Has any city made you feel really unwelcome? I submit this booking from a New York City hotel certainly does that for me.
What's next - a charge for breathing city air? Another tax for using water to flush the toilet? One gets the feeling one is being financially raped to benefit the city. In that case, why go there at all?
Ye Gods and little fishes . . .
Peter
Since my last health update, there's been a lot of "hurry up and wait" and several frustrating disagreements among medical professionals who can't agree on what they want to do to me. I'm beginning to feel like a laboratory guinea-pig.
All the doctors agree that "Something Must Be Done!" - but they can't seem to agree what that Something should be. The main point of contention appears to be whether I need three more vertebrae to be fused, adding on to my present fusion site, or whether the existing fusion should be removed and a sort of reinforcing tube or grid built around all the vertebrae in my lumbar spine. The latter is agreed to be the strongest option, and the least likely to give further problems in future, but it's also the most invasive and potentially harmful if something goes wrong. (Doctors: "Nothing Will Go Wrong!" Their nurses, talking to me when the doctor has gone out for a moment: "Don't You Believe It!" I think some of the doctors want to do it purely so they can say they've had experience with the procedure, but I'd rather have a doctor who's done it before, as many times as possible, so he's not graded low on the learning curve.)
I've just about finished with the tests that were required to get this far. (Believe it or not, it's taken over six months to go through them all!) The file of test results is pretty thick by now, but it still hasn't provided enough evidence for the doctors to decide on the best approach. I'm going to give them until the end of February, then, if there's still no decision, I'm going to take the entire file and CD's of all the imaging and go to a completely different hospital network in the DFW area for a second opinion. That will delay proceedings, but I hope will provide greater clarity. Besides that, the doctors in the other network appear to be considerably more experienced than those in the local one, so I hope I'll be dealing with specialists who've faced this combination of issues before and treated it/them successfully.
Meanwhile, thanks to your generosity, dear readers, the bills are paid up to date, and so far (cross fingers, touch wood, etc.) things look manageable in terms of future planning. I remain very grateful to you all. I'd hate to have financial worries hanging over the physical ones! Thanks to you, I haven't got that added complication. Pain remains a daily problem, but I've added another medication targeting peripheral neuropathy issues, which has helped reduce the dosage of painkillers I've been popping. That makes me feel less zombie-fied, if you know what I mean, and is yet another reason for gratitude towards God, the doctors and all of you.
So far, so good. I'll provide another update in a couple of months.
Peter
Yesterday reader Paul M. made this comment on Larry Lambert's blog. He's referring to California taxes.
‘Tax us to death’…saw this:
Payroll taxes, Building Permit Tax , CDL license Tax , Cigarette Tax , Corporate Income Tax , Dog License Tax, Federal Income Tax , Federal Unemployment Tax, Fishing License Tax , Food License Tax , Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon) , Gross Receipts Tax , Hunting License Tax, Inheritance Tax , Liquor Tax , Luxury Tax, Marriage License Tax , Medicare Tax , Personal Property Tax , Property Tax, Real Estate Tax , Road Usage Tax , Recreational Vehicle Tax , Sales Tax , School Tax, Social Security Tax , State Income Tax , State Unemployment Tax, Telephone Federal Excise Tax , Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax , Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes, Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax, Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax , Telephone State and Local Tax , Telephone Usage Charge Tax , Utility Taxes , Vehicle License Registration Tax , Vehicle Sales Tax , Watercraft Registration Tax , Well Permit Tax , Workers Compensation Tax.
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.
When you lay it all out like that, it's a breathtaking tax burden, isn't it? That list isn't even comprehensive: it doesn't include firearms taxes, ammunition taxes, and regulatory fees for this, that and everything else. Now they want to add a wealth tax on top of it all! They say it'll be a one-time tax, but if you believe that . . .
I wondered for a brief moment why any sane California taxpayer would vote for a government that robs them blind like that, but then I realized that most sane California taxpayers probably don't vote for those measures. Taxpayers who've drunk the liberal/progressive Kool-Aid do; but they're not the biggest margin of support. The people who don't have to pay those taxes, but who benefit from the money they bring in, are mostly the ones who vote for them (and the politicians who impose them).
Peter
This very interesting video shows what happened when 100 Ford dealers were asked to quote a best and final price for an identical model of pickup. The first year, relatively few responded. The second year (after Ford had taken notice and presumably talked to its dealers) a lot more responded - but the price variance in both years, from lowest to highest offer, was astonishingly high, well into five figures. Take a look.
I knew dealer margins varied, but I had no idea their pricing structures were so very different, nor did I realize how much the price goes up when dealer add-ons are included. The section on fees and regulatory charges was also eye-opening; I'd assumed that dealers would not dare meddle with statutory costs like that, but it looks like I was wrong.
I'm sure the facts and figures disclosed in the video will be encountered at any manufacturer's dealers, not just Ford's. Nevertheless, I hope Ford notices this video and does something about what it reveals - because business practices like these do it no favors at all in the eyes of the public.
I'm certainly going to follow the video's advice if I ever buy another vehicle from a dealer. Obviously, it applies more to new vehicles, but I'm willing to bet some of it carries over to the used market as well.
