The Patriot Post® · Going the Way of Red China?
It’s bad enough that our economy appears to be tied so tightly to China’s that if someone sneezes in Beijing, the U.S. comes down with the Asian flu.
Maybe this global economy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While it expands the market for our goods, it has just about wiped out our manufacturing capability and padlocked our factories. In exchange, it has flooded the U.S. with shoddy goods from China, Mexico and Indonesia.
Worse yet, it forces us to deal with the thieves in China, who are always looking for new ways to swipe our technology. It also allows the giants in the Silicon Valley to choose between working in the best interests of our government or China’s, and nearly always choosing the latter.
It also compels the Europeans to pander to Iran and Russia, while at the same time fearing Russia’s expansion plans and remaining allied with Russia’s chief ally, Islamic Turkey, in NATO. Even Lewis Carroll, at his madcap best, couldn’t have visualized this amount of surrealistic lunacy.
I know that global trade is supposed to be great for our economy, but how great is it when the Stock Market can lose over 800 points in a day over a rumor and when people’s nest eggs can disappear overnight if a hostile nation decides it’s in its own self-interest to drop us as a trading partner?
Frankly, I’ve been suspicious of our economy for a long time, going back to the day that rich people stopped being millionaires and turned into billionaires.
Even the likes of Rockefeller, Morgan and Ford, never dreamed of becoming one. Now every schmuck who ever came up with a new social network could buy and sell every financial giant who was born prior to 1970.
As if it’s not bad enough that Nixon and Henry Kissinger brought China in from the cold, allowing it to lose its pariah status and thus become a financial behemoth, a large segment of our population has decided to replicate Mao’s revolution here in America.
As William Jasper pointed out in an opinion piece he wrote for The New American: When Mao and his Red Guards undertook their Cultural Revolution, driving out what they referred to as the Four Olds (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas), they didn’t try to persuade anyone through cogent arguments. Instead, they used force, just the way that every other Communist dictatorship has done.
All they had to do was accuse people of deviating from Communist doctrine in word or deed and it was enough to cause them to lose their homes, their jobs and, it goes without saying, their lives.
We have seen our own version of this with the way the Left has used violence courtesy of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. We have seen the way that the media has offered its own services in their unrelenting attack on President Trump, Conservatives, Judge Brett Kavanaugh and even teenager Nick Sandmann and his fellow Pro-Life Catholic schoolmates from Covington High School.
To those on the Left, there are no innocent parties. You either toe the party line or you’re fair game for the blood-thirsty mob.
The Left also inflates the numbers and influence of what they refer to as White Supremacists, just so they can insist that Trump is their leader. Of course it’s a lie. If you rounded up every member of the Klan, the Aryan Nation and David Duke’s fan club, you could, as Fred Allen once said about the amount of sincerity to be found in Hollywood: “Stuff it in a gnat’s navel and still have room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”
Not nearly often enough, but occasionally, the world’s news can be downright amusing. Clearly, there’s nothing funny about Brazil’s rain forest being consumed in flames. But it has led to a delightful exchange of insults between France’s Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsanaro.
It all began when Macron blamed the fire on Bolsanaro. He then suggested that France and some other European nations kick in $20 million to help Brazil put out the holocaust. His ego wounded by first being accused of arson by the uppity Frenchman and then by the suggestion that Brazil can’t afford to put out a fire, Bolsanaro then insulted the Macrons by pointing out that the missus robbed the cradle.
It thus proved to be instructive and not merely amusing. I had previously been unaware that whereas Mr. Macron is 41, his wife, Brigette, is 66, whereas the ages are nearly reversed in Brazil, where Mr. Bolsanaro is 64 and his trophy wife, Michelle, is 37. Interestingly enough, both couples were married in 2007, when the Macrons were 29 and 54 , while the Bolsanaros were 52 and 25.
Just for the record, Donald Trump is 73, Melania is 49. They were wed in 2005, when Donald was 59 and Melania was 35.
Isn’t it strange that whereas the 25 year age gap between the Macrons and the 24 year gap between the Trumps doesn’t seem nearly as peculiar as the 25 year gap with the Macrons?
A marriage between an older woman and a younger man strikes us as nearly as weird as the marriage of a short man and a tall woman, as though family conflicts will be resolved by a one-on-one game of basketball.
I am definitely going to have to give this matter more thought.
Marijuana has been portrayed as a harmless drug for as many years as I can remember. Back as far as the movie “MASH” and Reverend Jim on TV’s “Taxi,” stoners have inevitably been depicted as goofy, harmless and loveable.
But as Alex Berenson, author of “Tell Your Children,” discovered after years of extensive research, it’s not as benign as we’ve been told by lunkheads like Bill Maher and Woody Harrelson or by politicians looking to increase state coffers with tax revenue. It seems the opposite is true.
It has been found that pot smokers are not only befouling their lungs and exterminating the few brain cells they were born with, the addiction often leads to violent behavior.
That doesn’t mean that every pothead living in his parents’ basement is a time bomb waiting to explode, but there is indisputable evidence that between a third and 40% of men who murder children regularly smoke the shit.
Oklahoma recently saw a judge rule that Johnson & Johnson owed the state half a billion dollars for the role it played in the opioid epidemic. Interestingly enough, there was no mention of the roles played by the FDA, which okayed the drug, or the multitude of doctors who prescribed it.
Clearly, many other states will now be following suit, hoping to add to the amount of revenue it now collects after having legalized the sale of marijuana.
My chief concern is whether this practice of victimizing pharmaceutical companies is going to put at risk those people who are actually suffering from constant pain. Is the pharmaceutical industry going to risk producing the meds so desperately needed if they know that if even a few people misuse them, it’s the companies that are going to suffer?
After all, we’ve seen how the crime rates spike when cops are afraid to do their jobs for fear that gutless politicians will kick them to the curb if some sleazebag gripes that he’s been ill-treated.
My favorite meme this past week was of a San Francisco supervisor addressing two cops holding a straitjacketed Hannibal Lector: “Stop calling him a ‘convicted cannibal.’ He’s a ‘justice-involved person with unique dietary needs.’”