Commissioner for Home Affairs] had decided at the Commission level, to cooperate with Qatar, Kuwait and Oman,” the lawyer added. For the moment, these are just leaked allegations made by the lawyer of a suspect in a very serious corruption investigation, and should be treated as such. But one thing that is clear is that Borrell, as Europe’s chief diplomat, played a leading role in forging closer ties with Qatar. MEPs now suspect Qatar’s palm-greasing may have unduly influenced negotiations on the highly lucrative EU-Qatar aviation agreement. Signed last year, the deal granted Qatar Airlines unlimited access to the EU’s vast market of 450 million people while giving European airlines access to Qatar’s somewhat smaller market of 2.9 million people. The first deal of its kind ever to be signed by the Commission, it was heavily criticised by major EU airlines and unions, but defended by the EU, which claimed it would provide “opportunities for both sides.” An EU spokesperson said on Wednesday the agreement was reached with “full transparency.” In the end, Europe’s desperate hunger for energy sources, which was already readily apparent even by the summer of 2021, probably played a much larger part in securing the deal than a few greased palms. On his first visit to the country as EU’s chief diplomat, in September 2021, Borrell praised Qatar as a “reliable energy partner”, which in these times, he said, is “especially important.” He also announced EU plans to build a fully fledged diplomatic mission in Doha this year, which was inaugurated in September. As previously mentioned, Morocco is also implicated in this ever-widening scandal. According to Spanish journalist Ignacio Cembrero, it is the country’s foreign intelligence services, the DGED, that has been bribing MEPs, presumably to frustrate any resolutions in favor of Western Sahara, the resource-rich former Spanish colony it invaded and occupied in 1975. Morocco has also been accused this year of using Pegasus spyware to target the mobile phones of around 200 Spanish government officials, including the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchéz and then Defense Minister Margarita Robles. Regular readers may recall that over the last year the North African country has garnered increasing support for its “autonomy” plan for Western Sahara among big hitters in the EU including Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The plan would essentially involve formalizing Morocco’s permanent occupation of the resource-rich region and has already received the blessing of both Israel and the US. Another Toothless Ethics Body For the moment, it is far from clear just how far this burgeoning scandal will reach. One thing that is clear is that the reputational damage will be large and lasting. The European Union’s ability to lecture the misbehaving governments of Member States and third-party countries on how to govern will be further diminished. As Hungary’s Victor Orban said in a video uploaded to his Facebook page, “It is time that we drain the swamp here in Brussels.” And he is right. EU institutions need to get their house in order once and for all, and fast. And that is unlikely to happen. The EU ombudsman Emily O’Reilly said this week that Von der Leyen’s proposed plan for a new ethics body is likely to end up as “something with no teeth, something that will possibly sit there passively, wait for complaints to come in.” What the body really needs, O’Reilly said, is investigatory and sanctions powers. But that might actually threaten to derail the gravy train Brussels has become. And the problem is not just illegal cash payments stuffed away in paper bags and briefcases; it is the vast lobbying apparatus that has built up in Brussels, which is now the second largest lobbying capital in the world after Washington. As in Washington, lobbying reaches into just about every aspect of governance. In its 2015 report, CEO reported that lobbyists representing businesses and trade associations made up 75% of all high-level Commission lobby meetings and more than 80% in certain areas such as financial regulation or the internal market. The inevitable result, as in Washington, is that policies are made almost exclusively in the service of vested corporate interests. Sometimes corporate lobbies even draft the EU’s legislation. This is the business model of modern governance. Lastly, if Borrell is indeed caught up in this burgeoning scandal and, by some miracle, loses his job, it would be no great loss to the EU’s 450 million citizens. He is the least diplomatic of diplomats. Just about every time he speaks, whether on the wonders of European colonialism or the vast untamed jungle that lies beyond Europe’s borders, damage is inflicted on the EU’s relations with some other part of the world. Since long before the Ukraine conflict he has played a leading role in escalating tensions with Russia, the EU’s biggest neighbor and energy supplier. He is also no stranger to scandal, having been convicted, in 2018, of insider trading in Spain. That resulted in him being placed on the Spanish market regulator’s blacklist. The ensuing scandal triggered calls for his resignation as Spain’s then-Foreign Minister. But he resisted those calls and in 2020 was bumped up to the European Commission, as so often happens with scandal-tarnished domestic politicians in the EU. Tyler Durden Sun, 12/18/2022 - 08:10.....»»

Quinn: We Are Trapped In 'A Truman Show' Directed By Psychopaths Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949 “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley When I step back from the day-to-day minutia and trivialities flooding my senses from all directions and media devices, it almost appears as if I’m living in a highly scripted reality TV program where the characters and plots are designed to create passions and reactions to support whatever narrative is being weaved by those directing the show. Huxley really did foresee the future as clearly and concisely as anyone could, decades before his dystopian vision came to fruition. Orwell’s boot on the face vision is only now being initiated because a few too many critical thinkers have awoken from their pharmaceutically induced stupor and begun to question the plotline of this spectacle masquerading as our reality. The mass formation psychosis infecting the weak-minded masses; relentless mass propaganda designed to mislead, misinform, and brainwash a dumbed down and government indoctrinated populace; and complete control of the story line through media manipulation, regulation, and censorship of the truth; has run its course. As Charles Mackay stated 180 years ago, the masses go mad as a herd, but only regain their senses slowly, and one by one. My recognition that the world seems to be scripted and directed by Machiavellian managers, working behind a dark shroud, representing an invisible governing authority, molding our minds, suggesting our ideas, dictating our tastes, and creating fear, triggered a recollection of the 1998 Jim Carrey movie – The Truman Show. The movie, directed by Peter Weir (Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poet’s Society), had the surreal feel of Forest Gump, while beckoning the horrendous introduction of reality TV (Big Brother, Survivor), which poisons our shallow unserious society to this day. The plot of the movie focuses on individuality versus conformity, consumerism, voyeurism, reality versus manipulation, false narratives, the truth about the American Dream, and the dangers of surveillance in a technologically advanced society. Truman Burbank is the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show, a reality television program filmed 24/7 through thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast to a worldwide audience. Christof, the show’s creator seeks to capture Truman’s authentic emotions and give audiences a relatable everyman. Truman has been the unsuspecting star of the show since he was born 30 years prior. Truman’s hometown of Seahaven Island is a complete set built within an enormous dome, populated by crew members and actors who highlight the product placements that generate revenue for the show. The elaborate set allows Christof to control almost every aspect of Truman’s life, including the weather. The picture-perfect home, with picket fence and plastic people, is an attempt to convince Truman he is living the American Dream rather than in an inescapable dystopian techno-prison. To prevent Truman from discovering his false reality, Christof manufactures scenarios that dissuade Truman’s desire for exploration, such as the “death” of his father in a sea storm to instill aquaphobia, and by constantly broadcasting and printing messages of the dangers of traveling and the virtues of staying home. One cannot but acknowledge the plotline to keep Truman under control, obedient, and locked down in his controlled environment, with no escape hatch visible, as exactly the plotline used by our overlords during the Covid scam. Using fear to regulate your subjects is a familiar theme used by those controlling the narrative and pulling the strings behind the scenes of our glorious democracy of dystopia. The first task was to instill fear into the masses through fake videos, fake medical experts spewing fake “facts”, denying the reality masks, social distancing, and locking down the world did not stop a microscopic virus, while suppressing treatments which were clearly safe and effective (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) and forcing Fauci’s remdesivir and ventilators on patients – insuring their deaths. Truman’s life was built upon lies, deception, and fake narratives, controlled by a tyrannical director putting on a show to please his bosses and maximize profits. We are experiencing the same reality today. Since March 2020 we have been trapped in a dystopian reality show based on lies, deception, and fake narratives about a weaponized virus created in a lab funded by Anthony Fauci and utilized to further the totalitarian Great Reset agenda of Schwab, Gates and their ilk, while maximizing the profits of Pfizer, TV networks and filling the pockets of politicians, shills, and apparatchiks willing to sellout the people of our country for thirty pieces of silver. As the Truman Show approached its 30th anniversary, Truman began discovering unusual elements, such as a spotlight falling out of the sky in front of his house and a radio channel that precisely described his movements. He began to awaken to the fact he was nothing but a peculiarity trapped in a cage and constantly deterred from escaping at every turn, for the good of the show. He lived in a scripted world of conformity, where questioning the plot was not allowed, and the masses just played their parts. This is exactly how a dictatorship without tears uses technology, pharmaceuticals, and psychological manipulation to convince the masses to love their servitude. This is the reality show we have been living in during this 21st Century dictatorship dystopia of dunces. But this psychological phenomenon is not new to mankind, as Plato described an ancient Truman Show analog in the 6th Century with his Allegory of the Cave. The nature of human beings has not changed across the trials and tribulations of history. In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but are not an accurate representation of the real world. An enlightened man is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand the shadows on the wall are not reality. The ignorant inmates do not desire to leave their prison/cave, for it is the only life they know, and they fear reality. The fire and the puppets, used to create shadows, are controlled by artists. Plato indicates the fire is also the political doctrine taught by a nation state. The artists use light and shadows to indoctrinate the masses with the dominant doctrines of the times. Few humans ever escape the cave. Most humans will remain at the bottom of the cave, with a small few elevated as major artists, to project the shadows keeping the masses disoriented, confused and fearful. “Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave “Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated fifteen centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth. Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show. Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death. Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits. The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right. Whether we are trapped in an artificial world produced in a dome, cave, or our current technologically advanced surveillance propaganda state, the goal of those controlling our false reality is to take away our freedoms, crush dissent, keep us ignorant of the truth, and treat us as plebs to be taxed and molded. Christof, whose name is supposed to invoke him being a god-like figure ruling over Truman’s world, declares Truman could discover the truth and leave at any time, while using every diabolical trick to keep that from ever happening, because his show generated revenues exceeding the GDP of a small country. Truman and ourselves are essentially prisoners in a vast production, and our overlords believe it is their duty to convince us to love our servitude and prefer our cells, because it is financially beneficial to the overlords and their crew. Our world is not fake, but it is tightly controlled by those running the show. Seemingly random events, plots, and subplots are manipulated to generate specific emotions and reactions by the public in order to achieve the objectives of those benefitting from the various storylines. They are molding our minds and forming our tastes through psychological and technological manipulation of our daily existence. Christof explained why most rarely discover the truth or question the world they live in – “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” We have allowed men we have never seen to dictate how we live our lives, the choices we make, and which politicians and “experts” to believe, without ever putting in the effort to understand why we are being prodded to do so. We are locked in a self-imposed prison of desires, emotions, and needs through mass media messaging and a constant barrage of advertisements. Conformity and obedience are the desired traits sought by the ruling class, while individuality and skepticism are frowned upon and punished through social ostracism. We are conditioned from birth to believe what they tell us to believe. Government school indoctrination and mass media misinformation does the trick. Distracted by our techno-gadgets and ignorant of truth is how the globalist oligarchs methodically implement their Great Reset agenda. They are so convinced of the ignorance of the masses they openly proclaim their depopulation and techno-prison schemes with no fear of push back or retribution. The ending of the Truman Show is a lesson in resistance, persistence, and the strength of the individual, even in the face of a technologically advanced Big Brother state. It offers a message of hope, no matter how powerful our overlords appear to be. Refusing to obey or conform by one individual can inspire others to do likewise. Once Truman ‘awoke’ to his plight as a lab rat in a scripted show, he began to plot his escape. Using a makeshift tunnel in his basement, out of view of Christof’s cameras, he disappeared and forced the suspension of the broadcast for the first time in thirty years. Christof discovers Truman sailing away from Seahaven in a small boat, as he has overcome the fake conditioning of fear instilled in him by the man who supposedly loves him but traumatized him about the sea by faking his father’s death while at sea. Christof chooses to almost drown Truman by creating a violent storm to deter him from discovering the truth. Ultimately the storm ceases and his boat strikes the wall of the dome. This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years. The covid advertising campaign will never be topped, as Hollywood stars, top athletes, famous writers, rock legends, supposedly impartial journalists, and all the major networks said SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! Everyone was for sale, and all they had to do was lie and say the jabs were “safe and effective”. Product placement was the money-making formula for the Truman Show, while hard selling a Big Pharma phony cure over the airwaves 24/7 using the tax dollars of the victims was the final solution of the Great Reset Cabal. The grand finale is a clash of the philosophies of reality versus false reality, as Truman discovers a staircase leading to an exit door. Christof speaks to Truman, claiming there was no more truth in the real world than in his artificial world, and he would be safe, with nothing to fear, in a world controlled by men invisible to him assuring him they have his best interests at heart. Truman chooses individuality, truth, risk, living a real meaningful life, and seeking honest relationships over a safe existence in a bubble where all decisions were made by others. Truman bows to the audience and exits, leaving Chistof to mourn the loss of his star and the revenue he generated. The ignorant masses watching the show cheer his escape and then ask, “what’s on next?” Plato captured the uncertainty and bewilderment Truman must have felt as he walked into the light. “Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave This world of manufactured dystopian pleasure harkens more towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where pharmaceuticals and conditioning would keep the public seeking pleasure, pre-occupied with trivialities, distracted by materialism, unable to think critically, and reduced to passivity and egoism through the control of messaging by their controllers. Our efficient totalitarian state has gained complete control by convincing the masses to love their servitude and beg for more rules, restrictions, and reduction of liberties in the name of safety and security. Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question. “Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.” ― Aldous Huxley “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Just as those controlling the Truman Show were not doing it for Truman’s benefit, but for their enrichment, those controlling the puppet strings of our society today had no interest in our health over the last two years, our financial well-being, our psychological well-being, or the peaceful rational functioning of our civilization. They have no interest in securing our border, reducing crime, holding fair elections, promoting peaceful solutions to global conflict, or allowing the truth to reach the masses. Their agenda has been and continues to be, the destruction of our civilized society, obliteration of our core standards and norms, depopulation of the planet, confiscation of our wealth, and ultimately our enslavement through technological shackles and chains. As Huxley noted decades ago, technology has just provided our civilization with a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is being used by our controllers to monitor our movements, communications, and to surveil, distract, and amuse us to death. It is no longer a force for good, but a means to control us. They plan to use technology to disarm their citizens through increasingly authoritarian regulations, sold as keeping us safe from mass shooters. Their climate agenda isn’t about the climate, but about complete control of the masses. When government and their social media attack dogs monitor the citizens for “hate speech and misinformation”, and dole out retribution at their whim, our system is profoundly broken and extremely warped. They are supposed to answer to us. But these megalomaniacs have much bigger agenda. We’ve lost all sense of reality, reason, and truth in a profoundly abnormal world, created by those we allowed to ascend to power through the control and influence of shadowy globalist billionaires operating as an invisible government, with Deep State apparatchiks doing the dirty work. Schwab, Gates, Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whoever hides in the shadows behind these psychopaths, intend to control the entire world and steal all the wealth because they believe they are smarter, more ruthless, and know what’s best for the lowly peasants polluting their satanic playground planet. They know facts can be ignored when they’ve conditioned the masses to be willfully ignorant. They know they can lie without implications, but even more powerful, they can stay silent about the truth through censorship, suppression, and cancellation of truth tellers. The adaptation of the masses to this abnormal society, created by evil power-seeking men, is a form of mental illness – or as documented by Mattias Desmet in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism – Mass Formation Psychosis.  “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited I know I will never adapt or adjust to this abnormal society. We certainly can’t change a system, so thoroughly rigged and controlled (e.g., 2022 Arizona election and the 2020 presidential election), through traditional means. Those in control can easily buy-off our politicians, scientists, doctors, academics, TV personalities, and journalists to spin whatever web they choose, enabling their despicable anti-human agenda of deviancy. The only viable solution is the individual solution of walking away from this phony world like Truman. Armed revolution is a non-starter, as the oligarchs have far more firepower, and the dissenters are unorganized and scattered. A form of ‘Irish Democracy’ where a silent dogged resistance, marked by the withdrawal from society, belligerence to authority and non-compliance with government dictates by millions of ordinary people would accomplish far more than rioting and armed revolution. Millions have already practiced a form of Irish Democracy by not masking, not social distancing, not getting jabbed, and taking control of their own health decisions. They have almost sealed the escape hatch in this dystopian paradise of pleasure and pain. They know their techniques of control through fear work like a charm. Their final task to achieve total control is central bank digital currencies (CBDC), where everything we buy and sell is tracked digitally, so taxes can be levied, your life tracked, and if you choose to dissent from government directives, your ability to utilize CBDCs will be turned off. Micro-chipping us is next on the agenda. We need to reduce our tax and digital footprint now. It might seem hopeless in going to battle against these vile, vindictive vermin, but the solution is to not play. Many have already walked away from the modern world, taking to the country – farming, homesteading, bartering, and only giving to Caesar the bare minimum. They’ve chosen a hard, but a far more fulfilling life. The more people who disassociate from their fake world, the weaker they get. As their hold on our lives weakens, they will lash out. This is why it is important to be armed. Direct armed confrontation with the establishment’s forces is foolish, but guerrilla tactics on land you know would start to eat away at the morale of the paid police thugs sent to enforce their dictates. The beast isn’t as strong as it portrays. It’s broke and its empire of debt is crumbling. If millions walk out the exit door, the beast will begin to starve and eventually die. Maybe a new, less complex, smaller, more community-oriented society could be born from the ashes. Tribe up with like-minded individuals with different skills, if possible. There is hope if enough patriots decide to regain their senses and walk away from this abnormal society, leaving our totalitarian Christofs to wallow in their failure to control the truly awoken. “Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged *  *  *It is my sincere desire to provide readers of The Burning Platform with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. Tyler Durden Fri, 12/02/2022 - 16:25.....»»

Based on the positive reviews of Goodreads users, these are the best mystery books and thrillers of 2022. When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.Amazon Goodreads is the world's largest platform for readers to rate and review books. These mysteries and thrillers were the most popular and highest-rated reads of 2022. They're also all nominated for the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards. Mysteries and thrillers are juicy, suspenseful reads that have you guessing murderers, dark secrets, and character's pasts through gripping plot twists and turns. Readers look to be bamboozled by shocking revelations and offer ratings based on how invested they are in the plot. Over 125 million readers use Goodreads (the world's largest platform to rate and review books) to track their favorites, leave reviews, and help others pick their next book. The mysteries and thrillers on this list were all published in 2022 and were ranked by a combination of how many reviews they have and how highly they were rated — any book with less than 3.5 out of five stars was left off the list. Coincidentally, all these reader favorites are also up for Goodreads Choice Awards, which will be announced in December. From startling sequels to gripping psychological thrillers, here are the best mysteries and thrillers of 2022, according to Goodreads reviewers.20. "Jackal" by Erin E. AdamsAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $22.99Though Liz isn't thrilled to be going home to her predominately white hometown, she's returning to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for her best friend's wedding. But when the bride's daughter goes missing, Liz is reminded of the Black girl who went missing in high school and fears her friend's daughter may be facing the same, gruesome fate.19. "More Than You'll Ever Know" by Katie GutierrezAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $17.99This Good Morning America Book Club pick is about true-crime writer Cassie Brown, who is deeply fascinated with Lore Rivera, a woman who was once secretly married to two men until one of them found out and shot the other. As Cassie digs deeper, she finds that Lore is willing to tell her story of an affair that turned deadly — but knows her own secrets lay just beneath the surface.18. "The Family Game" by Catherine SteadmanAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $21.99The Family Game" is a psychological thriller about newly engaged Harriet and Edward whose bliss is interrupted when Edward's old-money family reemerges long after he cut ties. Harriet is easily drawn to Edward's family, but when someone slips her a cassette that holds a shocking confession that could destroy everything, a deadly game and Harriet's hunt for the truth begins.17. "Killers of a Certain Age" by Deanna RaybournAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $21.99Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie are now 60 years old and ready to retire, having spent 40 years as elite assassins for the Museum. When they're sent on an inclusive retirement vacation, the four women quickly realized they've been marked as targets by the Museum and must turn on their own organization and rely on only each other to survive.16. "The Violin Conspiracy" by Brendan SlocumbAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $14.99Ray McMillian is determined to become a professional musician and when he discovers his fiddle is really a priceless family heirloom, his stardom begins to grow. But as he's preparing for an international classical music competition, his fiddle is stolen by a man whose family once enslaved the fiddle's owner, claiming he's the rightful heir.15. "The Family Remains" by Lisa JewellAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $15.99In this novel, three seemingly unconnected people set out to find the answers to three mysteries: An investigator who finds evidence of a 30-year old case; a wife whose husband is found dead in his cellar; a mother whose brother is determined to dig up their shared past. Though "The Family Remains" is considered a sequel to Jewell's bestseller "The Family Upstairs," both books can be read as standalone thrillers.14. "Daisy Darker" by Alice FeeneyAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $15.99Reminiscent of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," "Daisy Darker" begins with Daisy's family — many of whom haven't spoken to each other in years — gathering at Nana's island home for her 80th birthday. With the tide in, they're cut off from the world so when Nana is found dead at midnight and another family member is found an hour later, the family must face their secrets to find the killer before they're picked off one by one.13. "Wrong Place, Wrong Time" by Gillian McAllisterAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $17.99In this suspenseful, time-travel thriller, Jen is watching from the window, waiting up for her 17-year-old son to come home, when she witnesses him kill a stranger outside her home, now in police custody. Soon, Jen finds that every time she wakes up, it is the day before the last and she has an opportunity to not only piece together what happened and why, but hopefully change the future and stop a murder that's already happened.12. "All Good People Here" by Ashley FlowersAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $17.51Written by one of the hosts of the popular true-crime podcast "Crime Junkie," "All Good People Here" is the thrilling story of journalist Margot Davies who is still haunted by her hometown's unsolved murder of January Jacobs, unable to shake the feeling that it could have been her. When Margot returns home and a young girl goes missing in a neighboring town, she knows she must find January's killer once and for all.11. "The Overnight Guest" by Heather GudenkaufAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $12.49Wylie Lark has retreated to an isolated farmhouse to finish writing her new true crime book — and is happily and cozily snowed in — until the feeling of being trapped in a home where two people were murdered begins to haunt her. When she discovers a small child outside in the snow, Wylie realizes she's not as isolated as she once thought.10. "The Housemaid" by Freida McFaddenAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $9.98Millie is down on her luck when she gets hired as a live-in housemaid to a wealthy, elegant family whose dynamics, particularly those of Nina, the wife and mother, are strange. Millie can't help but imagine herself in Nina's shoes, but when she tries on one of her dresses and Nina finds out, she learns her attic bedroom only locks from the outside.9. "The Bullet That Missed" by Richard OsmanAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $23.49"The Bullet That Missed" is the third mystery novel in the "Thursday Murder Club" series, which follows a group of four friends who meet up once a week in their retirement village to investigate unsolved murders. In this latest installment, the group is investigating two murders set 10 years apart when Elizabeth is presented with a mission to kill or be killed and needs the help of her friends to save her.8. "Things We Do in the Dark" by Jennifer HillierAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $16.74When Paris Peralta is arrested for the alleged murder of her celebrity husband, her biggest worry is the media attention bringing about her dark past. And when Ruby Reyes, once convicted of a similar murder, is suddenly released from prison, Paris's secrets are more in danger of being exposed than ever.7. "The Night Shift" by Alex FinlayAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $9.2915 years apart, four teenagers working night shifts are attacked, leaving only one alive with the memory of a killer saying "Goonight, pretty girl." Now, a survivor, the brother of the original suspect, and an FBI agent are all determined to find the truth in this twisty, multi-POV thriller. 6. "The Golden Couple" by Greer Hendricks and Sarah PekkanenAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $14.50In this creepy, suspenseful thriller, Marissa and Matthew Bishop decide to start marriage counseling for the sake of their son after Marissa's infidelity. They meet Avery Chambers, a therapist who has lost her license but is still sought after for her rigid and unorthodox counseling methods. From the moment they meet, they're set on a fast-paced course toward the truth through secrets, revelations, and possibly fatal danger.5. "The Book of Cold Cases" by Simone St. JamesAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $14.7940 years ago, two men were murdered and the prime suspect, Beth Greer, was acquitted and returned to her isolated mansion. Now, Beth has agreed to do an interview with Shea Collins who runs a true-crime website and whose passion is fueled by her own attempted abduction as a child. As the two meet at Beth's mansion, Shea's feelings of unease grow and she begins to suspect there's something lurking in the home.4. "The It Girl" by Ruth WareAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $17.99A decade after April Coutts-Cliveden's murder, John Neville, the man convicted of her murder, has died in prison. Though she's hoping to finally put her best friend's death behind her, Hannah is approached by a young journalist, convinced Neville was innocent. Together, Hannah reconnects with their old friends to dig into the past and find the truth but soon realizes everyone has something to hide — including a murder.3. "A Flicker in the Dark" by Stacy WillinghamAmazonAvailable at Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, from $15.5220 years ago in Chloe's small town, six teenage girls went missing and her father was arrested as a serial killer. Now, Chloe is getting ready for her wedding when local teenage girls start to go missing, reminding her of the devastating events that unfolded when she was 12 and leaving her wondering if she's seeing parallels or just being paranoid.2. "The Paris Apartment" by Lucy Foley.....»»