Peter
This headline yesterday boggled my mind.
DOJ's Inventory Of Unreleased Epstein Files Soars To 5.2 Million Pages
Remember February 2025?
Today, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), declassified and publicly released files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations ... Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents...
I don't know what bureaucratic battles Attorney General Bondi has had to fight with an entrenched anti-Trump Justice Department and a Deep State dedicated to fighting him and his minions at every turn. Her public statements have all been along the lines that she's going to (and wants to) release all the relevant documents. She may be the victim of bureaucratic sabotage, more sinned against than sinning . . . but her public image has become one of ineptitude, incompetence and waffling.
Who hid the existence of so many documents from her, and why? Where were they kept, and why were they not catalogued in the FBI's systems so that they could be readily made available? Why have we found out about them only in dribs and drabs, never all at once so that we knew the scale of the problem? In particular, why has it taken almost a year to uncover the existence of this latest, massive "document drop"?
I understand that most, if not all, of these documents are coming out of the Justice Department's Southern District of New York. If that's the case:
Attorney General Bondi's credibility has been severely affected by failures to charge various individuals and address known issues over the past year. The latest development over the Epstein documents threatens to completely derail her government career. She may become poisonous to the political touch for her supporters.
WHY IS NOTHING BEING VISIBLY, IMMEDIATELY DONE, OPENLY AND WITHOUT EQUIVOCATION, TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE ONCE AND FOR ALL?
One hopes the President will act swiftly to address the matter. These problems are doing him no favors at all, and are tarnishing his administration as a whole. What's more, many of us who supported him want - demand - answers now. We're tired of waiting, and see no good reason why we should wait. If there's nothing to hide, why is it being so carefully - and so successfully - hidden?
Peter
Most of my readers are doubtless aware of my ongoing medical issues, including the removal of a kidney back in September, and your generous response to my appeal for funds to help pay for previous expenses plus what lies ahead. I'm very grateful to you all for your ongoing support.
I'm in the middle of a series of follow-up consultations on what the various tests have discovered. Briefly, my lower spine has deteriorated rather more than anticipated, partly due to the injury I suffered in 2004 and its treatment at that time, and partly due to my advancing age. There's no doubt that further surgery will be needed. One "side" of the medical fraternity thinks that it will be best to extend my existing spinal fusion to take in two adjacent vertebrae. The other "side" says that won't be enough, and instead wants to remove the existing fusion altogether and encase my lower (lumbar) spine in a sort of cage or mesh, supporting the whole thing in all directions. Both sides agree that surgery is necessary, but not what surgery, or how to go about it. Me, I'm the "piggy-in-the-middle", a playing-ground for neurosurgeons who are having a fine old time arguing with each other about what they (rather than I!) want to do next. It's . . . frustrating - and while all the arguing is going on, I'm paying for their discussions. That's even more frustrating!
There are trade-offs to be considered as well. It seems that whatever surgical solution is adopted, my lumbar vertebrae are likely to end up pretty solidly fixed together. That's going to make bending and twisting a lot harder than it already is (even though pain levels should improve). The mesh solution will be more restrictive than extending the fusion, but will offer greater long-term support. Which to choose, and why? I'm a layman. I can't answer that - but the doctors won't give me a single, straightforward answer. They simply tell me the alternatives, then say "It's up to you which one you want to choose." Since I'm not an expert, and I can't predict the future or its challenges, how am I supposed to know which to choose? I may as well glue some gears on my spine and call it steampunk!
So, here's what's going to happen over the next six months to a year.
Ongoing care at this level will continue to be a drain on the funds I've saved up (and you've donated) for hospital treatment, but it's unavoidable right now. As I recover from the loss of a kidney, I find I'm able to write more easily, so I'll try to get a new book (perhaps a new series?) out during 2026. God willing, that will help to fund more medical misadventures.
Thank you all for your prayers, support and understanding. I'll continue to "fight the good fight" as long and as hard as I can.
Peter
If Greenpeace wanted to make at least half of America fighting mad, it's chosen a good way to go about it.
A North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace in March to pay pipeline company Energy Transfer $667 million for the environmental group’s rogue campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Now, Greenpeace is trying to get a Dutch court to nullify the jury award, which the trial judge reduced to $345 million in October. Energy Transfer is asking the North Dakota Supreme Court to block the activist group’s attempt to end-run the U.S. legal system. If Greenpeace’s efforts succeed, they would harm much more than the pipeline company. They’d open the door for activists to torpedo other American critical infrastructure projects under European law.
. . .
The suit claims that Energy Transfer’s litigation violated Greenpeace International’s rights under the European Union’s 2024 anti-Slapp law, an anagram for strategic litigation against public participation. The law seeks to protect journalists and nonprofit organizations from meritless lawsuits designed to silence or intimidate them.
Greenpeace’s case isn’t an ordinary appeal, in which a party asks a higher court to review a lower court’s application of the law. Rather, Greenpeace is asking a Dutch court to reassess the merits of the North Dakota case under Europe’s sweeping anti-Slapp directive. The case marks the first attempt to apply the law “extraterritorially” to stymie a lawsuit brought in a country outside the European Union.
