And I Think of You (opens in separate window)

the boomers ruined everything

friday, june 28th, 2019

The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans. The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.

Millennials didn’t kill the economy. The economy killed Millennials.

Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.

Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.

There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.

Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction difficult. Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.

But, of course, Boomers didn’t only make rules that nudge young people out of homeownership. They also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.

Just as tight land-use rules make existing homeowners richer by reducing how many new houses are listed on the market, strict licensing rules make existing workers richer by reducing competition in their fields. And while some industries clearly need licensing rules for health and safety reasons, most of the growth in licensure has been in fields where health and safety justifications are less salient: Do you really need hours of course work and special exams to be a florist, an interior designer, or an auctioneer?

By privileging existing workers, licensure rules increase income inequality, and they do so specifically by shifting income toward older workers. When licensure standards exclude felons, they also disproportionately affect minorities. Young people, and especially minorities, are increasingly being legally prohibited from work.

Again, scholars differ on explanations for why licensure has proliferated. It could be that work has simply gotten more complex. Or it could be that the decline of unions led to a search for new ways to maintain occupational closure. Increased gender and racial integration in workplaces may also have led to a search for new forms of hierarchy.

But even for workers who don’t need a formal license, barriers to work have grown over time. Jobs that once required a high-school degree now require a college degree. This escalation of credential requirements has created a kind of educational arms race. The rise in collegiate attainment, again, did not begin with Boomers. Rather, the GI Bill, and the explosion in new university chartering that it underwrote, created a new norm of college education for many jobs. With the rising availability of higher education, employers, who tend to be older than their employees, often demand degrees as licenses.

Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.

As with formal licensing and land-use rules, there are explanations for the rise of degree requirements: greater public support for education, a complex economy, growing demand for knowledge-workers. All probably have some validity. But the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.

And whatever specific factors contributed to the rise of licensure, land-use rules, and demands for more degrees, these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of life. Regardless of changes in formal segregation, unionization, demand for knowledge workers, returns to various asset classes, or other explanations for the rise of work and housing regulation, what is striking is that these trends occurred simultaneously. A graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend. Sector-specific explanations seem a bit suspect when the trend itself is so general.

The most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates. Even though murder rates are today at the same levels they were in the 1950s, the imprisoned share of the population is higher in America than in any country other than North Korea. We imprison a larger share of the population than authoritarian countries such as Turkmenistan and China.

That huge spike has a very clear origin in the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Academic research has shown that incarcerating more criminals does reduce crime somewhat, so, as with all the other examples I’ve given, this response was understandable.

But many countries experienced a similar crime wave. Most of them experienced similar crime declines in the 1990s, even without so much imprisonment. Furthermore, research has also shown that imprisonment patterns in America were heavily biased by race, with incarceration rates not always reflecting actual rates of criminality.

Today, while incarceration rates are edging lower, they remain astonishingly high. Even as younger Americans are locked out of jobs and housing by strict rules set by previous generations, a startlingly large share of them, especially in minority communities, are literally behind bars. Those who remain free are nonetheless bereft of family, friends, and potential co-workers—and whole communities are, as a matter of law, stripped of potential workers.

It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s. And whatever specific arguments may have justified a command-and-control response to crime, this kind of response reared its head for every major political problem encountered by Baby Boomers: housing, jobs, education, crime, and, of course, debt.

Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time. Already, in places such as Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico, where political rules make flexible solutions hard and the population is aging very quickly, massive debt restructurings loom large. But around the country, the pressures of long-term obligations will grow.

Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.

Furthermore, the basic demographic balance sheet is getting worse all the time, increasing the relative burden on young people. Working-age Americans are dying off in alarming numbers.

The odds of a 32-year-old dying have risen by 24 percent in the past five years, even as death rates among older Americans are about stable. Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence. But, of course, while this sudden increase in working-age death rates is a new concern, the long-run fiscal crunch has been obvious for decades. For virtually the entire period of Boomer political dominance, it has been obvious that long-term obligations needed to be fixed. And yet, the problem has not been fixed. Younger Americans will suffer the consequences.

As dire as this all sounds, there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically unpalatable.

Not all of these problems were first caused by the Boomers, but they each worsened on their watch. If leaders in business, education, and politics want to solve these problems, they can. Whether the gerontocracy in charge today wants solutions may be another question altogether.

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.

Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.

Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.

There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.

Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction difficult. Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.

But, of course, Boomers didn’t only make rules that nudge young people out of homeownership. They also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.

Just as tight land-use rules make existing homeowners richer by reducing how many new houses are listed on the market, strict licensing rules make existing workers richer by reducing competition in their fields. And while some industries clearly need licensing rules for health and safety reasons, most of the growth in licensure has been in fields where health and safety justifications are less salient: Do you really need hours of course work and special exams to be a florist, an interior designer, or an auctioneer?

By privileging existing workers, licensure rules increase income inequality, and they do so specifically by shifting income toward older workers. When licensure standards exclude felons, they also disproportionately affect minorities. Young people, and especially minorities, are increasingly being legally prohibited from work.

Again, scholars differ on explanations for why licensure has proliferated. It could be that work has simply gotten more complex. Or it could be that the decline of unions led to a search for new ways to maintain occupational closure. Increased gender and racial integration in workplaces may also have led to a search for new forms of hierarchy.

But even for workers who don’t need a formal license, barriers to work have grown over time. Jobs that once required a high-school degree now require a college degree. This escalation of credential requirements has created a kind of educational arms race. The rise in collegiate attainment, again, did not begin with Boomers. Rather, the GI Bill, and the explosion in new university chartering that it underwrote, created a new norm of college education for many jobs. With the rising availability of higher education, employers, who tend to be older than their employees, often demand degrees as licenses.

Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.

As with formal licensing and land-use rules, there are explanations for the rise of degree requirements: greater public support for education, a complex economy, growing demand for knowledge-workers. All probably have some validity. But the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.

And whatever specific factors contributed to the rise of licensure, land-use rules, and demands for more degrees, these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of life. Regardless of changes in formal segregation, unionization, demand for knowledge workers, returns to various asset classes, or other explanations for the rise of work and housing regulation, what is striking is that these trends occurred simultaneously. A graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend. Sector-specific explanations seem a bit suspect when the trend itself is so general.

The most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates. Even though murder rates are today at the same levels they were in the 1950s, the imprisoned share of the population is higher in America than in any country other than North Korea. We imprison a larger share of the population than authoritarian countries such as Turkmenistan and China.

That huge spike has a very clear origin in the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Academic research has shown that incarcerating more criminals does reduce crime somewhat, so, as with all the other examples I’ve given, this response was understandable.

But many countries experienced a similar crime wave. Most of them experienced similar crime declines in the 1990s, even without so much imprisonment. Furthermore, research has also shown that imprisonment patterns in America were heavily biased by race, with incarceration rates not always reflecting actual rates of criminality.

Today, while incarceration rates are edging lower, they remain astonishingly high. Even as younger Americans are locked out of jobs and housing by strict rules set by previous generations, a startlingly large share of them, especially in minority communities, are literally behind bars. Those who remain free are nonetheless bereft of family, friends, and potential co-workers—and whole communities are, as a matter of law, stripped of potential workers.

It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s. And whatever specific arguments may have justified a command-and-control response to crime, this kind of response reared its head for every major political problem encountered by Baby Boomers: housing, jobs, education, crime, and, of course, debt.

Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time. Already, in places such as Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico, where political rules make flexible solutions hard and the population is aging very quickly, massive debt restructurings loom large. But around the country, the pressures of long-term obligations will grow.

Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.

Furthermore, the basic demographic balance sheet is getting worse all the time, increasing the relative burden on young people. Working-age Americans are dying off in alarming numbers.

The odds of a 32-year-old dying have risen by 24 percent in the past five years, even as death rates among older Americans are about stable. Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence. But, of course, while this sudden increase in working-age death rates is a new concern, the long-run fiscal crunch has been obvious for decades. For virtually the entire period of Boomer political dominance, it has been obvious that long-term obligations needed to be fixed. And yet, the problem has not been fixed. Younger Americans will suffer the consequences.