Israeli Intelligence Warns Iran Is Mulling Terror Attack On World Cup The head of Israeli Military Intelligence has warned this week that Iran is mulling an attack on World Cup venues in Qatar amid ongoing anti-regime protests. Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva described that he expects Tehran officials to grow more desperate amid the now months-long "anti-hijab" protests, thus the potential for lashing out by a major terror attack grows increasingly likely. "There is a real concern within the regime that it endangers the regime. At this stage, I do not see a risk to the regime…. but as the pressure on Iran increases, including internal pressure, the Iranian response is much more aggressive, so we should expect much more aggressive responses in the region and in the world," Haliva said. Anadolu Agency/Getty Images "I am telling you that the Iranians are now considering attacking the World Cup in Qatar as well," he said. “The only thing holding them back is how the Qataris will react." He issued the words Monday before a defense conference in Tel Aviv, calling the ongoing protests which have increasingly taken over university campuses and major city streets in the Islamic Republic "extremely exceptional" and now fast becoming a "civilian rebellion". "The death toll, the attacks on national symbols — this is very troubling for the regime, especially combined with sanctions, the existing international pressure, and the difficult economic situation," the military intel chief described. Outgoing Defense Minister Benny Gantz also backed the prediction related to the World Cup, alleging the Iranians are poised to create instability outside their country.  Iranian leaders have meanwhile charged that the protests and unrest are a foreign plot, with the spiraling violence which has left scores of police and security services casualties being fueled by Israeli and US intelligence. Over 320 people have died since the demonstrations began. Authorities have denounced the "rioters".  IDF Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. Image: JNS/Flash90 As for the claims that Iran could be planning an attack on the World Cup, it remains entirely unclear if this is based on any firm intelligence. Instead, it seems more the speculative accusations which are typical from Israeli officials anytime there's a major media-covered international event in the Middle East region. Tyler Durden Wed, 11/23/2022 - 11:30.....»»

Protesters Set Fire To Iconic Home Of Islamic Republic Founder Ayatollah Khomeini A major development Thursday and Friday in Iran strongly suggests the protests crisis is escalating and will grow more violent, as hundreds of demonstrators set their sights on the historic and iconic "house of Ruhollah Khomeini" - the revolutionary hardline Islamic cleric credited with founding and leading the Islamic Republic.  The "anti-hijab" protests which have raged for two months are now attempting to destroy the republic's most sacred symbols, after a Tehran court began handing out the country's first death sentences to protesters, or "rioters" as state authorities have called them.  Astonishing scenes from #Iran. Protesters have burned down the house of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder. The house has been a museum for the past 30 years. This is an attack in the essence of the republic itself. pic.twitter.com/Qtk5jr5AR6 — David Patrikarakos (@dpatrikarakos) November 18, 2022 Reports AFP, "Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini." The report further confirms that "The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images posted on social media, verified by AFP." The report also cites regional gulf sources to say the anti-government crowds are declaring that current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei "will be toppled." The home (now museum) of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, set on fire by Iranian protesters. pic.twitter.com/YLE7Fe2kAh — Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) November 18, 2022 The protests have at times gotten violent, with buildings across various cities burned down, and also with live fire used by security services to quell the unrest. Last week hardliners in parliament demanded that authorities take a harsher stance in order to finally halt the so-called "anti-hijab" demonstrations. Likely to further fuel the anger in the streets is the increasingly harsh stance the country's judiciary is taking toward the protests. On Thursday three more Iranians were sentenced to execution, after the first such unprecedented sentence for "rioting" was handed down earlier in the week.  According to Al Jazeera:  The Iranian judiciary said late on Sunday that an unnamed individual has been sentenced to execution for “setting fire to a government center, disturbing public order and collusion for committing crimes against national security” in addition to “moharebeh” (waging war against God) and “corruption on Earth”. Five more unnamed people, who authorities described as “rioters” – a word the government uses to describe the ongoing protests and those participating in them – were handed between five and 10 years in prison on national security-related charges. More such extreme penalties are expected, given that Tehran officials have long accused the protest movement of being fueled by Iran's enemies such as Israeli and US intelligence, hence the charge of "collusion for committing crimes against national security."  The Iranian Kurdistan region has continued to be a hotbed of unrest and anti-government demonstrations:  People chant “Ghassmlou, Ghassmlou your path continues" at the funeral of Azad Hasaanpour who was killed by Iran's terrorist #IRGC in the Kurdish city of #Mahabad#JinaAmini #KurdistanProtests #IranRevolution #Kurdistan #IranProtests pic.twitter.com/d5MST1j1Ew — PDKI (@PDKIenglish) November 18, 2022 At this point at least 326 people have died, including deaths among the police and security services. The White House has meanwhile said it stands in solidarity with the protesters, in what Tehran has taken as a declaration of regime change coming from the Biden administration.  Tyler Durden Fri, 11/18/2022 - 15:03.....»»

Former President Donald Trump, 76, launched his highly-anticipated 2024 presidential campaign. These photos show his life up until now. President Donald Trump.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDonald Trump made his long-awaited announcement about his 2024 bid for president.The businessman and hotel mogul became a household name through his reality show, "The Apprentice."The former president faces a litany of lawsuits and investigations into his businesses and role in the Capitol riot. Former President Donald Trump made his long-awaited announcement that he will run for president in 2024. After a failed bid for re-election in 2020, which he still falsely claims was "stolen" from him, Trump has teased his 2024 decision for months. Meanwhile, he and his family still face a litany of lawsuits and investigations into his business, his role in the Capitol riot and attempts to overturn the election, and the classified federal documents found at Mar-a-Lago.While certainly controversial, Trump has lived a unique life. Here is a look at the president's life journey, from the New York Military Academy to the Oval Office and beyond.Donald John Trump was born to Fred and Mary Anne Trump in Queens, New York on June 14, 1946. He is the second-youngest of five children.A photo of US President Donald Trump's late father Fred Trump sits behind him as he gives an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office at the White House.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersRead more: Meet Donald Trump's siblings, the oldest of whom just retired as a federal judgeAs a teen, the president was enrolled at the New York Military Academy where he briefly served as a captain during his senior year.Donald Trump in the New York Military Academy's 1964 yearbook.Business Insider via ClassmatesSource: Washington PostHe graduated from Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's in economics in 1968. He then started his career at his father's real estate development company, E. Trump & Son.Donald Trump with his father, Fred, left, at his graduation from the Wharton School of Finance.Donald Trump/FacebookAs someone who loves the art of negotiation, Trump was able to negotiate New York City to provide a 40-year tax abatement for the Grand Hyatt Hotel — the first ever granted to a commercial property.Gov. Hugh Carey, accompanied by Trump, points to an artist's conception of the hotel that will be built on the site of the former Commodore Hotel on June 28, 1978.APSource: The Trump OrganizationAn early win was when Trump offered to renovate decrepit areas in need, such as a long-closed ice-skating rink, at no profit to himself, after the city's renovation effort went through five years of delays and more than double the original cost estimate.Here, Donald Trump poses with New York City's Parks Commissioner, Henry Stern, holding a pair of ice skates that are intended for use at the Wollman Rink in Central Park on August 7, 1986.Paul Burnett/APSource: APTrump's enterprise also stretched out into sports, where he was the original owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League.Donald Trump shakes hands with Herschel Walker in New York after an agreement on a four-year contract with the New Jersey Generals USFL football team on March 8, 1984.Dave Pickoff/APTrump owns a fleet of luxury helicopters, and a private plane that was often a backdrop at his 2016 presidential campaign events.Donald Trump in front of one of three Sikorsky helicopters at the Port Authority's West 30 Street heliport on March 22, 1988.AP Photo/Wilbur FunchesTrump also enjoys tennis — he even played a round, wearing his traditional suit, against the legendary Serena Williams.Donald Trump talks with his former wife, Ivana Trump, during the men's final at the US Open.Mike Blake/ReutersTrump was notorious for befriending supermodels. His first wife, Ivana, a Czech-American, was a member of the social elite.Donald Trump and his former wife, Ivana, pose outside the federal courthouse after she was sworn in as a US citizen in May 1988.ReutersTrump had three kids with Ivana: Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.Family portrait of, from left, socialite Ivana Trump, her son Eric Trump, her former husband businessman Donald Trump, and her daughter Ivanka Trump as they sit at a table at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, 1998.Davidoff Studios/Getty ImagesHe divorced Ivana in a public split in 1992, and married Marla Maples in 1993.Donald Trump watches as his ex-wife, Marla Maples, gets a kiss from Earl Sinclair of TV's "Dinosaurs" during lunch at the Trump Plaza Hotel on November 2, 1992.Henry Ray Abrams/ReutersTrump and Marla had one daughter, Tiffany, in 1993.Happy parents Marla Maples, left, and Donald Trump greet the press with their newborn daughter, Tiffany, as they leave St. Mary's Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Thurs., Oct. 14, 1993.Hans Deryk/APAs a self-proclaimed family man, Trump attended many public events and television shows with his family over the years.Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, peek over the crowd as they take in a tennis match during the US Open in New York.Roh Frehm/APSource: OprahTrump loved showing off his wealth with lavish spending, and once paid the sultan of Brunei $30 million for a nearly 300-foot yacht.Donald Trump waves to reporters with his former wife, Ivana, as they board their luxury yacht, The Trump Princess, in New York City.Marty Lederhandler/APSource: APTrump first started showing signs of interest for a possible bid for the US presidency with the formation of a presidential exploratory committee ahead of the 2000 election.Donald Trump talks with host Larry King after taping a segment of King's CNN talk show in New York.ReutersSource: ReutersTo test the political waters, the potential Reform Party presidential candidate traveled to several areas to address party leaders.Donald Trump makes an appearance for the media atop a Beverly Hills, California, hotel on December 6, 1999.Chris Pizzello/APSource: APIn 2005, Donald Trump married fashion designer and model Melania Trump.Donald Trump and Melania Trump leave Hollinger International's annual meeting at the Metropolitan Club in New York on May 22, 2003.Peter Morgan/ReutersSource: PolitiFactThe two had one son, Barron, in 2006.Donald Trump, Barron Trump and Melania Trump leave Trump Towers to attend the 16th Annual Bunny Hop at FAO Schwartz to benefit the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center March 13, 2007 in New York City.Peter Kramer/Getty Images/for MSKCCAs no stranger to the political process, Trump was even acquainted with members of the judicial branch. Here he is greeting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the Daytona 500.US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, serving as the grand marshal for the Daytona 500, speaks to Donald Trump on the starting grid at the Daytona International Speedway.ReutersHe also became the owner of the infamous Miss Universe beauty pageant for many years.Donald Trump and Miss Connecticut, Erin Brady, pose onstage after Brady won the 2013 Miss USA pageant.AP Photo/Jeff Bottari, FileTrump loves to golf. He owns 17 courses. The president has spent time at one of his golf courses during at least 266 days of his presidency so far.Donald Trump takes a swing on the 11th green of the Ocean Trails Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.Damian Dovarganes/APRead more: 23 celebrities, professional athletes, and politicians Trump has golfed with as presidentSource: CNNHis reality TV show "The Apprentice" made Trump a household name. Everyone knew him for his classic catchphrase, "You're fired!" Trump himself was fired as host of "The Celebrity Apprentice" by NBC in 2015 after he made derogatory comments about immigrants during his campaign.Donald Trump attends the Universal Studios Hollywood Apprentice Casting Call on March 10, 2006 in Universal City, California.