If the European directive achieves this reach, it would extend the EU’s regulatory imperialism to the political and social spheres where Europe and America follow starkly different legal norms: In a nutshell, Europe’s speech rules are based on values, while America’s are based on rights.
. . .
Under the EU directive, courts can award damages to parties that have been subjected to “abusive court proceedings,” including those involving “an imbalance of power between the parties” or “excessive” claims.
Greenpeace claims in the Dutch lawsuit that the financial resources of Energy Transfer constitute an “obvious” imbalance of power and that the company’s demands for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages are “clearly excessive.” But the rule of law is based on whether the parties acted within their legal rights, not on whether they happen to run a successful business like Energy Transfer that is seriously affected by a shutdown in operations. If Greenpeace succeeds, expect other activist organizations to incorporate in Europe so they can wiggle out of liability by invoking the EU’s loosely drawn “abusive court proceeding” standard against U.S. companies.
There's more at the link.
I don't know whether the European Union envisaged its anti-SLAPP law being used in this way, to undercut and nullify the duly constituted courts and legal system of a nation that's not a member of the Union. Nevertheless, it was worded loosely enough that Greenpeace sought to take advantage of it.
What happens if the Dutch court rules in Greenpeace's favor? For a start, no US court will issue an order making the Dutch ruling binding under US law. That right does not exist in terms of our constitution. So, let's say the US court goes ahead with its proposed ruling, and orders Greenpeace to pay damages. What if Greenpeace refuses, citing the Dutch court's ruling? If the US government sues them in a US court to recover the money, they'll simply file another Dutch lawsuit in retaliation. If the US does nothing, our laws will quite obviously no longer be adequate protection for our constitutionally enshrined property rights - and that will open the door to a Pandora's box of litigation, countersuit and wealthy lawyers. What if the US tries to sue Greenpeace in a European court? What if the latter rules that the US has no standing to do so, not being a member of the EU?
This is an appallingly complex can of worms. What it might lead to is anybody's guess. However, one thing I'm sure of: from now on, if I come across anything Greenpeace wants, or motivates, or works towards, I'm going to oppose it. I'll even donate to their opponents, whether or not I agree with their perspective. Try to thwart our laws, would they, without so much as a "By your leave" to the American people? To hell with them!
Peter
From user Common Sensei on Gab:
I'd vote for that (and the representative[s] proposing it) in a heartbeat . . .
Peter
It seems that the 2020 census deliberately mis-apportioned state populations, which in turn led to mis-allocation of electoral seats per state. Nice when you can fix the results before the election even begins!
Redistricting is a sum of blocks. Distort the blocks, and you distort the districts, the legislatures, and the House. This practice is not merely bad policy; it is plainly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Department of Commerce v. House of Representatives (1999) made clear that statistical sampling for apportionment is illegal on statutory grounds. Abowd’s algorithmic manipulation is statistical sampling by another name, an unlawful substitution of estimated data for an actual enumeration required by the Constitution.
The proof arrived in March and May of 2022 when the Bureau’s own quality checks exposed a lopsided pattern. Fourteen states had statistically significant coverage errors, eight with overcounts and six with undercounts. The tilt was unmistakable. Democratic-leaning states were widely overcounted. Republican-leaning states were widely undercounted. Florida’s undercount was roughly three quarters of a million people. Texas’s undercount was on the order of a half million. Minnesota and Rhode Island kept seats they would have lost under an accurate count. Colorado gained a seat it did not deserve. Florida and Texas each missed multiple seats they should have gained. Analysts estimate the net effect was a shift of nine House seats away from Republican-leaning states and toward Democratic-leaning states. The Electoral College moved with them. More than $86 billion in federal formula funds followed.
. . .
The stakes are immense. The Census Bureau’s operations across a decade cost taxpayers on the order of $25 billion. Citizens paid for accurate data and received a noisy approximation that tilted representation and shifted money. Republican states are projected to lose almost $90 billion in federal funds across the decade as a result of the miscounts. Democratic states are projected to gain $57 billion. This is not a rounding error. It is a reweighting of national political power and public finance by mathematical fiat.
There's much more at the link. It provides graphic evidence of what I can only presume is Deep State manipulation of our electoral machinery, to give their approved candidates and causes a built-in advantage even before a single vote is cast. That situation still exists, and will govern national elections for the next half-decade or more until a new census can re-calculate our population and fairly apportion its distribution. It means President Trump is fighting a built-in, institutionalized disadvantage in every election he and his party fight.
Food for thought. Remember to get out and vote today!
Peter
Found in several places on social media:
Perhaps, if enough SNAP/EBT recipients lose their heads and riot over the suspension of those benefits, the taxpayers who fund them will also rise up in revolt and demand that their taxes be used for the good of the country, rather than the feeding of the feckless.
Peter
I've been getting awfully fed up with the brouhaha over whether President Trump should/should have/ever will win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the first place, previous winners of the Prize have comprehensively dishonored and discredited it merely due to their inclusion on the winners' roster. Lawdog puts this nicely in perspective, so I won't repeat the details here.