As dire as this all sounds, there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically unpalatable.

Not all of these problems were first caused by the Boomers, but they each worsened on their watch. If leaders in business, education, and politics want to solve these problems, they can. Whether the gerontocracy in charge today wants solutions may be another question altogether.

© 6/24/2019 By Lyman Stone, The Atlantic.

[JS – Presented to show you the twisted, perverted way a leftist, commie asshole thinks and reasons, if you can even call it that.]

A Day In The Life.

Up at 6:30a on Friday, thanks to my alarm, I did my usual DR, made coffee, checked the news and weather, and had some Special K Honey Nut Cereal w/ Red Raspberries. I forgot the OJ, but would get some when I got to New Eastern Market. As usual, I bought too much stuff at the Mkt, but managed to get it in the 'fridge when I got home, a few hours later.

I spent the afternoon helping some neighbors place and plant some annuals and perennials, doing paperwork, paying some medical bills online, and, after my DR, had a huge Meat Lasagna, that I gotten at the Mkt. Today was the longest day of the year – Summer Solstice – and it stayed light until almost 9p. I did my next-to-last DR for the day, had a Chicken Salad Sandwich on Croissant w/ Chips, and crashed for the night. I planned to sleep-in tomorrow.

And I did; I slept until 9:30a on Saturday, did my DR, made coffee and had some Special K Honey Nut Cereal w/ Blueberries, made Kona Coffee and checked the weather and news. I left at 10a to get to Lee's in Dallastown, so we could figure out what to do with his disastrous gardening mess in his and Annette's tiny backyard. First thing: use Round-Up Herbicide to kill 23-30% of the crap growing and going wild back there, wait a week and, #2: remove the dead junk and weeds, and replant with quality plant material. We got #1 done, and I left for home to get my DR done, and get some lunch.

After lunch, I watered my gardens, cleaned-off the back patio of the white pine pollen sacs, needles and other debris, and paid some bills. History's "Ancient Aliens" was on for several hours, and I watched it on-and-off, for a while, as I did with Discovery's "Mysteries Of The Abandoned" shows. Frankly, tonite's offerings on both CATV channels, sucked. I did my DR, had a glass of white wine, and hit the sack around 10:30p.

Up at 7a on Sunday, I made coffee, did my DR, had a couple of smokes, had a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios Cereal w/ Blueberries, grabbed a quick shower, started a load of laundry, and still had time to watch the start of the F-1 Grand Prix of France. Lee stopped by at 9am, just before the race started at 9:15a. Good race. Then, the IndyCar Grand Prix of Road America, in Elkhart Lake, WI, came on NBC Sports. I washed, dried, folded and put away 3 loads of laundry, in between and during the races. Like my Dear, Sweet Friend Sherry, says, "Welcome to my world." Heh.

It was a warm and slightly muggy 85°, so after having had the windows and screen doors open all morning, I closed-up and cooled the condo down to 73°. With a 2-ton Amana AC unit outside my office-sunroom – I upgraded from a GE 1-ton about 7yrs ago – it cools down very quickly. Finally, I have a clear week coming up; no dr's app'ts or anything else to do. Just the 2 cleaning ladies coming on Thursday morning. I quit for the night at 11p.

Awake at 6a on Monday, I went back to sleep until 8:30, made Kona Coffee, did my usual DR, and some Special K Honey Nut Cereal w/ Red Raspberries. I had a pile of errands left over from last week, so I left at 10a to get them done and over with. Traffic was light, so it all went quickly.

Back home by 11:30a, I checked the weather and news, while listening to the balance of the "Chris Plante Show" – I'll catch the full podcast at 3p – I began watering my front and back gardens, since this is going to be a very dry and hot week. I fell asleep on the LR couch, after my midday DR and lunch, and watched History's "American Pickers" recent episodes thru dinner and into the evening. Hey, we're halfway to Christmas! I hit the sack at 11p, just as the rains arrived.

Awake several times during the night, as the rain pounded on the skylights, I slept-in until 8:30a on Tuesday, did my DR, made Kona Coffee, had Life Cereal with Red Raspberries, and noticed that my searing neck and shoulder pain, were hugely-diminished, and the neck almost gone.

I listened to the "Chris Plante Show" for a while, and then took the 2019 Jeep HEMI out for a long drive, in Manual Mode. 8 forward speeds. Seamless. Fast. Slick. I may never drive it in Automatic Mode, with only 6 forward speeds, again.

Around 6:30p, when the 86° temps and oppressive humidity abated, I transplanted several perennials from my back patio gardens, to the front gardens, and brought one back that was more in scale that the ones I'd transplanted to the front. I didn't even break a sweat. After a dinner of Chicken Marsala and Angel Hair Pasta,, I watched 3 episodes of History's "Curse of Civil War Gold" and "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation", also on History, did my nightly DR, took my Rx pill regimen, had a glass of white wine, and went to bed at 11p.

I slept-in until 9a on Wednesday, did my pre-breakfast DR, made coffee and had Chex Honey-Nut Cereal w/ Red Raspberries. After re-watering the perennials I transplanted last evening, I heard the weather forecast for the week had gotten even worse: 90-95° and no rain in sight. My email took a crap and Gmail locked me out, for deleting a location I was never at. After a few errands in late morning, temps hit 91°, I put the Jeep away, and took some time to get my email working again, on Gmail and Thunderbird. It worked!

For the second week in a row, a small Florida city has agreed to pay cyber criminals hundreds of thousands of dollars after a ransomware attack crippled city systems. The council in Lake City, a community of about 12,000 people west of Jacksonville, approved during an emergency meeting Monday night a bitcoin payment worth about $462,000 by the city's insurer. This follows a vote a week earlier in Riviera Beach, a city of about 34,000 near West Palm Beach, in which the council authorized its insurance carrier to pay about $600,000. It's way past time to track down all of the hackers, and kill them.

I continued transplanting two more perennials from the back patio's small gardens, to the bigger front gardens. I'll know in a day or two if they made it. I watched "Homestead Rescue" on Discovery until 11p, had a glass of vino, did my DR, took my Rx pills, and headed to sleep. Cleaning ladies are in before 8:30a.

Up at 6:30a on Thursday, I had to get things moving, as the cleaning ladies would be here by 8:15-8:30, and I had errands to run down south in Red Lion. I did the DR, made Kona Coffee, had OJ and Special K Honey Nut Cereal w/ Red Raspberries. And of course, a smoke with my first cup of coffee. One of the real pleasures of my start to the day.

No, I didn't watch last night's First DemonkkkRATic Debate – Debate of the Losers, 9 radicals with no shot at being elected to anything except to redistribute each other’s time – and despise, loathe and hate them all; communists, socialists, marxists, leftists, anarchists and worse.

The terrible right side neck/shoulder/arm pain's returned, even using Bayer 325mg. I have a Wellspan Phjysical Therapy meeting next week, so hopefully they'll come up with a procedure to alleviate my pain. I've been off Oxycodone 20mg, for over a week, and don't want to go back on it; too many nasty side effects. I'd rather deal with the pain.

High for Thursday was an oppressive 93° with 95% humidity, around 4p. I don't do well in that kind of heat/humidity, anymore, so I mostly stayed inside, except to go out for a smoke. And no, I didn't watch the Second DemonkkkRATic Debate either, rather choosing to watch some of the first 5 seasons of Discovery's "Expedition Unknown". I had 2-Alarm Chili and an Egg Salad Sandwich for dinner, took my evening Rx pills, another Bayer 325mg aspirin for pain, did my DR, and had a glass of Chardonnay, before calling it a day, at 10p.

Tomorrow, Friday, starts a new week here in the "Journal", and I hope to get my pain analyzed and ameliorated, if not stopped. But I'm not counting on anything, for sure.

Worldwide Eco-Wacko Suicide.