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesSource: CBS NewsSome of the president's projects, like Trump University, were mired in lawsuits that Trump lost or had to settle. Others he may have made a profit on, but declared bankruptcy, and partners he worked with accused him of not paying them.Marita Luna (C) and Miriam Ramos (2nd R) joins other union members from UNITE HERE Local 54 as they rally outside the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey on October 24, 2014.ReutersRead more: The New York Times rates 61 of Donald Trump's business deals, concludes 40% failedIn June 2015, Trump famously launched his presidential campaign by coming down an escalator in Trump Tower.Donald Trump.Christopher Gregory/Getty ImagesAs the fog of the political battlefield cleared on the Republican side, Trump prepared to take on presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.Donald Trump looks out at the construction site of his 92-story tower along the Chicago river during a visit to his Chicago offices on April 10, 2006. Trump acknowledged that because of security concerns after the events of September 11, he abandoned plans for it to be the world's tallest building at 150 stories.Charles Rex Arbogast/APTrump made his final appeal to voters in swing-states as the contentious campaign drew to a close.Donald Trump campaigns in New Hampshire.Scott Eisen/Getty ImagesWhile Trump won the electoral votes needed to secure the presidency, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes.Donald Trump in New York on election night.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesSource: The New York TimesTaking his oath of office on January 20, 2017, Trump officially became the 45th President of the United States.Supreme Court Justice John Roberts (2L) administers the oath of office to President Donald Trump (L) as his wife Melania Trump holds the Bible and son Barron Trump looks on, on the West Front of the US Capitol.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesTrump signed 90 executive actions during his first 100 days in office. Some of his more controversial orders, like the travel ban, drew hundreds of thousands of people to protest. That action was ultimately held up by the Supreme Court.Evan Vucci/APRead more: Trump signed 90 executive actions in his first 100 days — here's what each one doesAfter taking office, Trump's administration faltered under a series of scandals and missteps. One of these was his firing of FBI director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russia's meddling in the US election.President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with James Comey, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC.Andrew Harrer-Pool/GettyThe special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to oversee the investigation. Nearly two years later, he closed the probe in May 2019 — after charging several of Trump's associates with crimes, concluding Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, and outlining several instances that the president failed at obstructing justice.President Trump and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty ImagesRead more: Mueller outlines key Trump-Russia contacts and potential instances of obstruction of justice in final reportAs a businessman who prides himself as a seasoned dealmaker, Trump has had mixed success interacting with world leaders as president. With some, he's had sparkling relationships. With others, things have been more frosty.Thomson ReutersAs the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Trump observed the sacrifices made by US service members on Memorial Day.President Donald Trump lays flowers on the grave of Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly's son at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. US Marine Corps Lt. Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 while leading a patrol in Afghanistan.Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty ImagesTrump's first foreign trip as president began in Saudi Arabia and ended in Italy in May 2017. In Riyadh, Trump was photographed with the infamous glowing orb that took social media by storm.Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Saudi King Salman, and President Donald Trump visit a new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Saudi Press AgencyAt his first presidential college commencement, Trump addressed the graduating class of Liberty University. "What imprint will you leave in the sands of history?" he asked them. "What will future Americans say we did in our brief time right here on earth? Did we take risks? Did we dare to defy expectations? Did we challenge accepted wisdom and take on established systems? I think I did, but we all did and we're all doing it."Getty Images/Chip SomodevillaSource: TIMETrump often received criticism during his time in office, like when he threw paper towels into a crowd in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc on the region.Trump tosses rolls of paper towels like basketballs to victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.Evan Vucci/APOther times in his presidency were more lighthearted. On the White House front lawn, Trump and the first lady presided over the Easter egg roll, one of many holiday traditions.President Donald Trump, joined by the Easter Bunny and first lady Melania Trump, speaks from the Truman Balcony of he White House in Washington, Monday, April 2, 2018, during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.Carolyn Kaster/APIn some of the more lighthearted moments, Trump entertained athletic champions at the White House with his favorite items from fast-food restaurants.With fast food meals from Domino's, Wendy's, McDonald's, and Burger King, Trump entertains the Clemson Tigers football team after their 2018 playoffs national championship win.Susan Walsh/APHis presidency witnessed multiple mass shootings including ones at the Las Vegas Strip, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Trump has fiercely defended the Second Amendment.Thomas Gunderson fights his fresh gunshot wound to the leg to stand and shake Trump's hand.Thomas Gunderson via FacebookSource: Business InsiderThe Trumps joined the living presidents and first ladies to attend the funeral of former President George H.W. Bush in December 2018.U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Jimmy Carter listen as former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney speaks during a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington, for former President George H.W. Bush.Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERSFrom December 2018 through January 2019, the federal government was shut down for a record 35 days when he and lawmakers couldn't get spending bills passed over disputes related to funding for his long-promised border wall.Trump gives his first Oval Office address on Day 18 of what would become the longest federal government shutdown in US history.CNNSource: Business InsiderTrump successfully saw Justice Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court despite the controversy surrounding his appointment and a heated confirmation hearing in the Senate. The president ushered in three conservative justices, including Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.President Donald Trump shakes hands with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, before a ceremonial swearing-in in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 8, 2018.Susan Walsh/APSource: Business InsiderThe president was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, on charges of abusing his power and obstructing Congress. The inquiry was sparked after a whistleblower filed a report over a phone call the president held with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019. Trump is the third president to be impeached in US history.President Donald Trump addresses his impeachment during a Merry Christmas Rally at the Kellogg Arena on December 18, 2019 in Battle Creek, Michigan. While Trump spoke at the rally the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president, making Trump just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesSource: Business InsiderThings turned out alright for the president, however, when he was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate on February 5 by a vote of 52-48. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict the president.President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, in Washington.AP Photo/ Evan VucciSource: Business InsiderThe Trump Administration was tasked with handling the COVID-19 pandemic, which first reached the US in January. Some 400,000 Americans died from the disease caused by the novel coronavirus during Trump's time in office. The president received sharp criticism for his administration's handling of the pandemic.President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks Tuesday, May 5, 2020, at Honeywell International Inc. in Phoenix.Official White House Photo by Shealah CraigheadSource: Associated PressThe president also received criticism for his handling of nationwide protests about racism in US police forces. At a press conference in June, Trump threatened to deploy the military to end nationwide unrest. Meanwhile, a crowd of peaceful protesters was tear-gassed outside of the White House to make way for Trump to walk to a nearby church for a photo-op.US President Donald Trump holds a Bible while visiting St. John's Church across from the White House after the area was cleared of people protesting the death of George Floyd June 1, 2020, in Washington, DC.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)Source: Business Insider   Trump celebrated his 74th birthday less than five months before the 2020 general election. At the time, the president was planning to resume his campaign rallies, which were paused due to COVID-19.President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesSource: Business InsiderTrump returned from a Tulsa rally in which he called for the US to slow its COVID-19 testing when the country had about 2.3 million cases and almost 120,000 deaths.President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington as he returns from a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 21, 2020.Patrick Semansky/APSource: Business InsiderTrump attended his first debate against Joe Biden in September 2020. It was later revealed by Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows that the president tested positive for COVID-19 three days before debating Biden in person.President Donald Trump holds up his face mask during the first presidential debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland, Ohio on September 29, 2020.Julio Cortez/APSource: Business InsiderTrump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Coney Barrett was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in just eight days before the 2020 election.President Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett stand on the Blue Room Balcony after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas administered the Constitutional Oath to her on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Oct. 26, 2020.Patrick Semansky/APSource: Business InsiderTrump spoke to his supporters on January 6, 2021, repeating his debunked claim that the election was stolen from him. Shortly thereafter, the MAGA mob stormed the Capitol.In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo with the White House in the background, President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Washington.Jacquelyn Martin/APSource: Business InsiderTrump became the only president to be impeached twice following the Capitol insurrection. He was later acquitted by the Senate in a 57-43 vote.President Donald Trump boards Air Force One upon arrival at Valley International Airport, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, in Harlingen, Texas, after visiting a section of the border wall with Mexico in Alamo, Texas.Alex Brandon/APSource: Business InsiderTrump left the White House early on January 20, 2021, and skipped President Joe Biden's inauguration, breaking a time-honored tradition that had held for 152 years.President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, in Washington. Trump is en route to his Mar-a-Lago Florida Resort.Alex Brandon/APSource: Business InsiderIn June 2021, Trump held his first rally since leaving office, reciting many of his debunked claims about election fraud.Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Lorain County Fairgrounds, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Wellington, Ohio.Tony Dejak/APSource: Business InsiderTrump skipped the 9/11 20-year anniversary memorials attended by Presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton. Instead, Trump did an unannounced photo-op with New York police and firefighters before going to Florida to give commentary on a boxing match.Former President Donald Trump salutes cheering fans as he prepares to provide commentary for a boxing event in Hollywood, Florida, on Sept. 11, 2021.Rebecca Blackwell/APSource: Business InsiderTrump endorsed dozens of candidates in the 2022 midterms, many of whom – like Mehmet Oz – later lost their elections.Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, left, accompanied by former President Donald Trump, speaks at a campaign rally in Greensburg, Pa., Friday, May 6, 2022.Gene J. Puskar/APSource: Business InsiderTrump attended the funeral of his first wife, Ivana Trump, alongside his family in July 2022.Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Barron Trump, Jared Kushner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are seen at the funeral of Ivana Trump on July 20, 2022 in New York City.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSource: Business InsiderTrump has remained the focus of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack. The committee subpoenaed Trump, whose legal team filed suit to block his testimony.A January 6 video of Former President Donald Trump telling his supporters to go home, is seen on screen during a hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on July 21, 2022.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty ImagesSource: Business InsiderRead the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Victor Davis Hanson: The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their radical ideology that was finally enacted and wrecked the country... Over the last few months the four icons of the Democratic Party—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi—have hit the campaign trail.  