My main objection is simply that the Nobel committee has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they're merely a collection of politically correct idiots. I remember how disgusted I was when former President Obama received the award. He had done (and has never done) anything even remotely justifying his receiving it. He was (and remains) a political hack, a tool in the hands of those manipulating him, and they never allowed him to achieve anything positive. It was a cretinous move to award him the Peace Prize, because anyone with a couple of working brain cells to rub together could figure that out for themselves; and if he had any personal integrity at all, he should have refused the Prize, to demonstrate that he wasn't completely a puppet of outside forces.
Since his acceptance of the Peace Prize, it's been irredeemably dishonored in my eyes, and in the eyes of many around the world. I don't want President Trump to be awarded the Peace Prize, and if he is, I want him to refuse to accept it. Why would anyone with any self-respect want to be numbered among a bunch of losers like that?
Peter
Regular readers will know of my own struggle with the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I've documented it in some detail (see the sidebar for links).
Now comes news that the Catholic Church has once again chosen to behave like a business organization rather than as the Body of Christ on earth, as it is called to be.
On October 1, 2020, with sexual abuse lawsuits piling up, the Rockville Centre diocese filed a “voluntary petition for reorganization” under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
“This decision was not made lightly,” said Bishop John O. Barres in a statement at the time. And perhaps that is true. But as a legal strategy it was a no-brainer, since its primary effect was to undermine the purpose of the Child Victims Act. Bankruptcy gave the diocese the upper hand, while the victims became creditors who will be lucky to get a fraction of what a jury might have awarded them.
As of July, 41 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have used Chapter 11 filings to deal with the decades of horrific crimes committed by thousands of priests. Those filings have stopped lawsuits in their tracks and forced victims to accept pennies on the dollar, a Free Press investigation has revealed. To put it bluntly, long after the Church looked the other way at clergy sexual abuse, it has now found another way to deprive the victims of justice: the bankruptcy courts.
It has long been standard practice for companies facing massive numbers of lawsuits—for manufacturing asbestos, say, or marketing OxyContin—to file for bankruptcy. A Chapter 11 filing does not require companies to be insolvent; they simply need to show “financial distress,” allowing them to restructure their debts while continuing to operate.
Chapter 11 shuts down all litigation, halting discovery, the process by which litigants gather documents and witness testimony to support their claims. It prevents additional lawsuits from being filed. It eliminates jury trials and instead shifts the ongoing cases to federal bankruptcy court, where any settlement requires a process of mediation between the bankrupt company’s lawyers and lawyers for the creditors. That mediation often takes years. Although additional claims can be made, they too are routed to the bankruptcy court, where claimants fill out standard claim forms rather than filing lawsuits.
Early on, said Marci Hamilton, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who represented abuse victims in many early clergy sex abuse cases, dioceses used some unorthodox defenses to wriggle out of their obligations to sexual abuse victims. “They argued that it was unconstitutional for them to have to provide discovery,” she recalled. “It was unconstitutional to interfere with any kind of exchange between a bishop and a priest. They called it the formation privilege. And they argued that you couldn’t punish them for doing nothing but forgiving. Because forgiveness was what their faith required.”
In court, recalled Hamilton, “I dismantled all those arguments.”
But when states began passing laws like the Child Victims Act—ultimately, 21 did so, as did the District of Columbia—many dioceses decided that their best course of action was to adopt the bankruptcy playbook.
“It was a brilliant tactic because the bankruptcy system makes it about saving the debtor,” Hamilton said. “So they were able to flip the lawsuits from the victims being at the center of it, to them being at the center. And the victims just became collateral damage.”
In New York alone, nearly 5,000 people claiming to have been abused by clergy or staff came forward during the two-year exemption period from the statute of limitations. In September 2019, just one month after abuse victims were allowed to file lawsuits, the Rochester diocese sought Chapter 11 protection. Rockville Centre was second. Overall, six of the state’s eight dioceses have filed for bankruptcy. (The only ones that haven’t are the Archdiocese of New York, based in Manhattan, and the Diocese of Brooklyn.)
“Bankruptcy eviscerates the whole architecture for ferreting out the truth,” Paul Mones, a plaintiff’s lawyer who has represented dozens of victims in Rockville Centre diocese cases, told me. “By removing cases from the civil justice system, there is no cross-examination of church hierarchy, and all the ways to tease out the injurious behavior of church abusers gets whitewashed. It’s all about how much money the entity has to distribute, and nothing else. Lawyers are reduced to being financial managers.”
There's more at the link.
I think this is utterly horrendous in moral terms. The Church claims to be the Body of Christ, yet uses completely non-Christian secular tactics to avoid accepting responsibility for the damage it has done to so many people. Personally, I don't care if bankruptcies were to reduce the Church to meeting in private homes and hired halls, giving up all its luxurious properties and accumulated assets. Isn't that what the early Church did? Isn't that how it took root and grew? However, the Church has become utterly focused on itself as a business. Its bishops (and, to a certain extent, their subordinate clergy) see themselves as "defending the Church against secular attack" when, in fact, they are focused on defending the Church's assets - not its teachings, not its eternal mission, and most certainly not the victims of evil acts on the part of some few of its ministers and other members.