If fossil-fuel power plants are to go the way of the clipper ships over the next decade, something must replace them. Going solely solar would require installing solar panels over an area of land nearly the size of West Virginia. Generating just 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from wind would require mounting turbines on an area encompassing land the size of New Hampshire and Vermont. About 900 hydroelectric plants were demolished between 1990 and 2015 owing to opposition from environmentalists outraged by harm to fish ecosystems. Nuclear plants would get similarly rough treatment at the hands of fanatics frightened by the prospect of nuclear power.

Solar and wind power flit across the landscape intermittently, requiring an alternate source, like coal or gas, to make electricity when nature takes a break. Environmentally friendly Europeans find that a lack of reliable backup when nature takes that break increases the risk of electrical grid failures. German engineering, as good as it is, has not been able to eliminate the effect of “green” politics, which would replace fossil and nuclear power with renewables. The result is 172,000 localized blackouts in Germany in 2017.

Poverty was a constant companion of humanity until modern times. The proportion of people worldwide living in poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010, according to the World Bank, an achievement unprecedented in human history. It was the result of a rapid boost in global energy production — up 43 percent during that period, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Nearly 81 percent of that power was generated by fossil fuels, such as oil and gas.

A billion people around the globe still suffer extreme energy poverty, with no access to electricity. Everyone gets a hint of what that means when storms knock out the power, and everything in the house stops. Fumbling occasionally for candles is a mere inconvenience, but life beyond carbon — entirely dependent on sunshine and a breeze — would be insanity.

Have You Noticed?

As I watch CATV, almost each and every commercial has a "Black American" in it, as well as other minorities. Every beer, pizza, car and truck, business, food, beer, licorice, banking, sports, dating, mattresses, insurance, candy, soft drinks, sporting equipment, appliance, pet food... you name it. I guess the ad agencies are now so wacko leftist that they "feel" the "diversity factor" must sell anything. Not so, back in the 70s & 80s, when I worked on Madison Avenue, in NYC.

Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Are there too many Blacks in TV ads? Some people think so. And after many evening CATV show ads in a row, I often do too. For a group of people who only number 13-14% of the total population, they are way over represented, considering they commit 76% of the violent crime, murders, rapes etc.

Back then the product sold itself; it just needed someone to deliver the message and news that it was available. Today, the spokesman/woman is the sales factor. Rip-rap, filth, garbage, shit, trash and junk, sell anything to the masses of ignorant morons, lowlifes, douchebags and scum-sucking filth who can dial-up a URL, and pay with a credit card.

Next time you're watching CATV, use a pen and pad to note each ad you see, or even radio commercial, where you see and/or hear a Black in it. You'll be stunned.

Trump Just Drove A Mack Truck Through
The Shameless Liberal Hypocrisy On Sanctuary Cities.

If the liberal attitude toward immigration and a host of other issues could be summed up with just one saying, it would be this one: “good for thee, but not for me.”

Safely tucked away inside their think tanks, tenured academic positions, lily-white suburban enclaves, and ESPECIALLY behind their carefully crafted WALLS, it’s easy for liberals to virtue-signal about how the rest of us should be “compassionate” and agree to welcome every migrant who takes a notion to come to the United States. But when it comes to their own personal lives, their “money” is almost never anywhere in the vicinity of their big fat jabbering pie holes.

In other words, just like with the degree of charitable contributions from people all-too-eager to spend YOUR money, liberals are big fat hypocrites.

Liberals take what you said, change it until it's no longer what you said, and then attack you for what you didn't say.

Such was the case last week when President Donald Trump brilliantly proposed - in a masterful troll job that may very well exceed all of his previous troll jobs - that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) transport illegal border-crossers to … wait for it ... sanctuary cities. Sure, it’ll sadly probably never happen, and likely the only reason Trump brought it up was to do exactly what it did - expose liberal hypocrisy. But even so, you’d think liberals would be ALL OVER the notion, right? This should be so EASY, given their worldview, so why not just call Trump’s bluff and say “bring them on in?” I mean, even allowing for the typical degree of liberal hypocrisy, the very definition of “sanctuary city” means that those in charge of designating their cities as such must want them to be, you know, a SANCTUARY for illegal immigrants. The more the merrier, they’re always saying, yet when the bad orange man proposes giving them what they supposedly want, right in their own backyards, they look that gift horse in the mouth like it’s got three eyes.

It’s almost like they think Mexico and Central America aren’t sending their best, or something.

Senator Amy Klobuchar accused Trump of “literally using human beings as pawns in a political game.” If that was the case, it was a checkmate move, Mr. President. Actress Alyssa Milano called the idea “sick and twisted.” Rep. Adam “Pencil-Neck” Schiff called it a “hare-brained scheme.” Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro waxed eloquent about “the cruelty of this administration,” because apparently the definition of “cruelty” is matching liberals up with the reality of their absurd utopian fantasies. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin accused the Trump administration of treating illegals like a “pestilence to spread around the country,” which still begs the question: if they love them so much why would they care?

And then there was Cher, who did a Trump-prompted stark 180 on mass immigration by wondering via Twitter why Los Angeles and California, a city and state that aren’t “taking care of” their “own” should bring in and “take care of more.” This was a woman who, less than two years ago mind you, begged anyone who could to “take a dreamer” into their home. It’s hard to know how long it’ll be before “red-pilled Cher” issues the obligatory profuse apology, but for today at least it’s nice to see a ray of common sense pierce even the most brainwashed of souls.

There were plenty more where those came from, all perfectly summed up by Trump Deputy Director of Communications Matt Wolking, who tweeted: “Seeing left-wing media folks who advocate for open borders lose their minds because immigrants will bring violence and crime to their cities is ... quite a sight.”

Indeed. It reminds me of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s now legendary question to Jorge Ramos last October when the Univision anchor was traveling with the first migrant caravan.

“How many of these migrants are you taking in personally into your home and are supporting once they get into the United States?” Carlson asked Ramos.

“I think that’s a great question and that’s precisely the kind of question that people like you ask when you don’t want to understand that this has nothing to do with individuals,” Ramos responded. After an awkward back and forth, Carlson asked him if he would simply take in “three” migrants, a question Ramos dodged yet again because he CLEARLY wasn’t about to take any of the migrants he supposedly cares so much about into his sprawling, walled (because of course it is) mansion. They might get the carpets dirty, after all.

To his credit, San Jose, California Mayor Sam Liccardo is the only liberal non-hypocrite in America right now. That’s because he offered to take any illegal immigrants President Trump would transfer to his city: “[Donald Trump] plans to release detained immigrants to [San Jose]??” Liccardo tweeted Friday. “We welcome any families willing to endure such extraordinary hardships and to take such tremendous risks to be a part of our great country.”

Liccardo’s non-hypocrisy, on this issue at least, stands in stark contrast to the rest of his ideological brethren. Liberals want to take your money and choose where to spend it, but don’t want to give it themselves. Liberals want walls for their mansions and their neighborhoods, but none for America. Liberals want armed guards and even guns for themselves, but would disarm ordinary Americans whose lives apparently aren’t as “valuable” as theirs.

And as Trump masterfully exposed, they want endless immigration from the Third World, but not anywhere near where they live.

Why People Troll.

Imagine someone whose life never took off the way they wanted. For whatever reason, they are now stuck in a miserable situation; a dream career never came to be and they still live in mom’s basement. Their life is parasitic and they know it. The only thing that brings them any relief is tearing down others. Those who don’t create can only try to destroy. It’s a sad fact that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel.

Abusive childhoods are breeding grounds for adult addictions. Traumatic events that occur while the brain is still developing mess up the circuitry, magnifying the consequences across the spectrum of life. The transmitters between each neuron operate below optimum levels. This is where addiction comes in. If a normal person’s dopamine levels are at a healthy 100%, someone who’s suffered childhood abuse will only work at 40%. However, the drug of choice boosts that up to 80%, which is the closest they’ve ever felt to being whole. But when the drug wears off, the dopamine level crashes below what it was previously, at 20%. So the addict has to go back to the drug inflate it again (only it may never go as high; next time will be 75%, then 70%, etc.).