They’ve weighed in on everything from “right-wing violence” and “election denialists” to the now tired “un-American” semi-fascist MAGA voter—and had nothing much to say about inflation, the border, crime, energy, or the Afghanistan debacle. In this, they remind us just how impoverished and calcified is this left-wing pantheon.  So why should we take anything they say seriously, given their own records—and especially given their mastery of projecting their own shortcomings upon others as some sort of private exculpation or preemptive political strategy? Still Hopin’ and Changin’?  Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president. He is storming the country, while Joe Biden mopes at home or visits shrinking blue enclaves so he can claim post facto, “At least I was out there stumping.”  Over the last six years, we have become accustomed to Obama’s periodic getaways from one of his three estates. It is always the same. From time to time, he reenters politics to remind us that he did not just cash in on his presidency to become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he is still the Chicago “community activist” of his youth. And so, Obama will not be overshadowed by the Biden crew that is enacting all the crazy things he as president had warned were a bit much even for him.  At the funeral of the late John Lewis, Obama turned his eulogy into a political rant. He weighed in on the “racist” filibuster, the “Jim Crow relic” that he desperately sought in vain to use to stop the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito.  At campaign stops, he deplores “divisions” that he, more than any modern figure, helped create. The entire left-wing vocabulary of disparagement for the white lower-working classes (e.g., deplorables, dregs, chumps, irredeemables, etc.) got its start with Obama’s putdown of Pennsylvania voters who rejected him in the 2008 primaries as “clingers.”  In interviews, Obama suddenly now blasts harsh rhetoric—this from the wannabe tough guy who stole the “The Untouchables” line about bringing a knife to a gun fight. Well before crazy Maxine Waters’ calls to arms, Obama advised his supporters “get in their faces.” Still, on the campaign trail, Obama appears not so much animated as stale. It is as if he has been suddenly stirred from a long coma that commenced in 2008. It’s the same old, same old—sleeves rolled up. He still resorts to the scripted outbursts of mock anger. And the nerdy prep school graduate still amateurishly modulates his patois—now policy wonk, now breaking into the Southern African-American pastor accent when an audience needs more preachy authenticity.  He still tries to rev up his crowds with the familiar attacks: Republican demons will cut Social Security, the MAGA semi-fascists are captives of Donald Trump (as if the Democrats have not ceded their souls to woke hysterics), the Republican fanatics will all but kill women by denying abortions, and extremists unlike himself are dividing the country.  On and on, Obama shouts about social justice. And then he wraps up and must decide to which of his mansions he will fly home (via private jet)—Kalorama, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyde Park, or soon the Waimanalo estate. Obama offers no solutions much less hints at his own culpability in his sermons. There is nothing about the open border he helped birth. Nothing about Biden’s failed energy policies now bankrupting the middle class that were simply a reification of his energy secretary Steven Chu’s perverse wishes for European-priced gas (“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”).  There is nothing about Obama’s old boasts about shutting down coal plants and skyrocketing electricity (“Under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”).  Nothing is said about the Skip Gates psychodrama and his blanket stereotyped attack on police, the tossing of his own grandmother under the racial bus, the Trayvon Martin racial editorialization, the Ferguson mythologies, and all his efforts to create a binary nation of oppressors and oppressed, as Obama himself determined who is the victim, who the victimizer. Drew Angerer/Getty Images The Role Model Pelosi After the terrible attack on her husband, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s colleagues are rightly calling for an end to extremist rhetoric. If we are to follow the Democratic clarion call, what might Pelosi herself do to help us to lower the temperature? Here are a few modest suggestions.  Contrary to press reports, conservatives deplored the attack on Paul Pelosi. They want his attacker behind bars with no bail until his trial date. And if convicted they wish him to serve a long sentence before parole is even considered. Let us dish out a proper punishment to David DePape; one that can serve as a model to all such thugs who do his kind of devilish work daily against the innocent and weak—but unlike him, are usually exempt from punishment. Recall that DePape should never have been in the United States. He is an illegal alien who violated his visa and should have had a warrant out for deportation, especially given his prior history of lawlessness. Would that the illegal alien who murdered innocent San Franciscan Kate Steinle had been subject to the likely punishment that now is awaiting DePape. So yes, we all must lower the temperature. As speaker of the House, Pelosi can do her part in quieting passions, given half the country are her fellow Americans who do not live in the darkness of lies. She might ask Joe Biden to quit calling them semi-fascists and un-American.  Pelosi herself should never again tear up her copy of the state of the union address on national television. In that congressional forum she was attacking the presidency, not just Donald Trump. Half the voters feel as strongly about Joe Biden as she does about Donald Trump. If, as House speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were to follow Pelosi’s precedent and rip up the next Biden State of the Union, would Pelosi find that continuation of her precedent conducive to healing the nation’s wounds? Pelosi herself should not use any more violent imagery in expressing her anger at a president of the opposite party, much less threaten to use physical violence.  When she was asked to clarify what she meant in screaming about Trump (“I hope he comes. I want to punch him out. . . . I’ve been waiting for this . . . I’m going to punch him out, and I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”), she scoffed that she could not follow up on her threat only because Trump would never come to Congress to give her the opportunity.  Whatever one thinks of Trump, Pelosi only lowers the bar when she boasts about feloniously striking a president of the United States.  That Joe Biden had boasted twice about taking Trump behind the gym to beat him up, and others such as actor Robert DeNiro have echoed such threats (“I’d like to punch him in the face”) was no excuse for her reckless talk. After 2016 it was hard to calibrate all the ways the leftists had shouted ways of slaying Donald Trump—by stabbing, shooting, incineration, or decapitation. Pelosi should never again delay legislation aimed at protecting Supreme Court justices from the sort of violence that occurred when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was run out of a restaurant, or anti-abortion protesters swarmed his home, or a would-be assassin showed up at his house.  Why was Pelosi so fearful about expediting such added security? Would prompt action have empowered the factual narrative that the chief threat to Supreme Court justices now arises from radical abortion protestors? Pelosi might have reminded Democrats to tone down their rhetoric after the near-fatal shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). After all, the shooter was a highly political, left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders’ volunteer. But she did no such thing. She could have privately reprimanded her own daughter that it was not a funny thing to cheer on the violent attack against Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung, pneumonia, and had to undergo pulmonary surgery.  When the younger Pelosi used her family name to gain traction by tweeting “Rand Paul’s neighbor was right,” (if she had used her married last name would anyone have read it?), it sent the message that there was a sort of happiness on the Left that a political opponent had been a target of violence. The Left is furious at Donald Trump, Jr. for crudely mocking the Pelosi assault, but he unfortunately followed a precedent long set by others. Kyle Mazza/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images She’s Back! Hillary Clinton is occasionally asked to weigh in on the midterm campaigns, but never in a swing state or hotly contested race. Her presence, like that of Joe Biden’s, would immediately lose the endorser a critical 1-2 points.  Clinton recently warned that the 2024 election likely will be illegitimate due to Republican instigated “voter fraud.”  Her outburst can be translated into something like, “The midterm left-wing wipeout may be just a preliminary to a 2024 Democratic disaster.” Hillary preempted Biden who, in his third and latest McCarthyite speech, warned that the “Mega Maga” people are planning devilry years in advance and so, like Hillary, he can now cast doubt on the legitimacy of future elections the Democrats will lose.  In truth, no one has done more in the last century to impugn the integrity of U.S. elections than Hillary Clinton. She has questioned the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, on the theory that any election Democrats might lose is an “attack on democracy.”  Her sins go way beyond feloniously destroying subpoenaed emails and devices or leveraging her New York senatorial run by Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons or using her office to enrich her family’s foundation as in the case of Uranium One.  When we return to sane times, historians will assess her 2016 efforts to destroy her opponent, his transition, and his presidency as the greatest election scandal in modern memory. She used three paywalls to hide her efforts to hire foreign national Christopher Steele (who was simultaneously working with the FBI).  On spec, she used her own contacts such as Charles Dolan to fabricate a phony hit dossier against her opponent and then to seed it within the media and the Obama bureaucracy to smear Trump. Not content with that failed and likely illegal effort, she then declared the duly elected president illegitimate and the 2016 election all but stolen.  Her Hollywood friends cut videos begging electors to renounce their constitutional duties, ignore their state tallies, and vote instead for Hillary. Had they gotten their way, the entire federal election system as we know it would have been destroyed. Then her surrogate, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, sued to overturn the election. Clinton bragged of joining #TheResistance in mock-heroic terms. As an arch-denialist, she urged Joe Biden under no circumstances to concede to Trump if he lost the 2020 vote.  And now she warns us of others who might emulate her own denialism?  What does Hillary fear in 2024? That a Trump or DeSantis will hire a Steele-like fraud to fabricate Democrat-Chinese collusion and smear a Democrat nominee? That the loser will not concede as she once urged, or the winner is illegitimate as she once insisted? Good Old Joe Is Just Old Joe Instead of a list of supposed communists, Joe Biden apparently has a roster of “election denialists” who he says are running for Senate and Congress and whom he fears will win next Tuesday. And he sets the example for others like House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.)—himself a 2004-05 election denialist—who now smears his opponents as Nazis who, he fears, by democratically voting Democrats out of office nationwide will “destroy democracy.”  What will Biden not lie about? The death of his son, the circumstances in which his first wife died in a car wreck, the fantasy congressional vote on his student-loan forgiveness scheme? The number of states (Joe says, 54, Obama used to swear there are 57)? The very century we are now in? Where he went to college?  Joe, our own Walter Mitty, has variously been a semi-truck driver, an arrested South-African street protestor against apartheid, a surrogate Puerto-Rican child, a black college enrollee, a Ciceronian populist orator, a coal miner’s scion, an honors student, a blue-chip collegiate athlete, a defender against inner-city Corn Poppers, and absolutely ignorant about the Biden family syndicate. Recall that a non compos mentis Biden was nominated solely as the thin veneer to a hard Left agenda whose avatars were unelectable. Biden was to feign being the colorless, stand-in “moderate” who would “unify” the fractured country, tone down the Trump rhetoric, and let the Trump record sort of proceed on autopilot.  Then when he played out that part and won, the leftist minders in this Faustian bargain took over to push through, on a one-vote senatorial margin, the most radical left-wing agenda in U.S. history.  Biden, however, took his role too seriously. He reverted to the mean-spirited, pre-senile blowhard Joe—the obnoxious messenger thus now making the noxious message even more toxic.  A retiring, silenced, good old Joe from Scranton was the script, not a doddering, incoherent, ”get off my lawn” old man shouting for the need of socialist policies that were the exact opposite of his previously supposed convictions.  The Left got their Biden. And yes, he turned over the reins of government to them. And yes, they got their neo-socialism for two years. And yes, they are destroying America as we knew it. But in doing this, the people had the rare occasion to see fully and experience the nihilist Left. And they are now about to express their loathing for what the Left has wrought.  The problem with the ossified Democratic Pantheon is that they are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their own radical ideology over the past two years that was finally enacted and wrecked the country. And all the shrieks about abortion, semi-fascists, and democracy dying cannot put back together what they shattered. Tyler Durden Mon, 11/07/2022 - 23:45.....»»