Every time I read reports such as this, I quail inwardly. Every Catholic - every Christian - knows the judgment that awaits all of us, when we must give account of our lives to the Righteous Judge. How is it even possible to think of justifying such attitudes and actions to Jesus Christ? "Oh, I saved your Church a few million dollars, by denying justice to a few of its victims." How many bishops and priests dare to think of trying to excuse that to the Christ who said, "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."
I have committed many sins in my life, and I'll have to accept responsibility for them when my turn comes to face the Judgment . . . but I do most sincerely thank God that I won't have to account for that sort of sin. The thought of trying to plea-bargain my way out of that is just too ghastly to contemplate - and, absent the most radical repentance and conversion, I doubt very much that it will succeed.
Peter
That's what Ted Gioia claims Apple, Disney+ and other streaming entertainment services are doing to themselves by continually raising prices. After detailing just how much more those services are charging today, he notes:
Years ago, I claimed that streaming economics were broken, and price increases were inevitable. But I never anticipated the rapacious response of the suits in the C-suite.
The short explanation is that they do it because they can. Sure, some people cancel their subscriptions, but not enough to make a difference. Most subscribers simply put up with it.
That’s why the streamers keep boosting prices again and again. They will continue doing it until they encounter serious resistance—and they haven’t hit it yet. So I expect more of the same.
But there’s a danger to this business strategy. Look at Las Vegas, where tourism is collapsing because the casinos went too far. For a long time, the public didn’t flinch in the face of price hikes, but then it got ridiculous:
- $95 ATM fees
- $14 coffee
- $50 early check-in fees
- $30 cocktails
The casinos have now earned a reputation as exploitative price-gougers. Tourism is now down sharply—hotel occupancy has dropped 15%. The city feels “eerily empty.”
This isn’t easy to fix. Once you destroy your reputation and lose the customer’s trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That happened in an earlier day to Sears and K-Mart, and they never recovered.
Something similar may already be happening at Disney’s theme parks. Some visitors report that Disney World is empty—looking like a ghost town even during Labor Day weekend.
They squeezed customers too many times, without increasing value. And Disney is now trying to do the same thing with streaming. Let’s see how it plays out.
The streamers are following a very simple strategy: (1) Raise prices and (2) Cut costs. You might notice that improving quality and reputation are not part of this equation.
In business strategy this is known as an endgame maneuver. It works in the short run, and is smart if you’re running a dying or declining company. Squeeze all the cash out of it that you can, before everything collapses.
This is also a popular strategy with private equity funds. They specialize in acquiring wounded businesses, and making these same moves.
But when prestige companies like Apple and Disney act this way, you really need to scratch your head. Why are these (once) respected businesses treating their own brands the same way a private equity firm deals with a declining industry?
These companies were once focused on innovation and rewarding customers. That could happen again, but not under the current leadership.
Until that leadership changes, expect to see more price increases. And if you want to stop it, don’t complain—just cancel.
And if you’re totally fed up with streaming costs, consider switching to books. I hear they offer a sweet deal on them down at the public library.
There's more at the link. If you follow the entertainment industry at all, particularly from a business and economic perspective, Mr. Gioia should be on your daily reading list.
I can't say any of this has affected my wife and myself directly. We don't even own a TV, because there's hardly anything worth watching on it, so the cost of streaming services isn't in our budget. As for visiting places like Las Vegas or Disney World, we aren't interested in what they have to offer. Our only trip to Las Vegas was to a writers' convention a few years ago, and we were stunned by the prices demanded for ordinary, everyday goods and services. We reckoned the cost of living in Las Vegas was at least double, and in some cases triple, what we paid at the time in North Texas. We fled back to sane pricing as soon as we could, and we aren't about to be fleeced again, thank you very much.
Nevertheless, I know a lot of people do spend money on these things, and I hear more and more complaints from them about their affordability. I'm not necessarily very sympathetic, you understand: to me, one prioritizes one's purchases around everyday importance. Housing, food, transport, school, etc. are a lot higher priority than what's on the TV screen! However, I know there are families actually cutting back on food purchases in order to pay for multiple subscription TV services each month. I can only hope that they come to their services before things get completely out of hand. (I don't suppose it helps that the very TV services they can't afford are constantly advertising food, entertainment, etc. that they can afford even less!)
Oh, well. I guess the entertainment moguls will go on extracting every penny they can from an increasingly impoverished audience, until the consumer can no longer afford them - then they'll demand a government bailout for their "industry" . . . and guess whose tax dollars will be expected to pay for that?
Peter
I note with satisfaction that the Epstein "victims" are threatening to release the names of those who victimized them.
Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have told Donald Trump they are compiling a list of men who were clients of the paedophile financier.
Survivors gathered outside the Capitol on Wednesday to demand that his administration authorise the release of all of the documents it holds on Epstein.
Lisa Phillips, who was abused by Epstein from 2000, said she and other victims will produce their own client list if the US government fails to publish the names of wealthy clients believed to be connected to Epstein’s crimes.
. . .