But drugs of choice can take many forms: cigarettes, pills, pornography, video games, or even television. Anything that causes a temporary dopamine rush becomes dopamine fuel. Specifically, I want to talk about internet trolling, when someone leaves nasty, hateful, or derogatory comments over the internet. Things they would never say to a person’s face. It seems to not have any consequences because of the safety of the computer screen; but like any addiction, this temporary boost is unfulfilling and cries out quickly for more. As suicides from cyber bullying have been on the rise, the consequences are clearly not so harmless at all.

The amygdala (which means “almond” due to its shape) is a part of the brain that controls fear and aggression. Vision has a direct path to the amygdala due to its location (behind the eyes the middle of the lower brain). This is why we react emotionally to imagery (and why propaganda can be so effective). Logic and reason take place in the cerebral cortex, which is further up, taking information longer to be processed there.

In the wild, this is a useful survival mechanism. If our tribal ancestors saw a lion at a distance, their fear response kicked in and the amygdala sent messages to the renal glands above the kidneys to release adrenaline and help them run fast. Our brains are so effective at this studies have shown that we can react fearfully to danger before we even recognize what the danger is.

But this can have a tragic effect on modern society.

Our surroundings growing up have a tremendous impact on our mental stability as adults. Ideally, a child should develop in a two-parent home that provides a balance of love and discipline. But if the parents divorce, are verbally or physically abusive, or neglectful, the child is put in a constant fight-or-flight mode too early in life. As a result, the brain overcompensates by reinforcing the amygdala as a survival strategy while under-developing the frontal cortex.

Because their fight-or-flight reflex is messed up, people with overdeveloped amygdalas struggle with insecurity, anxiety attacks, and aggression towards others. They misinterpret everything as attacks and are prone to rages even at the slightest hint of friction. They can have difficulty maintaining close relationships. Think of an animal backed into a corner afraid for its life; when it goes into fight-or-flight mode, it scratches, bites, screams, urinates, anything to get out of the situation alive. In humans, short tempers betray deep insecurities.

What’s especially noteworthy is that other opinions can also be viewed as a threat. Argumentative people crave a “thrill of victory” (again, the dopamine rush) because their minds interpret other viewpoints as literal threats. It’s like an immune system going berserk and sending white blood cells to wipe out an infection. This is why I personally try to avoid internet debates; just like the person with anger management issues, someone who constantly needs to win arguments online is usually trying to mask childhood insecurities.

I personally think that the specific abuse that leads to internet trolling is neglect. Divorce and its traumatic effect on children is one example, but neglect can take many forms. It could be that the parents punished the child by locking them in closets or kept them isolated from others. Or the mom or dad always worked too late and never spent time with their children.

Our relationship with our parental figures shapes who we are perhaps more than anything else (birth order plays a factor, too). There’s an old saying that the way you talk to your children is the voice they’ll hear in their heads for the rest of their lives. Children need to feel safe and protected by their families. Absent parents create fear in their children. The child lives with an  underlying sense of being abandoned in the wild surrounded by predators. In adulthood, this fear manifests itself as a desperate need for attention. People who are loud, boisterous, or flamboyant were often neglected by their parents. The coping mechanism is the attempt to be the center of attention, always, in every situation, and is the sad story behind famous comedians like Robin Williams.

The term “projection” is used to describe imagining one’s own desires onto others. However, I use the term somewhat differently. Let’s call it “the parental hallucination.” People with bad relationships with their parents grow up imagining everyone they meet is their parents, most of the time without even realizing it. There’s a projector in their heads broadcasting an image of their mom and dad on everyone they know, even their own spouses and children.

This is why so many girls abused by their fathers marry abusive men. They’re trying to rewrite their childhood in adulthood, only this time they hope to get love and nurturing from the monster. But the deadly trap is that like any addiction, it never works. Robin Williams spent decades being adored, applauded and loved by millions, but that could never fix the neglect he suffered from his parents.

So we have two ingredients that make up the groundwork for an internet troll. The first is an overdeveloped amygdala that views everything, even something as harmless as another person’s opinions, as a threat. The second is the parental projection, the hallucination that everyone they meet online is their mom and dad. If they were neglected as children, they now have the ability to make themselves the center of attention. The third is perhaps the most crucial: anonymity. Imagine being able to punish your parents from the shadows without ever suffering any perceived consequences. Trolls often tend to have garish, cartoony avatars and rarely show their true faces. Like the KKK, Isis, or Antifa, real cowards act brave while wearing masks.

This futile attempt to make up for a lost childhood motivates people to take up strange causes. Most angry feminists have an absent father somewhere in their past. Behind most atheist social media trolls are oppressively strict religious parents. Crazed environmentalists or animal rights activists tend to have parental figures who beat or verbally abused them (they project their parents onto the meat companies and themselves onto the animals). The epidemic of single motherhood has left us with a generation with considerable daddy issues.

The desire for attention from parents while wanting to lash out at them at the same time is a toxic combination. This is the average internet troll in a nutshell. But lest I be accused of adopting the “blame your parents” cliché, there does come a point where self-responsibility comes in. In other words, no matter how bad their childhoods were, people can eventually grow up and come to terms with it, then quit the never-ending attempt to rewrite everything in adulthood. Escaping these behavioral patterns is one of the most freeing things that can happen in life.

Oh, Goody Goody.

Comey said he's "never thought of electronic surveillance as 'spying' ".

There are some people in the DOJ IG's and intel agency offices who've been electronically monitoring him since around Feb. 2017 who are happy to hear this.

Remember when I said the SpyGate plotters aren't the ONLY ONES WHO CAN WRITE FISA WARRANTS.

Guess who's team has had that ability since late January, 2017?

And where were the SpyGate plotters after 2017? Most of them were out of the gov't and then last year they lost their security clearances. Unless I miss my guess, every single time the SpyGate plotters contacted the foreign intel officials overseas they plotted this coup with, they were under surveillance.

The only way that didn't happen would be if Trump & his team were incompetent, which I doubt.

Trump Trolls The Democrats To Highlight Their Hipocrisy.

It isn't difficult to grasp the scope of Democrat and media hypocrisy. It's far beyond YUGE! Regarding immigration, it is beyond description. They are making their disingenuousness so obvious that they might as well put it on billboards. Tolstoy wrote:

"Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised." (Anna Karenina)

President Trump suggested, perhaps seriously, that the hundreds of thousands of illegals whom the Democrats insist be allowed to flow into the country unimpeded be distributed to those states and cities throughout the nation that have designated themselves sanctuaries to such migrants. After two years of doing everything in their power to keep our borders open to all comers, asserting that these illegal aliens are "gifts of love" (Pelosi) to America, you would have thought Trump suggested depositing dumpsters full of fetid rodents to all those virtue-signaling cities and states.

The leftist media spent the day hysterical that he would dare imagine such a ploy. They called it retribution, illegal (sanctuary cities are illegal), inhumane, vengeful, and worse. In short, they had a full-blown meltdown that rivaled the hysteria of a few days ago after A.G. Barr confirmed that spying on the Trump campaign and presidency did occur.

The Democrats, having lost their minds, leaped at the chance to display for all their blatant hypocrisy. They demand that those pawns (the migrants) in their game of remaking America for their purposes not be shipped to their their cities! No way, Jose.

For the duration of Trump's presidency, the Democrats have done their level best to foil his promise of immigration reform, no matter how many rapes, murders, and other crimes are committed by such non-citizens, who for the Left deserve more rights and more compassion than Americans. Pelosi, Schumer, and their acolytes have once again proven beyond all doubt that they value the prerogatives, if not the lives, of illegal aliens over American citizens. But they don't value lives at all – not those of American victims or those of the thousands of migrants who die on the long journey here because the left has lured them with promises of government largesse. This on the same day that the New York State Assembly blocked a bill to help Gold Star families with college tuition but approved $27M for tuition for illegals, even those present in the U.S. for only thirty days! What a murder of crows, our progressives!