Winning the lottery will not solve all of life's problems. In fact, many people's lives became notably worse after they hit the jackpot. YouTube/ABC While it may be tempting, buying a lottery ticket is almost certainly not worth it. And even if it does pan out, winning the lottery does not solve all of life's problems. History has countless examples of winners whose lives took a turn for the worse after hitting the jackpot. Lara and Roger Griffiths bought their dream home … and then life fell apart.The Daily MailBefore they won a $2.76 million lottery jackpot in 2005, Lara and Roger Griffiths, of England, reportedly never argued.Then they won and bought a million-dollar barn-converted house and a Porsche, not to mention luxurious trips to Dubai, Monaco, and New York City.Media stories say their fortune ended in 2010 when a freak fire gutted their house, which was underinsured, forcing them to shell out for repairs and seven months of temporary accommodations.Shortly after, there were claims that Roger drove away in the Porsche after Lara confronted him over emails suggesting that he was interested in another woman. That ended their 14-year marriage.Bud Post lost $16.2 million within a nightmarish year — and his own brother allegedly put out a hit on him.Flickr / AlexWilliam "Bud" Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but he was $1 million in debt within a year."I wish it never happened," Post said. "It was totally a nightmare."A former girlfriend successfully sued him for a third of his winnings, and his brother was arrested for allegedly hiring a hit man to kill him in the hopes he'd inherit a share of the winnings.After sinking money into family businesses, Post sank into debt and spent time in jail for firing a gun over the head of a bill collector."I was much happier when I was broke," he said, according to The Washington Post.Bud lived quietly on $450 a month and food stamps until his death in 2006.Martyn and Kay Tott won a $5 million jackpot, but lost the ticket.REUTERS/Mike SegarMartyn Tott, 33, and his 24-year-old wife Kay, from the UK, missed out on a $5 million lottery fortune after losing their ticket.A seven-week investigation by Camelot Group, the company that runs the UK's national lottery, convinced officials their claim to the winning ticket was legitimate. But since there is a 30-day time limit on reporting lost tickets, the company was not required to pay up, and the jackpot became the largest unclaimed amount since the lottery began in 1994."Thinking you're going to have all that money is really liberating. Having it taken away has the opposite effect," Kay Tott told The Daily Mail. "It drains the life from you and puts a terrible strain on your marriage. It was the cruelest torture imaginable."Sharon Tirabassi won $10 million, but eventually returned to her old life.IBN/screenshotIn 2004, Sharon Tirabassi, a single mother who had been on welfare, cashed a check from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. for more than $10 million Canadian dollars.She spent her winnings on a "big house, fancy cars, designer clothes, lavish parties, exotic trips, handouts to family, loans to friends," and in less than a decade she was back "riding the bus, working part-time, and living in a rented house.""All of that other stuff was fun in the beginning, now it's like, back to life," she told The Hamilton Spectator.Luckily, Tirabassi put some of her windfall in trusts for her six children, who would be able to claim the money when they turned 26.Evelyn Adams gambled it all away in Atlantic City.Flickr / Jamie McCaffreyAgainst all odds, Adams won the lottery twice, once in 1985 and again in 1986.The New Jersey native won $5.4 million, but AskMen.com reports that she gambled it away in Atlantic City.Adams also told The New York Times in 1993 that the publicity she received led to a bombardment of requests for financial assistance."I was known," she said, "and I couldn't go anywhere without being recognized."Tonda Lynn Dickerson was forced to pay gift tax.Flickr/Steve SnodgrassTonda Lynn Dickerson, a former Waffle House waitress, got served a big plate of karma when she reportedly refused to split her winnings with colleagues and was forced to pay the taxman $1,119,347.90.How did it happen? Dickerson placed her winnings in a corporation and granted her family 51% of the stock, qualifying her for the tax.Gerald Muswagon ended up feeling sorry for partying.Radyukov Dima / Shutterstock.com In 1998, Gerald Muswagon won the $10 million Super 7 jackpot in Canada.But he couldn't handle the instant fame that came with winning the grand prize, according to Canada's Globe and Mail."He bought several new vehicles for himself and friends, purchased a house that turned into a nightly 'party pad' and often celebrated his new lifestyle with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol," The Globe and Mail reported. "In a single day, he bought eight big-screen televisions for friends."Muswagon also poured money into a logging business that failed because of low sales.He was eventually forced to take a job doing heavy lifting on a friend's farm just to make ends meet, according to The Globe and Mail. According to media reports, Muswagon hanged himself in his parents' garage in 2005.Suzanne Mullins couldn't dig herself out of debt.Flickr/NZ Defence ForceSuzanne Mullins won $4.2 million in the Virginia lotto in 1993.She split the yearly payments three ways with her husband and daughter, leaving Mullins with about $47,000 a year. She quickly found herself in debt — her lawyer said she shelled out $1 million for her uninsured son-in-law's medical bills."It's been a hard road," Mullins' lawyer Michael Hart told the Associated Press in 2004. "It's not been jet plane trips to the Bahamas."She used future payouts to take out a $200,000 loan with a company that served a specific market — lottery winners who need their money faster.Mullins later switched to a lump-sum payout, but never paid back the debt. The loan company filed suit and won a $154,000 settlement that was all but worthless. Mullins had no assets.Americo Lopes quit his job, lied about winning, and then got sued.AP Images Construction worker Americo Lopes won the New Jersey lottery, quit his job, and lied about it, claiming that he needed foot surgery, according to reports from The New York Times.After coming clean to a former coworker, he and a few others ganged up on Lopes for not splitting the winnings as promised. In a fraud suit, the coworkers claimed they had all pitched in for the winning ticket.The court ordered Lopes to split the prize.Ibi Roncaioli was murdered by her husband after she squandered her winnings.Tim Boyle/Getty ImagesOntario resident Ibi Roncaioli walked away with $5 million in a 1991 Lotto/649 drawing, but she didn't tell her husband how she decided to spend it.When Joseph Roncaioli, a gynecologist, found out Ibi gave $2 million of her fortune to a secret child she'd had with another man, he poisoned her with painkillers, according to reports from the Toronto Star.He was convicted on manslaughter charges and reportedly asked Ibi's family to help foot the bill for her funeral.Michael Carroll lived in the fast lane and blew it all.Screenshot/YouTubeMichael Carroll was just 19 when he won Britain's £9.7 million ($15 million) jackpot in 2002, the Daily Mail reports.But according to media reports from the time, an alleged penchant for crack, parties, prostitutes, and cars put him back at square one in five years.Last we heard, the former garbageman was hoping to get his old job back.Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. was undone by robberies and a casino lawsuit.Screenshot/YouTubeIn 2002, West Virginia building contractor Andrew Jackson Whittaker Jr. walked away with $114 million, after taxes, on a $315 million multistate Powerball draw.That was just about his last stroke of good fortune.Thieves ran off with $545,000 that Whittaker had stashed in his car in 2003. And he lost $200,000 the same way a year later. He was also sued by Caesar's Atlantic City, which said Whittaker had bounced $1.5 million in checks.Within four years, his fortune was reportedly gone.Billy Bob Harrell Jr. had his prayers answered, but his luck ran out after he couldn't say no.Flickr / Mike MozartA Pentecostal preacher working as a stock boy at Home Depot got his prayers answered when he hit the $31 million Texas jackpot in 1997.At first life was good, with Billy Bob reportedly quitting his job, traveling to Hawaii, and buying a ranch, six other homes, and new cars. He donated 480 turkeys to the poor, according to Time.But like many others who win the lottery, he just couldn't say no when people asked for a handout. He also ran into financial trouble with a company that gave lottery winners lump sums in exchange for their annual checks, but it left him with far less than what he'd won.Media reports from the time say he eventually divorced and died by suicide. Shortly before his death, he told a financial adviser that "winning the lottery is the worst thing that ever happened to me."Willie Hurt's addiction did him in.Flickr / Nicoletta CiunciIn 1989, Willie won a $3.1 million jackpot in the Michigan Lottery.Two years later, Hurt was divorced, lost custody of his children, and was charged with attempted murder — and according to media reports, picked up a crack-cocaine addiction.Stories from the time say the habit sucked away his entire fortune.Denise Rossi didn't disclose the jackpot in her divorce filing.Reuters/Mark Blinch When Denise Rossi won $1.3 million in the California lotto, she kept the news to herself and abruptly demanded a divorce from her husband Thomas without a word, according to The Los Angeles Times.Thomas was shocked but agreed to divorce her anyway. During the proceedings, Denise continued to keep her good fortune a secret.Two years later, Thomas intercepted a letter at his new Los Angeles home revealing the truth.He sued Denise for not disclosing her winnings in the divorce, and the judge awarded Thomas every cent.Even Denise's lawyer admitted to People that Denise could have kept half her winnings if she had been honest with her then husband. "Her failure to disclose was a fraud," the lawyer said.Meanwhile, Thomas Rossi is enjoying his $48,000-a-year payouts."If it wasn't for the lotto, Denise and I would probably still be together. Things worked out for the best," he said.Janite Lee spent it all on charity and political donations.FlickrAfter winning an $18 million lottery jackpot in 1993, Janite Lee saw her winnings gone within a decade.The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Lee, a wigmaker from South Korea, blew it on charity.A reading room was named after her at Washington University's law school, and she was a major donor for the Democratic Party.But her giving hand, coupled with a little gambling and a lot of credit-card debt, reportedly did her in. She filed for bankruptcy in 2001.Luke Pittard wound up flipping burgers at McDonald's.Daniel Goodman / Business InsiderWelsh-born Luke Pittard won a £1.3 million jackpot ($1.9 million) in 2006, but spent almost all of it on a trip to the Canary Islands, a wedding, and a house.A year and a half later, Pittard was forced to return to his job at McDonald's."They all think I'm a bit mad but I tell them there's more to life than money," Pittard told the Telegraph in 2008. "I loved working at McDonald's before I became a millionaire and I'm really enjoying being back there again."Rhoda and Alex Toth both landed in court for tax evasion.Wikimedia CommonsAlex and Rhoda Toth hit the $13 million jackpot in Florida in 1990. Within 15 years, they were destitute.According to the Tampa Bay Times, the couple spent heavily on a three-month trip to Las Vegas, which included stays in a $1,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Mirage. Back home, they bought 10 acres of land.The two were eventually accused of tax evasion by the IRS after it was discovered they filed for bankruptcy protections and falsely reported gambling losses. At the time of their indictment, they were said to owe the IRS $2.5 million.Alex died before his case went to trial; Rhoda served two years in prison.Vivian Nicholson was a clotheshorse who couldn't stop shopping.Vivian Nicholson is not pictured.Spencer Platt / Getty ImagesDaily Mail UK reports that Vivian Nicholson got a taste of the good life when her husband Keith won a fortune — £152,300 — in Britain's football pools in 1961.She famously promised the media she would "spend, spend, spend" following the windfall — and she kept her word.The couple blew much of Keith's winnings on haute couture, sports cars, and a new home, their extravagant lifestyle becoming the stuff of headlines. When Keith died in 1965, Vivian was hit with a huge tax bill and declared bankruptcy.She struggled with alcohol and depression before her death in 2011 — two years after a West End musical celebrated her life in the play "Spend, Spend, Spend."Teen mom Callie Rogers was too young to spend her money wisely.iStockCallie Rogers was just 16 when she won £1.9 million (about $3 million) in the UK's lottery in 2003, and she was too young to know how to manage her money or where it would lead her, according to Gawker.After briefly vowing to manage her winnings responsibly, Rogers made quick work of her fortune. She reportedly spent millions on vacations, clothing, cars, breast implants, and (according to British tabloid The Sun) more than $300,000 on cocaine.She also reportedly spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on a bungalow and house for her mother.Rogers eventually became a mom of three, and has said on the record she's teaching them to be careful with money."I'm glad they'll grow up knowing the value of money," she told The Sun."I was too young to win the lottery. It nearly broke me, but thankfully, I'm now stronger than ever."Editor's Note: This is an updated version of an story including reporting from Pamela Engel, Mandi Woodruff, and Michael B. Kelley.