Ms Phillips added: “We know the names, many of us were abused by them. Now, together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know who were regularly in the Epstein world.”
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of Donald Trump who is working with Democrats on a bipartisan bill to secure the release of the files, said she would read the list of co-conspirators and abusers to Congress.
Noting that Epstein’s survivors would struggle to publicly disclose the list of names over fears of the potential ramifications, she said: “Yeah, it’s a scary thing to name names, but I will tell you, I’m not afraid to name names.”
There's more at the link.
Given suitable safeguards to prevent innocent people from being falsely accused, I think this is a very good idea. One could protect against abuse by naming only people who are remembered by two, or three, or more of the women, so that it isn't a "he said, she said" case, but one with multiple witnesses and/or victims. One could also remind them, prior to publication, that false accusations can lead to both civil and criminal charges against those making them, so they'd better be willing and able to back up their claims. Given those and similar measures, I can't see a downside to this.
I'm prepared to believe that President Trump's people in the Department of Justice have not found "smoking gun" evidence to convict anyone of complicity in Epstein's crimes - but that's only because their predecessors, and some of those still in the DOJ, have carefully erased or hidden that evidence. The cover-up has been massive. Anyone who believes that Epstein committed suicide in his prison cell has got to be so naive as to defy credulity. "Blissninny" just about covers it.
As far as Epstein's crimes are concerned, we haven't even scratched the surface yet in determining culpability and punishing offenders. It's long overdue.
Peter
A few weeks ago I wrote an article titled "From 'Medical Care' to 'Medical Couldn't Care Less'." In it, speaking about conflicting medical bureaucracies with whom I'm having to deal at present, I said:
Neither bureaucracy cares about me (or any other patient) as a person. They're just ticking off the boxes on their forms, checking their reams of regulations, and putting their organizations' interests ahead of anything and anyone else.
That's being driven home yet again by the latest medical shenanigans. I'm in pretty severe pain (all the time) from a deteriorating spinal condition, but no doctor or nurse seems interested in speeding things up to get to a point where that could be alleviated. Instead it's fill out this form, get that test, make follow-up appointments (which they then cancel because I haven't yet completed all the tests they want - but they don't tell me that until less than 24 hours before my appointment), and so on. What's worse is that medical insurance is an integral part of the problem, in that they won't discuss further treatment until a series of tests are completed, even if those tests have nothing whatsoever to do, medically speaking, with the specific health issue under discussion. The forms have to be completed, with all the boxes ticked off, even if some of those boxes apply to other conditions. If I complain and argue about it, I'll be frozen out of the process until I knuckle under.
The problem is, all of this costs money - and with competing bureaucracies arguing over who is or is not responsible for the bills, I have to pay for everything up front, in the hope of getting at least some of the money back from one or the other agency in due course. The fact that such costs run into thousands of dollars is irrelevant, as far as the bureaucrats are concerned. I have to get the tests done; if I can't afford to have them done, I won't be approved to proceed to further treatment options (for which they still won't pay, at least at present) through their bureaucratic processes. If I can persuade doctors to offer the treatment(s) I need without medical insurance pre-approval, it'll have to be on a cash basis, in the hope that subsequent discussions with my lawyer might persuade the insurers to contribute something towards them.
I'm going to have my right kidney removed towards the end of this month (the culmination of the kidney problems I had last year, with four lesser surgeries having failed to correct the situation). It'll take me a couple of months to get over that, I'm told, so back surgery will have to be on hold until I've fully recovered my strength. If I can raise the money for that, it should happen late this year or early next year, if I can get my medical ducks in a row.
I'm going to be launching a fundraiser within the next week or so to ask for help in meeting these expenses. This is a very costly situation for us. We're in the process of taking out a second mortgage on our home, and we've saved what we can to meet initial expenses, but we're still looking at a looming fiscal cliff in the not too distant future. I know we're far from alone in facing that sort of problem: I've mentioned others' fundraisers in these pages on occasion. Thank you to everyone who's already been generous. We couldn't have made it this far without you.
Peter
I was infuriated to read about an extraordinarily lenient sentence in a child sex abuse case.
Just hours after her first day of high school, a 15-year-old girl sat in a Fremont County courtroom and told a full gallery of people, both known to her and not, about her life from the ages of 7 to 12, when she was being sexually assaulted.
Candon Dean Dahle, 22, was sentenced by District Judge Steven Boyce to a minimum of five and a maximum of ten years in prison. Boyce then suspended the sentence and placed Dahle on probation for eight years.
He was also given a 180-day local jail sentence that began on Tuesday. After that, he will be required to complete 200 hours of community service.
There's more at the link.
The source article contains sickening evidence from the victim and her family of what this man's abuse did to her, the psychological effects of which will probably continue for the rest of her life. I won't publish that here, because I try to keep this blog family-friendly, but if you can stomach that sort of thing, I urge you to click over there and read it for yourself.
For the life of me, I can't understand how such a monster in human form could be let off with so light a sentence. There are parts of the world - including many in Africa, from where I come - that wouldn't have left him alive after doing things like that. People there wouldn't wait for the courts to give him a slap on the wrist. They'd administer rather more than a slap on the wrist to make sure he never did it again, and so that anyone else with ideas like that would be given a graphic example of why they should never, ever even consider putting their ideas into practice.