The Democrats' loving embrace of illegal immigrants is a scam. They do not want them in their own sanctuary cities, the biggest of them already fraught with homelessness, drug abuse, and all that accompanies those pathologies. Nancy Pelosi's city of San Francisco, like Seattle and Los Angeles, has been disfigured by leftist notions of compassion. Tourists, long a mainstay of the local economy, are appalled. Those who still come are given maps in order to avoid the paths benighted by fecal matter and discarded, contaminated needles.

The progressive vision for the Obama-imagined transformed America is a Democrat-created bust. Obama's polices transformed the country, all right; he nearly destroyed us, which is why Trump won in 2016.

All of this leads us to the Left's refusal to admit that the Obama administration did indeed weaponize our alphabet agencies in order to take Trump out. E. Nesbit, the British author of children's books, wrote, "Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know." The Left has for over two years now refused to acknowledge that a group of self-appointed thugs at the top of those institutions did indeed violate countless laws in order to sabotage a candidate they opposed. They surely know that it is true; there is too much evidence available to all to deny it. Still, they pretended to be shocked when A.G. Barr pronounced that spying did take place. They've spent two years trying not to believe that what is true is, in fact, true. "One thing you can't hide – is when you're crippled inside" (John Lennon). The Democratic Party is crippled, economically, ethically, and morally. All they have is their exposed hypocrisy and their rage at losing an election they took for granted.

The Left's hysteria over Trump's suggestion that the many thousands of illegals who have invaded the country be sent to sanctuary cities would be hilarious if it were not so unspeakably hypocritical. It is the Democrats who have done everything in their power to encourage these people to come, to breach our borders. But they do not want them in their communities. Trump, as usual, trolled them into revealing who they really are: disingenuous, elitist snobs. The man is a genius, and he is the best president since Reagan.

"It takes a common thug to commit injustice, but it takes an exceptional thug to call it "social justice." (Jakub Wisniewski)

Breakfast Isn't Important.

I skipped breakfast again this morning. I won't worry about it.

Yes, I've heard the advice. "It's the most important meal of the day." It balances blood sugar levels, kick-starts your metabolism, stimulates the brain, etc.

A Harvard University study said men who regularly skip breakfast have a 27% higher risk of suffering a heart attack. 27 percent!

But I'm not worried, because I now know there's no proof that skipping breakfast causes heart attacks or any other problem.

In his latest video, nutritionist Dr. Ruth Kava points out that just about all the claims about breakfast being especially important are unproven.

Those Harvard researchers actually say it "remains unknown whether specific eating habits ... influence ... heart disease risk."

Strokes and heart attack news persists in part because people who skip breakfast tend to have other bad habits, like smoking.

But the breakfast bunk keeps coming.

Several years ago, the government announced that skipping breakfast may make you fat. Of course, the media jumped on that one. "Missing breakfast tricks your brain into thinking you want higher-calorie foods," says WebMD.

"Far from making you fat, breakfast actually helps activate your metabolism so you start burning fat," says StepToHealth.com.

But it's not true, shows a new analysis by the British Medical Journal.

"They looked on a number of different studies, and they did not find that eating breakfast ... helped people lose weight," says Kava.

The government has backed away from its claim.

Why did researchers and the government get it so wrong?

Partly because eating habits are hard to study. You can't follow test subjects for years, continuously controlling what they eat.

So, many studies are based on what people say they ate. Some people forget. Or lie.

Many of us have been suckered by studies funded by cereal makers. Five of 15 studies mentioned by the government in its breakfast push were funded by General Mills or Kellogg.

"Yeah, well, they're the ones that are interested in having their products sold," says Kava.

On its cereal boxes, Kellogg touted that study that found people who didn't eat breakfast could lose weight by starting to eat cereal or breads for breakfast instead of skipping breakfast altogether or eating meat and eggs.

"Don't get your nutrition education from cereal boxes," says Kava.

In fairness, cereal companies don't always try to spin the results. One study funded by Quaker Oats found skipping breakfast was associated with weight loss in people who were overweight. Instead of ignoring the result, Quaker Oats actively pushed the researchers to publish the data.

Even cereal boxes might be better sources of information than television, though.

"Sesame Street" is more reliable than most shows, but even there, Michelle Obama told Grover he was probably tired because he hadn't had a "healthy breakfast!"

While it's true that a hungry child may not do well in school, Obama tells Grover, "Everybody should have a healthy breakfast."

Not true. You need nourishment, but there's no good evidence it has to come at a specific time of day.

"Eat breakfast if you're hungry. If not, eat a little later," advises Kava.

Of course, the key to good health isn't just to do whatever you feel like doing. Our appetites can lead us astray. Smoking kills. Some tempting foods are unhealthy.

But years of consumer reporting have taught me that moderation and common sense are better guides than the hyped warnings from government and the media.

You’re A Sucker If You Don't Know That The System Is Rigged.

Imagine you spent two years completely screwing up at your job, I mean not merely getting every single thing wrong but loudly, proudly getting in everyone else’s face about how right you are. You’d get fired, terminated, 86’d, and Schiff-canned. But not the mainstream media. The media hacks failed for two years-plus, nonstop and without equivocation, but are they ever going to be held to account? No, they’re just going to gather in a big circle and Pulitzer each other.

Imagine you committed a racial hate crime where you falsely accused people who didn’t look or think like you of a horrible atrocity, and that you’d have gladly picked some poor saps with the wrong skin tone out of a line-up and sent them to prison for decades given the chance. Now imagine the two half-wits you hired to help you managed to get caught on video buying their stereotype get-up and spilled it all to the fuzz, though the fact you paid them with a check – because you’re a criminal mastermind – was already enough to get a grand jury to indict your sorry AOC. Now, what are the chances the DA is going to transform your 16 felony counts into a $10K fine and a couple days community servicing? Your chances of said outcome are poor. They are poor because your pals are neither Mrs. Obama or Willie Brown’s gal pal.

Now imagine that you studied really hard while the rich kids partied and smoked dope and splattered water on you by running their BMWs through puddles as you walked home from high school. Imagine your last name is “Chang,” or that your dad is a soldier and not a hedge fund manager, or that your mom is a waitress and not a TV bimbo. Now imagine how you feel when Durwood Richguy IV gets admitted to Harvard when he can’t count past 10 with his Gucci loafers on and you get slotted on a waiting list for Gumbo State.

Imagine you handled classified information and you took it home and put it on your iPad. Do you think the FBI would be super-concerned with your feels about it and give you a pass, like Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit got from Jim Comey, or would you be bunking with Michael Cohen? And speaking of that Looming Doofus, if you lied under oath in front of Congress, do you think you’d be free to wander the country, posting stupid tweets of yourself staring at trees and beaches?

Yeah, sure, that would totally happen.

The American dream has morphed into the American grift. And we normal people are the marks.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop accepting the ruling class’s lies. And let’s stop lying to ourselves. America has changed. There used to be one standard, one set of laws, one set of rules. Now, there are two.

The one set of rules for normal people is designed to jam us up, to keep us down, to ensure that the power of the powerful never gets challenged.

And the one set of rules for the elite can be summed up like this: There are no rules.

The media howls about the rule of law. Democrat poohbahs cry about the rule of law. The Fredocon gimps whimper about the rule of law. But the “rule of law” they aspire to is merely their rule over you. To them, the rule of law is not some transcendent principle. Its purpose is not to ensure equality and fairness in our society. It’s a weapon designed to make sure nothing disrupts their scam.

Why do you think our elite is so eager to pass new laws and regulations? Is it because normal people like you and me are running wild in the streets? No, of course not. They don’t want to regulate political campaigns to make sure elections are fair. They want to regulate them so they will always win and we never will again. They don’t want a Green New Deal because they care about the weather in 2219, but because they want to take our power and our money for themselves. They don’t want to ban our guns because we’re dangerous to other Americans but because, armed and ready to defend our rights, we’re dangerous to their power.

Do you, even for a second, think any of the rules, regulations, statutes or laws they propose are even going to be applied to them? Do you see the DOJ ever indicting some liberal Dem or some pliable submissivecon for “campaign finance violations?” We know the answer to that because Hillary is wandering around the woods, with a goblet of screw-top Chardonnay glass in her withered paw, free as a bird.