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The Woke Mob "Crosses The Streams" Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance The climax of the hit movie Ghostbusters was when the protagonists finally decided to “cross the streams” of their proton packs to defeat the final ghost, the Stay Puft marshmallow man. In the context of the movie, it was an unthinkable action - viewers were warned early on that that “crossing the streams” of the unlicensed nuclear accelerators they were wearing on their backs would prompt an apocalypse-style event called “total protonic reversal”, which would be, for lack of a better word, “bad”. At the end of the movie the gang finds themselves engaging in the practice on purpose to try and close the door to another dimension and save New York City. In other words, they incited “protonic reversal” to try and make the “inside out” ghost world become “outside in” again. The world became the inverse of what it once was. To me, it seems pretty obvious that the woke world has crossed the streams: it is currently in the midst of the same type of inversion and, while the public is starting to notice it clearly, those perpetuating the wokeness are unaware of the destruction they are creating to their own universe. Woke ideology, which took the virtuous and noble ideas of caring for those around you and equality of opportunity and then, as postmodernism does, permutated them an infinite number of times over until they were completely incomprehensible and meaningless, has hit an inflection point. Putting aside the sheer lunacy of the things that woke culture is currently fighting for - ending fossil fuels during an energy crisis while using everyday items made from petroleum, never-ending Covid protocols and mandates, arguing both sexes can get pregnant and menstruate, advocating for biological men to be allowed to beat the shit out of biological women in mixed martial arts matches and general equality of outcome - the charade otherwise finally appears to be obvious. Ah, the sweet smell of equality. More importantly, the charade ending is becoming obvious to many people who have huge megaphones and transcend political borders - especially people in the entertainment industry. I started off 2022 by predicting that common sense was eventually going to do away with vaccine mandates and Covid hysteria. Now, it appears that Pfizer’s recent admission that it never tested its Covid vaccines for transmissibility before they were released - and after the entire world was told the vaccines would prevent transmission - could wind up being the straw that breaks the woke camel’s back. Days after this admission, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky herself tested positive for Covid-19 about one year after she took to national television to proclaim that “data from the CDC” suggested that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” and “don’t get sick”. As these stunning revelations were taking place, which put the vast touted lie of sterilizing immunization into clear, simple words and terms that the everyday citizen could easily understand, Academy Award and Grammy Award nominated musician M.I.A. asked: “If Alex Jones pays for lying, shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” Immediately she was “cancelled” by the left and demonized on social media for her sentiments, which did nothing but compare the consequences between how two entities - Pfizer and Alex Jones - were being held accountable for their obvious lies. “M.I.A. has faced criticism after she decided to compare a conspiracy theorist lying about the massacre of innocent children to promoting the Covid vaccine,” Rolling Stone wrote, making sure to remind readers that invoking Alex Jones’ lies involved invoking the “massacre of innocent children”, the day after her Tweets. Then, GQ Magazine severed their ties with her: After Arulpragasam’s tweets went viral – with most commenters pointing out the absurdity of her comparison and sharing proof that vaccines are largely effective – a representative for GQ appeared to reach out to somebody on her team, alerting them that the magazine would be cancelling plans it had to collaborate with her. Arulpragasam herself shared a screenshot of the message, which explains that “due to [the] controversial nature” of the artist’s “Twitter activity”, GQ would be cancelling her involvement in its 2022 Men Of The Year Awards, as well as a planned photoshoot. It’s unclear what role Arulpragasam was to have in the Awards, which are slated to be celebrated on Wednesday November 16. Rolling Stone also pointed out that her skepticism about vaccines in March 2020 cost her a feature in Vogue: The tweet from M.I.A. should come as no surprise as she revealed in March 2020 — as Covid roiled the United States — that she would be choosing not to get the vaccine, writing, “If I have to choose the vaccine or chip I’m gonna choose death.” Shortly after that tweet, she claimed British Vogue had decided to pull a feature on her due to her comments about the virus.  “Anti vaxer [sic] is your term. It didn’t exist before this binary addiction everyone has to separate everything into this and that,” she wrote on Instagram in April 2020. “Anti this anti that. I prefer to not make everything so black and white.” Following up this month, M.I.A. told The Guardian her simple reasoning for her statements: “I know three people who have died from taking the vaccine and I know three people who have died from COVID.” “This is in my life, in my experience. If anyone is going to deny that experience and gaslight me, saying: ‘No, that’s not your experience,’ then what is the point of anything?” She continued: “What is the existence that you are trying to protect by giving me a vaccine if I can’t even have an experience and process that information in my own brain and come to some sort of conclusion? And live within a society where I have to make choices every day? There’s this weird idea that we’re all free, and that we fight for everything, and we can say what we want, but on the other hand, I feel like there’s even more of a crackdown on that.” For all of the unadulterated praise the woke has for females, artists and immigrants, one would think M.I.A. - an artist of Sri Lankan decent who was forced to become a refugee at age 11, and who went on to be one of the first “viral” artists to leverage the internet to distribute her work - would rest comfortably at a cross section of bold female leaders praised for challenging the status quo and adored by the woke. In fact, it was her “think for yourself” attitude that garnered her praise from the music industry early in her career: M.I.A.'s accolades include two American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) awards and two MTV Video Music Awards. She is the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award and Grammy Award in the same year. She was named one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone, and one of the 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time. Esquire ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. According to Billboard, she was one of the "Top 50 Dance/Electronic Artists of the 2010s". M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music. It seems clear to me that when the mob starts cancelling the very same woke artists they once worshipped for being original and asking critical questions, the idea of using art and music to push for change is in the midst of dying a slow, ironic death. And while the left tries to ignore the fact that being an artist used to be about making people think, they can’t ignore M.I.A.’s circumstances, which is what makes it so wonderful to watch her stand up for what she believes in: the same identity politics often hurled out by those casting judgement have been turned back on the mob. They can’t call her part of the patriarchy because she’s a strong female trailblazer in her industry. They can’t call her homophobic or racist because nearly her entire musical catalogue has been about supporting human rights and immigration. The lunacy of the situation is glaring. The woke truly have no “case” against M.I.A. other than simply blindingly carrying a narrative for big pharma and Pfizer. Is this what the left has become? And to, M.I.A., well… “You've made this day a special day, by just your being you.” - Mr. Rogers Get 50% off: If you would like to support my work and have the means, I would love to have you as a subscriber and can offer you 50% off for life: Get 50% off forever The pushback on woke culture “crossing the streams” isn’t just with M.I.A., either. Other members of Hollywood, and even Democrats, understand how bad it is making the party look and the toll it is taking on our country. Last week, former Home Improvement star and comedian Tim Allen took to social media to jab at the “woke” mindset. “Who is the face of the woke. Do wokees have a club house in someone’s backyard or maybe a cute yet safe playpen somewhere?” he wrote. Then you have former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who just left her party because, in her words, it is "now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness." "The Democrats of today are hostile to people of faith and spirituality. They demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans. The Democrats of today believe in open borders and weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents. Above all else, the Democrats of today are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war," Gabbard said. Then you have Former President Barack Obama, who recently made comments on the Pod Save America podcast calling Democrats “buzzkills” who make people “walk on eggshells”. "Sometimes Democrats are [buzzkills]. Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes,” Obama said. He continued: "We spend enormous amounts of time and energy and resources pointing out the latest crazy thing he said, or how rude or mean some of these Republican candidates behaved. That's probably not something that in the minds of most voters overrides their basic interests — Can I pay the rent? What are gas prices? How am I dealing with childcare?" In addition to Allen, Gabbard and Obama, this past week we also saw several ungrateful woke “activists” doing what they do best: halfheartedly trying to further a nonsensical agenda by showing zero respect for anyone or anything and expecting to be taken seriously. Self-proclaimed “activists” from a group called “Just Stop Oil”, threw canned tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh‘s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, England in the name fighting for climate change…or something. The 21 and 20 year olds justified their actions with statements like: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” As I pointed out on Twitter yesterday, the sad thing is that these “activists” get as much attention as we give them, despite whether or not they make sense. Media chooses to label these people “protestors” and “activists” instead of “vandals” and “felons”. And, while we’re at it, here’s another shining example of relinquishing power to the woke mob: Europe is in one of the worst energy crises of its history - a crisis that could last for years to come. The continent is in “desperate straits”. Yet the world is so dedicated to fulfilling a corporate and government-backed ESG and climate change narrative that simple solutions proposed by experts, like nuclear power, are no longer feasible While people in Europe can’t afford to keep their lights on, the world has stopped searching for solutions to generate energy in favor of trying to win the favor of activists - and then the world is shocked when populist politicians are elected. Nuclear power, as I’ve written about dozens of times, holds a common sense key to both fulfilling a green agenda and increasing power capacity. It is a solution that makes sense that many world governments are just starting to come around to. Yet nuclear as a solution didn’t become a headline this year until it was approved by de facto European Energy Czar, 20 year old Greta Thunberg, in an interview earlier this month.   For some reason Thunberg was asked about her opinion on nuclear power, and when she offered up her stamp of approval - voila - it became an international headline. Being woke used to be about raging against the machine, remember? Now it’s about scrapping to defend the machine. The left used to be advocates for free speech who harbored a healthy skepticism of government, corporations and elites. This ideology has now turned into an addictive dependence on “big brother” that they once rallied against. As anyone of sound and sober mind can see looking from the outside in, that dependence has manifested in a baffling show of blind support and trust for big pharma, calls for censoring the opinions of those who don’t agree, a desire for state-sponsored “fact checking” of discourse and advocating for a completely manipulated ESG agenda, backed by giants like Blackstone and being used by global elites to abscond with people’s civil rights. In other words, the woke mob has officially “crossed the streams”. The woke mob has officially ventured so far off of the once-virtuous path that they have sullied their own name, as well as the act of activism itself. This is happening leading up to a mid-term election where Democrats are widely expected to lose handily, specifically due to their incessant overreaching need to invade the personal space of others in order to tell them how morally and ethically bankrupt they are for a variety of inane reasons cloaked in faux-intellectual sounding jargon. The woke once showed up on the scene of a real problem: there really was a point in world history when not enough was being done for equality. At the time, they drew their virtuous proton packs and fired at the issue full force. But in fighting, and admittedly helping progress against the problem over the course of decades, they eventually, unknowingly, also crossed their streams. Now, their woke universe is about to implode on itself. “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light” - Egon Spengler Tyler Durden Mon, 10/24/2022 - 13:05.....»»