Furthermore, I've never yet seen a single case where a child abuser was "cured" of his "disease" by any therapy, program or punishment. I've had to deal with far too many of them as a prison chaplain. Even those who'd sincerely, genuinely repented of their sin would tell me that they didn't know if they could refrain from doing it again after they finished their sentence. They said that for them, temptation sometimes grew so great that it amounted to an irresistible compulsion, so much so that some of them actively considered suicide as the only way they believed they could avoid acting on it. I somehow doubt that Mr. Dahle will prove any different.
I'd call him a complete and utter waste of oxygen, except that I'd then have to apply the same description to the judge who let him off so lightly, and the prosecutors who plea-bargained his offense down so greatly. I suspect society would be better off without any of them.
Peter
In the relatively short time that President Trump has been in office, investigations have uncovered misallocation of funds, corruption, bribery and malfeasance to an astonishing extent. I'm willing to bet most go back to the Obama administration, when covert corruption of the system of government became entrenched.
Two articles caught my eye over the past couple of days. The first refers to the Palisades fire in California last year.
Millions of dollars raised to help victims of the 2025 California wildfires have ended up in the coffers of unrelated nonprofits pushing a variety of progressive causes, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Some of the groups that have received funds explicitly exclude white people from their services, while others advertise programs for illegal aliens.
FireAid, a celebrity-studded fundraising organization that raked in about $100 million for wildfire relief efforts, has distributed money to more than 160 California nonprofits. Its flagship event on Jan. 30, produced by the Annenberg Foundation, featured performers like Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Dr. Dre, Stevie Wonder, and Sting, among others.
There's more at the link.
What appears conspicuous by its absence is the complete lack of support from FireAid to actual victims of the disaster. As far as we know, left-wing progressive liberal organizations benefited, but not a single property owner was compensated for losses suffered in the fire. I wonder if those who donated to FireAid knew that - and how they feel about it now? If it were me, I'd be demanding a refund.
The second article is from Jeff Childers, who notes that President Trump appears to be uncovering all sorts of interesting links between the Soros Foundation and other major progressive donors, coupled to the massive spread of non-governmental organizations (NGO's) who receive such donations and use them without having to account for what they're doing with the money.
Let’s connect some dots! First, yesterday President Trump randomly and quite colorfully posted about how the Soros family should be investigated for mob-like racketeering. Fair enough. No arguments here. But … why now?
. . .
The headlined but unnamed “firm” is mega-NGO Arabella Advisors, which the Times admitted “manages several ‘dark money’ funds that support Democrats and the progressive movement.” By “several dark money funds,” it meant hundreds.
. . .
Now let’s add the USAID connection. Over the last decade, Arabella Advisors and its woketopus of blandly named subsidiaries minted a cottage industry for USAID careerists, hiring them in the septic-tanker loads. And Arabella’s biggest donors, including the aforementioned Gates Foundation, were also —not coincidentally— some of the nation’s largest USAID grant recipients.
Now we can see the entire, obscene length and girth of the woke gravy train. Our own money flowed from USAID to the Gates Foundation and other big platforms, then to Arabella, and then to leftwing NGOs, Democrat politicians, and progressive activist groups. It was a kind of perpetual-motion donor machine where accountability disappeared in a puff of sulphuric smoke at each handoff.
You must admit it was a devilishly brilliant scheme, tricking us into paying for our own destruction.
. . .
Trump’s RICO drumbeat against Soros hints that this whole philanthropy-politics pipeline is about to be treated as what it is: a criminal enterprise. Trump’s post about Soros and RICO and the Gates–Arabella unraveling link up at the same networked-funding “philanthropic” ecosystem.
However it happens, if that USAID → Mega-platforms (like Gates) → Arabella → progressive activist pipeline is finally switched off, the political effect would be massive. Arabella’s fiscal-sponsor funds have quietly underwritten much of the left’s operational backbone: voter registration groups, climate activism, racial justice nonprofits, education campaigns, and ballot initiatives. Cutting the pipeline means many of those groups would lose dependable, pooled, and largely anonymous funding streams. They’ll struggle to sustain staff, payroll, and field operations at the current scale.
Again, more at the link.
Remember, an organized financial network of behind-the-scenes support for progressive left-wing politics doesn't get set up overnight. This has been constructed over years, possibly even decades. As I mentioned earlier, I suspect it swung into high gear when President Obama was elected. Indeed, this left-wing political machine might have made it a priority to elect a president whom they could control, and who could be "managed" to enable such behind-the-scenes chicanery.
I have no objection at all to any shade of political opinion funding its operations in an open, transparent, honest way. There should be accountability, of course, but openness is a great sanitizer. It's when things are done in secret, with money shuffled from group to group and account to account so often that it becomes untraceable, that things get murky. From what Mr. Childers has said, it looks as if the Soros-Arabella axis is as murky as they come. One hopes we'll get to the bottom of it in due course.