Do you see them giving up their SUVs and trudging to work on foot or riding in some greasy, stinky bus? Will they give up their air travel? How about their beef? Tofu veggie burgers are for peasants. And their minions will always have guns even as you are rendered disarmed and defenseless.

Our elite is not elite. Instead, it’s a bunch of bums who somehow got a little money and took the reins of power and are now shaking-down our great nation for every penny they can wring out of it. We owe them nothing – not respect, not gratitude and certainly not obedience.

If you still wonder how we got Trump, just look around you. He’s a cry for help, a scream against the injustice we’re surrounded by. This injustice is poison to our country. This injustice is what makes republics fall apart, when the worthless ruling class pushes its contempt in the people’s collective face so hard and for so long that the population finally screams “The hell with this!”

It can’t continue. It won’t continue.

The Dumbest Generation Yet.

For years, I've seen it coming: the "Dumbing Down" of America's next generation, and the so-called Millenials have finally and proudly "achieved it". There's just no end to their general stupidity and pervasive ignorance. To wit:

• One recent survey found that 74 percent of Millenial Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.
• An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Millenial Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
• Shockingly, only 26 percent of Millenial Americans can name all three branches of government.
• During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Millenial Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.
• North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.
• 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world. Today, we have fallen to 36th place.
• According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young Millenial semi-adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

America Has Become An “Idiocracy”.

What in the world has happened to us? Once upon a time, America had the greatest system of education on the entire planet, and our people were sharp, capable and extremely well-informed. Sadly, none of those things are true anymore.

In 2006, Mike Judge made a movie entitled “Idiocracy” in which an individual of below average intelligence wakes up after being asleep for 500 years thanks to a military hibernation experiment. When he wakes up, he quickly realizes that he is now the smartest man in America, and that is not a good thing. The film became an instant classic, but when I originally watched it I thought that such a thing could never actually happen in this country. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Since 2006 our nation has been “dumbed down” at a pace that is absolutely staggering, and it is difficult to see a positive future for America if this trend continues.

The following are 18 reasons that prove that America has become an “idiocracy".

#1 One recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.
#2 An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
#3 Shockingly, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government.
#4 During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.
#5 North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.
#6 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world. Today, we have fallen to 36th place.
#7 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.
#8 For the very first time, Americans are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than they are in a car accident.
#9 One study discovered that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.
#10 A recent survey found that 45 percent of U.S. teenagers are online “almost constantly”.
#11 Today, the average American spends 86 hours a month using a smartphone.
#12 Overall, the average U.S. adult “logs 6 hours, 43 minutes of total screen time daily”.
#13 In more than half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.
#14 During one seven day period last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaints about human feces were submitted to the city of San Francisco. And apparently the problem is very real because one investigation found 300 piles of human feces on the streets of downtown San Francisco.
#15 Every 24 hours, more than a third of all Americans eat fast food.
#16 Less than half of all Americans know which country used atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
#17 Even though we fought a war in Iraq for eight long years, 6 out of 10 young adults cannot find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. And that same survey found that 75 percent of our young adults cannot locate Israel.
#18 Today, the average college freshman in the United States reads at a 7th grade level.

Sometimes it helps to go into the past to get some much needed perspective on the present.

A few years ago, an eighth grade exam from 1912 was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. To me, it is absolutely amazing what kids living in rural Kentucky were expected to know a little over 100 years ago.

You can find a copy of the exam right here, and as I looked it over I quickly realized that most college students would have an exceedingly difficult time trying to pass such a test today.

In fact, I think that I would have a very hard time getting a passing grade. Here are just a few of the questions on the exam…

• Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?
• How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body?
• How long of a rope is required to reach from the top of a building 40 feet high to the ground 30 feet from the base of a building?
• Compare arteries and veins as to function. Where is the blood carried to be purified?
• During which wars were the following battles fought: Brandywine, Great Meadows, Lundy’s Lane, Antietam, Buena Vista?

If you would like to know the answers to all of the questions on the exam, you can find them right here.

In contrast, our system of education today is a total joke. Most of our students have never learned how to communicate effectively, they are fed an endless stream of “tests” that consist of multiple choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions, and when they get out of school most of them have absolutely no idea how to succeed in the real world.

Perhaps that helps to explain why our kids are in the bottom half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math and science literacy.

If we do not educate our children well, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the world, and it will be just a matter of time before we lose our status as a global power.

Of course that assumes that we actually have enough time left to turn things around. At that rate that we are currently degenerating, we might not.

How Best to Age? Do it Your Way.

I can hit the golf ball any way I can and laugh if it goes in the lake. That's the breaks. I'm just happy I can still hit that golf ball.

As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world, too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging.

When we're kids, we can't wait to grow-up. When we're grown-up and getting older, we just hope time will slow down.

Whose business is it, if I choose to read, or play, on the computer, until 4 AM, or sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 50, 60 & 70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love, I will.

I will walk the beach, in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves, with abandon, if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They too, will get old.

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And, I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years, my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break, when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet passes? But, broken hearts are what give us strength, and understanding, and compassion. A heart never broken, is pristine, and sterile, and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I believe in simple things, like the miracle this day brings.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face.

So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.

As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong.

So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. Though, as the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years pass, I do occasionally think about it. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it).

Why Do So Many Young People Embrace Socialism?

It’s not youth and inexperience. It’s not even government-run schools and idiotic celebrities. Not primarily.

Why do so many young people embrace socialism?

For the same reason any middle-aged or older person embraces socialism: Anxiety and envy.

By “anxiety” I mean neurotic anxiety, which means a false or exaggerated belief that one will be unable to properly survive or take care of oneself, so that unspecified help is needed to ensure survival.

Envy is often a byproduct of anxiety. If one starts out feeling, “I’m unable to care for myself,” then it’s not a stretch to look at someone else who has more than enough and say, “That’s not fair. He can more than provide for himself, and I’m unable to do so for myself”.

What about the fact that young people have not yet earned much money, and therefore don’t appreciate the value and justice of private ownership, i.e., being able to keep what you earn? Not all young people feel this way. Some young people understand the justice of keeping what you earn. Some do, and change their minds later and become socialists in middle-age.

Regardless, unless you have a significant amount of neurotic fear and/or envy, it’s unlikely socialism would grab your fancy for even five minutes, much less for years (and elections) on end.

It’s true that public schools are teaching the ideology of self-sacrifice and blind service to others (the same premises as Nazism and Communism) as self-evident givens in today’s government-run schools. But these faulty ideas are not new to the present era. Yet in earlier eras, the majority of young people did not turn as socialist as they appear to be doing today.

The more likely contribution of today’s mediocre schools — as well as an increasingly irrational culture — is that young people don’t know how to think. Thinking is your basic tool and precondition of survival. If you feel inadequate to think critically, rationally and objectively, you’ll develop a neurotic and pervasive sense that, “I’m not equipped to survive.” In a land of plenty, particularly, it seems logically appealing when someone comes along and says, “No worries. We’ll pick up your college tuition. And health care. And tons of other things too. You’re entitled to it, after all.” It comes as a relief to the anxiety-ridden souls who embrace socialism.

In older folk, and in some young people born into wealth, there’s the factor of guilt and atonement. That’s a form of anxiety, too. “I’m rich and I don’t deserve to be. It’s not fair.” So it becomes a form of virtue-signaling merged with a psychological tonic to make sure others see you support socialism.

It’s not that most young people are depraved and stupid any more than most older people are totally depraved and stupid. And it’s not just inexperience. It’s fear. And the envy that gets ignited by fear.

It’s truly sad. And yes, it’s dangerous for the future of a free society, but dangerous most of all for those young people who now seek to embrace socialism. It’s not going to end any better for them than it did for anyone else. And if they get their wish, and socialism gets enacted completely, then their fears will quickly become rational.

DemokkkRATs' Wet Dreams.

Rather than deal with Illegal immigrant wave number 2, the Democrats on the Hill engage in wet dreams and socialism.