Alaskan Locals Pointing Fingers At Causes Behind Record Number Of Marauding Bears Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Spotting a bear in the Alaskan wilderness is an exciting and terrifying prospect for nearly 2 million visitors who make the trip up north annually. American black bear (Ursus americanus) feeding on salmon eggs (roe) at creek at Neets Bay fish hatchery, Behm Canal in Southeast Alaska near Ketchikan, USA. (Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images) However, dealing with bears is a chore and just part of life for locals. On a good day, that means constant vigilance and being conscious about little things—like where you stash your fishing gear and old take-out containers. On a bad day, dealing with bears can be dangerous and very expensive. Nestled in the winding waterways of Southeastern Alaska is the town of Haines. Touted as the “adventure capital” of the state, it has the spirit of a true frontier outpost. Stock photo of an Alaska black bear pondering whether to maraud. (Danika Perkinson/Unsplash) It’s the kind of place where you can buy hunting rifles and liquor directly across the street from the cruise ship dock. It’s also the location of a record-high number of bear killings out of self-defense in 2020. That year, police received an astonishing 452 phone calls requesting help with bears breaking into homes, restaurants, and cars in search of food. Haines police chief Heath Scott indicated the number of calls was eight times higher than in 2019. The outcome was grim. Official counts stated a total of 46 bears—an unprecedented number—were culled out of necessity to protect human life and property. Some Haines locals say the unofficial number was closer to 60 bears. Last year, Haines police received more than 50 bear-related calls. That’s still above the average, which is around 35-50 calls per year. Quick to sound the alarm, some climate alarmists cite lower fish populations resulting from rising water temperatures as the cause for higher numbers of bear rampages over the past two years. But some Haines residents aren’t so quick to sweep marauding bears under the rug of climate change. Locals say fluctuating fish populations are not unusual. Compounding this is irresponsible trash management and nearby fish farms. The latter is something many Alaskans assert has quietly fueled this problem for years.  Bear Necessities “This isn’t anything new. It’s an ongoing thing,” Shori Long told The Epoch Times. Long has had more than her fair share of encounters with intrepid bears in the past 36 years. She grew up fishing in Alaska’s vast wildlands around the Aleutian Islands and Haines. “I remember playing on the beach as a kid and never really worried about bears,” she said, adding there was no electricity where she grew up until 2009. Long described sunny days as a young girl spent catching salmon barefoot with her dog. But since then, she’s noticed increasingly bold behavior among the local bear population. She attributes this to a shift in perception where bears now associate humans directly with food. Much of this derives from negligent behavior with trash and fish scraps. Uneducated fishermen—many of whom are visitors—will often feed bears directly or leave scraps nearby. After years of this dangerous practice, bears now see humans as walking food trucks. “They would throw their fish to the bears or leave the chum on the beach. Bears have learned from this and now they think, ‘Oh hey, there’s another human with a pole. That means food,” Long said. She also noted there were two key elements behind the historic 2020 bear rampage. They’re the same factors that underscore any year with a higher than average amount of bear damage. Destroyed garage doors near Haines, Alaska during the unprecedented bear rampage in October 2020. (Courtesy of Charlene Jones) “That was a really bad year for fish and berries combined. The berries weren’t there, and the fish just weren’t there,” she said. Other than fish, wild berries provide another important food source for Alaska’s ursid population. A combined scarcity can force hungry bears to shift from regular hunting and foraging to full-blown ransacking. “It’s the availability of natural foods. In 2020, it was a very low fish year and there weren’t many berries around,” Roy Churchwell, told The Epoch Times. Churchwell is a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He said the fish and berry supply was a little better in 2021 but “still not great.” He also says that bear rampages aren’t on the rise, per se. It completely depends on food availability, which varies from year to year. “For example, if wild foods become available again, it’s very common for bears to go back to those wild resources,” Churchwell said. Bear damage estimate and photo. (Courtesy of Dan Egolf) When hungry bears can’t find enough to eat in the woods, they often wander into cities and towns. Every year, they cause thousands of dollars in property and vehicle damage. They tear open doors to homes and cars, break through windows, and demolish storage sheds. Churchwell noted that Haines has problems with both black and brown bears, which are the species normally encountered in Southeastern Alaska. Confrontations with grizzlies are more common in the interior portion of the state. Despite the fierce reputation of Alaskan grizzlies, black bears alone account for upwards of 40,000 damage complaints to agencies throughout North America every year. Trash and Fish Farms Preventing bear damage goes far beyond rookie stuff like leaving unsecured food out in the open. A black bear’s scent capacity is estimated to be seven times greater than that of a bloodhound. That means leaving something as simple as a recently used fishing pole in your car will entice unwanted attention from bears. Moreover, things like empty fast food boxes and wrappers offer a nearly irresistible temptation. Though sometimes even smelling “too fishy” after a day on the water is enough to prompt an attack, according to Long. She recalled an episode in 2019 where a bear attempted to maul her after she returned from a pleasant day of beach fishing. Long said the prompt response of her dog, which launched a counterattack on the aggressive bear, proved to be enough of a deterrent to allow her to escape. Long laughed while recalling the incident. “When I saw that bear reaching for me, I thought, ‘here we go.’” Other locals in Long’s circle have had their own ugly run-ins with local bears. “One of my best friends and her neighbor had their cars totally destroyed because a bear got in and just tore it apart,” she said. In addition to cars, garages, mudrooms, and storage sheds, sunrooms are inviting targets for bears due to the prevalence of food storage in deep freezers along with hunting and fishing equipment. Damage after a bear got inside a car near Haines, Alaska. (Courtesy of Randa Hopper Szymanski)   “We’ve learned how to deter them,” Long explained. “You store your crab gear, your longline gear, outside in a shed. Then use plywood with screws sticking out that will injure the bear’s paws if they try to press on the door. It works as a fantastic deterrent.” Gear storage aside, there’s still a trash problem to address. Haines local Charlene Jones told The Epoch Times area bears near town have literally been “trained by the trash.” Jones says that 2022 has been a better year for fish and berries, which allows residents to breathe a little easier. This year, all she had to do was yell at the bears nosing around her property to make them leave. Yet even with a more abundant food supply, vigilance must still be maintained. Jones said that, along with her neighbor, “We tame our trash like we’re on a mission from god.” “Because all the bears taught their bear children to go and eat human trash. It’s a generational thing,” Jones said. Churchwell agrees that appropriate waste management is critical. “It’s difficult to get people to secure their garbage … and other bear attractants. If we can do that, it goes a long way.” Though looming in the backdrop of food supply and waste management is the impact of nearby farms on Alaska’s aquatic culture. Research suggests farmed fish is linked to spawning issues, disease, and smaller subsequent generations. Finfish farming isn’t legal in Alaskan state waters, but only up to three miles offshore. Also, in neighboring Canada, fish farming is a booming industry. That means fish farms may inadvertently contribute to the lower populations impacting bear behavior. Read more here... Tyler Durden Sat, 10/22/2022 - 22:30.....»»

"I just feel that police are always going to be a critical part of the conversation, and they are critical to being successful," he told Semafor. Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman.AP Photo/Matt Rourke John Fetterman said in a recent interview that defunding the police "was always absurd." While speaking with Semafor, he spoke of maintaining positive relationships with law enforcement. "They're the most important tool to make the street safer," the Senate hopeful said of the police. Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman in an interview published on Tuesday said the concept of defunding the police "was always absurd."During an interview with newly-launched news platform Semafor, Fetterman told political reporter David Weigel that he did not believe in cutting back on law enforcement, arguing that having fewer police on the streets would only lead to increased crime rates."It was always absurd to defund the police," Fetterman said. "I've never believed that that was ever the case. And anyone that said that – yeah, of course, it's just wrong. From my own experience I'd say, anytime you have fewer police, you're going to have more crime."When asked about Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke's desire to take a look at the constitutionality of some stop-and-frisk policies, Fetterman spoke of the importance of making sure any policy decisions would not be "abused.""I just feel that police are always going to be a critical part of the conversation, and they are critical to being successful. They're the most important tool to make the street safer," he said.He continued: "I think that's at the core of it; having them not be treated in a way that's antagonistic. That's the way I treated that when I was in charge of a police department for 14 years and creating a good relationship with the community and figuring out what everybody agrees is an appropriate tactic versus one that's abused."Fetterman said that a key to success for police departments was for them to work effectively with the communities that they serve — with the concerns of citizens in mind."The most effective recipe is a police department that understands that they have to do what they need to do in terms of making sure things be safer, but not at the expense of the community feeling that they're over-policed," he told Weigel. "I think it's critical in any conversation to really begin to beat back the crime."Fetterman, who served as the mayor of the borough of Braddock from 2006 to 2019, is well known for having tattooed the dates of murders that occurred while he was in office. (He was elected lieutenant governor in 2018 on a ticket with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.)But national Republicans have sought to seize of the issue of crime to attack Democratic candidates in races across the country, fueled by a small segment of the party that has called for defunding police departments after the death of George Floyd while in custody of the Minneapolis police in May 2020.Most Democrats — including President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — have rejected the concept of defunding police departments.Biden refuted such a stance during his State of the Union earlier this year, stating that lawmakers should "fund the police," and has repeatedly spoke of his longstanding support for law enforcement.The FBI earlier this month announced that there was a 4.3% increase in homicides in 2021 — from 22,000 to 22,900 — but the data was incomplete.At the same time, the agency said there was a decrease in the number of violent crimes overall due to a decline in the number of robberies.Fetterman is running against Republican Mehmet Oz in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. The open seat represents one of the Democratic Party's best chances to flip a seat from the GOP.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»