I'm particularly going to watch for indications of how many US taxpayer dollars were diverted to progressive left-wing partisan politics via USAID and NGO's. I won't be surprised to learn it was in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If so, one hopes the perpetrators will be hunted down and prosecuted for their misdeeds - just as those raising funds under false pretenses, no matter how carefully worded in evasive, weaselly terms, should also be held accountable.
Peter
I note with disgust that a large number of employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have complained that "the Trump administration’s sweeping overhaul is gutting the disaster relief agency’s authority and capabilities, undoing two decades of progress since the failures of Hurricane Katrina".
Titled “Katrina Declaration,” the letter accuses President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, of eroding the agency’s response capabilities and appointing unqualified leadership. The group calls for FEMA to be shielded from political interference and for its workforce to be protected from politically motivated firings.
The warning comes as the nation marks 20 years since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 1,400 people, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.) The botched FEMA effort exposed fatal flaws in the federal emergency response system – failures that led Congress to pass sweeping reforms, including the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which strengthened FEMA’s independence and set higher standards for its leaders.
Now, the letter argues, those reforms are being unraveled, as the Trump administration moves to either abolish or drastically shrink FEMA’s role.
There's more at the link.
I remember FEMA and Katrina very well indeed, because I was part of the independent efforts to bring relief to New Orleans after that hurricane, and saw the official cock-ups at first hand. I wrote about them at length at the time and afterwards. Go read about them for yourself, if you haven't already read that earlier article. It's eye-opening. Let's just say that my respect for FEMA, the American Red Cross and a number of other big-name emergency management and disaster relief organizations was severely undermined.
As for "reforms" implemented after Katrina, why don't we ask the citizens of North Carolina how they feel about the agency after Hurricane Helene went through there last year? The initial relief efforts were a shambles, and didn't improve until the Trump administration took office in January this year. There were - and still are - persistent allegations that the Biden administration deliberately slow-walked aid to the area because it was largely conservative in its politics, and had not supported the Democratic Party and the Biden administration in the past. FEMA was pilloried by many of the locals for its initial failure to act, and - when it did act - for ignoring the expertise of local agencies and taking over in a heavy-handed, inefficient, bureaucratic manner. There were repeated reports of supplies sent in by independent agencies being confiscated by FEMA without so much as a "by your leave", and a number of rescuers reported that they were ordered out of the area on pain of arrest if they returned.
I think FEMA as presently constituted is nothing more than a collection of bureaucrats throwing their weight around in an attempt to justify their existence. I think we'd be far better served if each State set up its own FEMA equivalent, using people who know the local area and population and are thus better positioned to help without delay in time of need. The federal FEMA could then be used as a conduit to get supplies and equipment to the state(s) when and where it's needed, and hand it over to the local FEMA to put it to work. The military could also establish permanent, working relationships with the State-level FEMA's to prearrange things like helicopter support, evacuations, etc.
Meanwhile, based on my own extensive (albeit two-decade-old) experience with FEMA, I consider this "Katrina Declaration" to be not worth the paper it's printed on.
Peter
Robbie Starbuck has done a deep-dive investigation into the DEI practices at Cracker Barrel, and reveals that the company has been getting more and more "woke" for years. Here's an excerpt.
Here’s the highlights you need to know:
- Cracker Barrel has funded "all ages" Pride events for many years like Nashville Pride and Third River City Pride.
- Cracker Barrel worked with the far left HRC organization and reportedly sponsored HRC events for 10 years. They even brought an HRC representative to their Tennessee HQ to do a pronoun and transgenderism training. We’ve included photos of this in the video. As a reminder, the HRC supports child sex changes and men in women’s bathrooms. They work to normalize/legalize both things and they work to force transgenderism in the workplace.
- Cracker Barrel worked with a group called Conexión Américas as part of their DEI efforts. This group helps illegal immigrants, providing them lawyers and the executive director opposes President Trump’s deportations.
- Cracker Barrel sponsored the Out & Equal LGBTQ Workplace Advocate Conference and presented a workshop on how Cracker Barrel has made progress supporting LGBTQ+ causes. This group works to push sexual topics and pronouns into the workplace.
. . .To put it mildly, Cracker Barrel has forgotten who their core customers are. It’s time for us to remind them.
They depend on YOU to keep their business afloat so now YOU have to ask yourself: Do you want to fund people or companies that hate your values?
It’s time to remind them who their customers are.
If you think their values don’t align with yours and you’re a customer who wants to speak out, you can write to them here: https://guestrelations.crackerbarrel.com/s/contactsupport
Reporters can also call their reporter hotline at: 615-235-4135 or email them: media.relations@crackerbarrel.com
Remember to ALWAYS BE KIND. Many in customer service agree with you. Being rude hurts our cause!
There's more at the link, including a 15-minute video report. Click over there for the full details of how Cracker Barrel has been spending our money on its loony left philosophies.
Cracker Barrel is, of course, entitled to spend its money any way it pleases. I, as a customer, am equally entitled to spend my money where and when I choose. After reading the above reports, I won't be spending it at Cracker Barrel (where a group of friends and I have been regulars for Sunday breakfast for several years).
Peter