A 70% tax rate?? This is the proposal that will bring in American votes – Yeah Right.

Government run healthcare "Medicare for all". Yeah Obamacare skyrocketed premiums. So instead lets Tax them to a literal death with European style healthcare.

Abolish the Electoral College so that New York, California, and Illinois rules – the little states be Damned.

100% renewable Energy. Lets just ban gasoline and diesel vehicles like Trucks and Cars, and depend on wind and solar energy for our needs even though they are not dependable nor sufficient.

Ban Guns. Who cares if illegal Aliens come across the border with them. Our Ranchers deserve to die and don't need no stinking 2nd Amendment. For that matter so do US Citizens, they don't need to protect themselves from MS-13, we Democrats will get around to protecting them eventually.

Democrats please engage in some more wet dreams. We are excessively entertained during this Shutdown.

Where's The Chaos?

The government shut down Dec. 21 over Sen. Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi petulantly not wanting Trump to have any border wall funding. The federal government spends $4.4 trillion a year; the $5 billion Trump wanted is one-tenth of 1 percent of that. About the same percent that Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren is Native American.

If you are like me, you are more worried about government starting back up than it being shut down.

Who will open our open-air national parks? Who will answer the phones when we call? Who will give us the runaround at the IRS? Who will put us into intractable wars? Who will use the Justice Department to go after political opponents? Who will put us $22 trillion in debt?

Most of NASA is shut down, including the division that we pay to monitor to see if aliens in outer space try to contact us. I trust they put their “Out of Office” message on their email before they went home, in case aliens contact us.

Shouldn’t there be chaos? Why are you not looting Target for a flat-screen TV? Who will let me know when the panda cam is back on at the Washington Zoo?

Two things become clear during a government shutdown: how little we need most of government, and how petulant public servants can be when they do not get their funding. Under Obama, there was much petty government intimidation. Remember how he hired extra people to make sure our open-air national parks were kept shut so citizens could not just walk through them?

Heavy-handed goons run a swollen government monster that intimidates its funders, the taxpayers. It is structurally incapable of spending just a little less than it did the year before and seeks revenge when asked to live within its means. This shutdown teaches us that it is no big deal getting 25 percent of the government out of our lives. Americans will adapt. Let’s shut down most of the government and just hire back any part that we miss.

With historically high employment, I suggest we let about one-third of government employees find real jobs in the real world. You know, jobs that require accountability and productivity. Trump should keep government closed. If you can find it in the Yellow Pages or online, government does not need to be doing it.

Washington and the Deep State hate Trump no matter what he does, even when he does Obama-like things. He has done prison reform, run a huge deficit, is pulling troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, etc. If Trump doesn’t stop acting like Obama, he might ask to see his own birth certificate.

Since the Democrats won the House, the stock market has cratered. The Dems want to investigate, not legislate. House Speaker Paul Ryan has ceded power and decided to let someone else not get anything done.

Schumer, Pelosi and fellow libs run our overreaching, ineffective and expensive government. Should we be happy when government is back? It feels to me like my niece got back together with an abusive husband when that happens.

Trump made an unannounced trip to Iraq over Christmas. With Mueller on his tail and Democrats spending inordinate time wanting to use the blunt force of the federal judiciary to investigate him further, Trump stands as the only president to go to a war-torn area for peace and quiet.

Government shutdowns have become a well-worn path of a dysfunctional Washington. It is like Schumer and Pelosi are walking the marble halls of the Capitol and 20 feet ahead of them they see a banana peel. They both say, “Here we go again.”

The government shutdown over border wall funding is petulant politics at its best. Government means more to Democrats like Schumer and Pelosi because it is their lives. There is no easy off ramp for either side on this standoff. Now it is a waiting game to see who blinks first. And Nancy Pelosi has had so much work done on her face that she can’t blink anymore. So expect her to not rest until she fully embarrasses Trump (a particularly hard man to embarrass) or she captures all 101 Dalmatians.

When the federal government was not working, Trump probably called Tech Support in India to get advice. He told the guy government isn’t working, and the Tech Support guy said, “Just try turning it off for a while, then back on and see if that does the trick.”

The Fake News Media Doesn’t Even Put Up A Pretense Anymore.

All fake news, all the time. If you still do not believe that our national media establishment is 100% in the pocket of the Democrat Party and coordinates messaging with that political party on a daily basis, consider the following story.

We are now in Day 9 of a partial “government shutdown” that exists over the issue of illegal immigration. Early this week, in the midst of this “government shutdown,” a California law enforcement officer was murdered by an illegal alien who he was attempting to arrest for what would have been the illegal’s THIRD DUI crime. Yes, that’s right: thanks to California’s sanctuary laws, this illegal had already been arrested for and convicted of two DUIs, has known gang affiliation, and despite all of that had been allowed to just get out of jail and roam free on the state’s highways to put more lives in danger.

Anyway, that murder took place four days ago now, and in all that time, not one Democrat officeholder has been asked by one intrepid “journalist” to comment on the situation. Think about that: California has 53 members of the house and 2 U.S. senators, and not one of them has had to field a single question about how they can continue to support open borders and sanctuary laws when their state’s police officers and citizens are being murdered by illegal aliens.

The reason why is obvious: The media and the Democrats are coordinating on a narrative, and that narrative dictates that only Republicans must field difficult questions about illegal immigration. Any “journalist” who violates the narrative runs the risk of being dis-invited from all the best dinner parties. This is not complicated, folks.

Speaking of fake news... – two other fake news stories dominated the fake media this week, and boy, were they doozies.

First, you had the “bone spurs” story. This story, which we’ve heard many, many times before, made a comeback this week, with “new” information. That “new” information came in the form of the two daughters of the doctor who treated Donald Trump for bone spurs in 1968 claiming that her father – who is conveniently dead – told them that he faked the diagnosis on orders from Trump’s father Fred Trump, so that Donald Trump could avoid the military draft in effect at the time.

1968 is half a century ago, for those who are chronologically challenged.

So, first of all, who cares? Other than a bunch of pedantic Millenial soy boys and valley girls staffing the fake reporter desks at CNN and MSNBC, that is.

Second of all, why should we believe these two women? In all seriousness – there is literally no reason at all to believe they are anything other than liberal attention-seekers. They bring with them zero supporting evidence – no documentation, no statements from their father or any other doctor. No media outlet would have dreamed of going forward with this story were it leveled at a Democrat president, yet every media outlet in America has parroted the claim this week.

Third of all, who cares? Yes, that deserves repeating.

The next big fake story of the week came from the pathetic McClatchy News Service, which updated its claim from earlier this year that ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague during the 2016 campaign to hold secret meetings with Russian agents. This story has been debunked more times than the one about the moon landings being faked, but that didn’t stop McClatchy running with an update claiming that...

“A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.”

Those “four people with knowledge of the matter”? They are not merely anonymous sources – they are anonymous sources being quoted by other anonymous sources, as Brit Hume so ably pointed out:

Brit Hume? @brithume It turns out that the new McClatchy story on Michael Cohen in Prague is not based on intel their sources saw but what their sources’ sources said they saw. The story remains exclusive. (https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/28/michael-cohen-prague-mcclatchy/)

5,914 11:42 AM – Dec 28, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy

Michael Cohen Report Is Based On Third-Hand Information, Reporter Reveals McClatchy reporters did not see Cohen intelligence for themselves.

(dailycaller.com) 3,741 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy The reason why McClatchy’s story remains “exclusive” is that it is so obviously faked that none of the other fake media outlets want to touch it.

This is the sort of nonsense your OUR President has to put up with on a daily basis. It is intentional, it is relentless and it is unending.

The lowlife filth at AP clearly demonstrated their fake plan and hatred for Conservatives in the obit for Bre Payton, a conservative writer at The Federalist and frequent guest on television news outlets including Fox News Channel. AP is filth.

EVERYTHING Can Be Blamed On Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Here is the short list of things the media blamed on AGW:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Alaska reshaped, moves, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk, anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn, Arctic warming (not), Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty, atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, Baghdad snow, Bahrain under water, bananas grow, barbarisation, beer shortage, beetle infestation, bet for $10,000, better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects, billion homeless, billions face risk, billions of deaths, Behold a pale horse, and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hell was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with plague and by the wild beasts of the earth. bird distributions change, bird loss accelerating, birds shrinking, bird strikes, bird visitors drop, birds confused, birds decline (Wales), birds driven north, birds return early, bittern boom ends, blackbirds stop singing, blackbirds threatened, Black Hawk down, blood contaminated, blue mussels return, bluetongue, brain eating amoebae, brains shrink, bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain one big city, Britain Siberian, brothels struggle, brown Ireland, bubonic plague, budget increases, Buddhist temple threatened, building collapse, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, camel deaths, cancer deaths in England,cannibalism, cannibalism again, caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened, childhood insomnia, Cholera, circumcision in decline, cirrus disappearance, civil unrest, cloud increase, coast beauty spots lost, cockroach migration, coffee threatened, cold climate creatures survive, cold spells (Australia), cold wave (India), computer models, conferences, conflict, conflict with Russia, consumers foot the bill, coral bleaching, coral fish suffer, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight, cost of trillions, cougar attacks, crabgrass menace, cradle of civilisation threatened, creatures move uphill, crime increase, crocodile sex, crops devastated, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, curriculum change, cyclones (Australia), danger to kid’s health, Darfur, Dartford Warbler plague, death rate increase (US), deaths to reach 6 million, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, depression, desert advance, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, disappearance of coastal cities, disasters, diseases move from animals to humans, diseases move north, dog disease, Dolomites collapse, dozen deadly diseases, drought, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early marriages, early spring, earlier pollen season, Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down, Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down, earthquakes, earthquakes redux, earthquakes redux 2, Egypt revolt, El Niño intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing, eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilisation, logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod, ladybirds, pikas, polar bears, possums, walrus, toads, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species, not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, salamanders, tropical insects) experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, fading fall foliage, fainting, famine, farmers benefit, farmers go under, farm output boost, fashion disaster, fever, figurehead sacked, fir cone bonanza, fish bigger, fish catches drop, fish downsize, fish catches rise, fish deaf, fish get lost, fish head north, fish stocks at risk, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, flames stoked, flesh eating disease, flood patterns change, floods, floods of beaches and cities, flood of migrants, flood preparation for crisis, Florida economic decline, flowers in peril, fog (more) in San Francisco, fog (less) in San Francisco, food poisoning, food prices rise, food prices soar, food security threat (SA), football team migration, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frog with extra heads, frostbite, frost damage increased, frosts, fungi fruitful, fungi invasion, games change, Garden of Eden wilts, geese decline in Hampshire, genetic diversity decline, gene pools slashed, giant oysters invade, giant pythons invade, giant squid migrate, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial earthquakes, glacial retreat, glacial growth, glacier grows (California), glacier wrapped, global cooling, global dimming, glowing clouds, golf course to drown, golf Masters wrecked, grandstanding, grasslands wetter, Great Barrier Reef 95% dead, Great Lakes drop, great tits cope, greening of the North, Grey whales lose weight, Gulf Stream failure, habitat loss, haggis threatened, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harmful algae, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, health affected, health of children harmed, health risks, heart disease, heart attacks and strokes (Australia), heat waves, hibernation affected, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, HIV epidemic, homeless 50 million, hornets, high court debates, human development faces unprecedented reversal, human fertility reduced, human health risk, human race oblivion, hurricanes, hurricane reduction, hurricanes fewer, hurricanes not, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice age, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, icebergs, illegal immigration, illness and death, inclement weather, India drowning, infrastructure failure (Canada), industry threatened, infectious diseases, inflation in China, insect explosion, insurance premium rises, Inuit displacement, Inuit poisoned, Inuit suing, invasion of cats, invasion of crabgrass, invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, invasion of king crabs, invasion of midges, island disappears, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, jets fall from sky, jet stream drifts north, Kew Gardens taxed, kidney stones, kidney stones again, killer cornflakes, killing us, kitten boom, koalas under threat, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake empties, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful, lawyers’ income increased (surprise surprise!), lawyers want more, legionnaires’ surge, lives saved, Loch Ness monster dead, locust plagues suppressed, Lopsided Earth, lush growth in rain forests, Malaria, mammoth dung melt, mango harvest fails, Maple production advanced, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), Mediterranean rises, megacryometeors, Melanoma, Melanoma decline, methane emissions from plants, methane burps, methane runaway, melting permafrost, Middle Kingdom convulses, migration, migration difficult (birds), migratory birds huge losses, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, minorities hit, monkeys on the move, Mont Blanc grows, monuments imperiled, moose dying, more bad air days, more research needed, mortality increased, mountain (Everest) shrinking, mountaineers fears, mountains break up, mountains green and flowering, mountains taller, mortality lower, Myanmar cyclone, narwhals at risk, National security implications, native wildlife overwhelmed, natural disasters quadruple, new islands, next ice age, NFL threatened, Nile delta damaged, noctilucent clouds, no effect in India, Northwest Passage opened, nuclear plants bloom, oaks dying, oaks move north, ocean acidification, ocean acidification faster, ocean dead zones unleashed, ocean deserts expand, ocean waves speed up, oceans noisier, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, Pacific dead zone, penguin chicks frozen, personal carbon rationing, pest outbreaks, pests increase, phenology shifts, plankton blooms, plankton destabilised, plants lose protein, plants march north, plants move uphill, polar bears aggressive, polar bears cannibalistic, polar bears deaf, polar bears drowning, polar bears eating themselves, polar tours scrapped, popcorn rise, porpoise astray, profits collapse, prostitution, psychiatric illness, puffin decline, radars taken out, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rape wave, refugees, reindeer endangered, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rice threatened, rice yields crash, rift on Capitol Hill, rioting and nuclear war, Rise and Fall of Rome, river flow impacted, rivers raised, roads wear out, robins rampant, rocky peaks crack apart, roof of the world a desert, rooftop bars, Ross river disease, ruins ruined, Russia under pressure, salinity reduction, salinity increase, Salmonella, Salmon Decline, satellites accelerate, school closures, sea level rise, sea level rise faster, seals mating more, sewer bills rise, severe thunderstorms, sex change, sexual promiscuity, shark attacks, sharks booming, sharks moving north, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered, shrinking ponds, shrinking shrine, ski resorts threatened, skin cancer, slow death, smaller brains, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall heavy, soaring food prices, societal collapse, soil change, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, space problem, spectacular orchids, spiders invade Scotland, squid aggressive giants, squid population explosion, squid tamed, squirrels reproduce earlier, stingray invasion, storms wetter, stormwater drains stressed, street crime to increase, subsidence, suicide, swordfish in the Baltic, Tabasco tragedy, taxes, tectonic plate movement, teenage drinking, terrorism, threat to peace, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tigers eat people, tomatoes rot, tornado outbreak, tourism increase, trade barriers, trade winds weakened, traffic jams, transportation threatened, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees in trouble, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, trees lush, tropics expansion, tropopause raised, truffle shortage, truffles down, turtles crash, turtle feminised, turtles lay earlier, UFO sightings, UK coastal impact, UK Katrina, uprooted - 6 million, Vampire bats, Vampire moths, Venice flooded, violin decline, volcanic eruptions, volcanic eruptions redux, Iceland volcano eruption, walrus pups orphaned, walrus stampede, war, war between US and Canada, wars over water, wars sparked, wars threaten billions, wasps, water bills double, water scarcity (20% of increase), water stress, weather out of its mind, weather patterns awry, Western aid cancelled out, West Nile fever, whales lose weight, whales move north, whales wiped out, wheat yields crushed in Australia, wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced, wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine - more English, wine - England too hot, wine - German boon, wine - no more French, wine passé (Napa), wine stronger, winters in Britain colder, winter in Britain dead, witchcraft executions, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World at war, World War III, World War IV, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.