“Another mass shooter that was all but saying he was a ticking time bomb—and no one did anything. This seems to be a pattern. Salvador Ramos shot and killed 19 students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas which has spurred another wave of anti-gun activism, opportunism by desperate Democrats, and all-around sensationalism in the media who are also hoping to use this mass shooting to distract us from the failing Biden presidency. We all know this.
What is keeping these wounds raw is the ongoing investigation into this shooting, specifically the police response which has earned low marks. The Department of Justice is launching an investigation as the Texas Department of Safety is now saying the decision to hold back and not breach the classroom where Ramos was barricaded was the wrong decision. It’s not known yet, but it wouldn’t shock me if this decision to hang back cost lives. It was nearly an hour before police breached the door which could be locked from the inside.
Yet, we’re also getting reports that Ramos was not some quiet kid, at least not online. He posted various death and rape threats. He was reported. And nothing happened (via WaPo):
He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.
But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.
Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”
In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting in a decade, many have asked what more could have been done — how an 18-year-old who spewed so much hate to so many on the Web could do so without provoking punishment or raising alarm.
But these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, friends or teachers. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him and had found him only through the social messaging and video apps that form the bedrock of modern teen life.
[…]
The girls who spoke with The Post lived around the world but met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live-streaming and social networking and has become known as a “Tinder for teens.” The Yubo app has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the U.S., including more than 200,000 times last month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
On Yubo, people can gather in big real-time chatrooms, known as panels, to talk, type messages and share videos — the digital equivalent of a real-world hangout. Ramos, they said, struck up side conversations with them and followed them onto other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send direct messages whenever he wanted.
But over time they saw a darker side, as he posted images of dead cats, texted them strange messages and joked about sexual assault, they said. In a video from a live Yubo chatroom that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to get raped.”
A 16-year-old boy in Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos frequently made aggressive, sexual comments to young women on the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January.
There are many avenues here. The fact that parents or teachers never saw these posts explains why nothing really happened here. There is an attempt to rope in online harassment of women which is a legitimate issue—conservative women are some of the most viciously attacked—but we may have a First Amendment issue here. How do we know what’s real and what’s the usual teenage angst and anger? Maybe the pictures of dead animals might be a good starting point when sifting through bad jokes and all-around kids saying stupid things and folks who need mental health assistance. If anything, it shows that our laws are a good quarter-century behind current technology and that’s an ongoing issue. It’s a periphery one with regards to this tragic shooting, and it might not be one we may be able to police effectively. ”
We are disengaged from each other. We are disengaged from reverence for life, disengaged from moral instruction, and disengaged from actions to confront the reality of evil and those who would do harm among us. We are disengaged from those tormented by mental illness or dark personality disorders, and we are disengaged from remediating the sociopathology of abnormal isolation.
We are disengaged from the bonds of the two-parent family structure, from childrearing at home, from teaching good from evil and imposing consequences on those who would slaughter the innocent and who have committed unspeakable atrocities. And yes, we are disengaged from God, willfully dismissive of His commands, grace, and truth.
Perhaps the most alarming common thread among the school, church, and supermarket shootings from Newtown, Connecticut to Parkland, Florida to Sutherland Springs, Texas to Buffalo, New York, and to the sidewalk massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to last week’s Uvalde, Texas apocalypse is that the gunman or perpetrator in each tragedy had previously displayed severe signs of mental illness or instability and/or possessed an abundant criminal record whose morbid premeditations were well known by family members, schoolyard pals, teachers, law enforcement, social services, and social media surfers.
No one saw anything; no one said anything; no one did anything.
We have become the world where Henry Adams invited the modern industrial state to replace the erstwhile ancient veneration of the Blessed Virgin, willingly foreswearing that once-upon-a-time when the moral and spiritual life was vivid, having life-affirming meaning, where individual names and faces had meaning. While Renaissance painter Pieter Breughel the Elder’s peasants’ lives were brutish and short, their outsized expressive faces effused personalities, believing that the Virgin knew each of them by name.
Instead, we have followed Adams into the cold and aloof realm of infatuation with the Dynamo, electricity-generating artificial intelligence seducing the world to venerate dehumanized packets of voltage, waveforms, and electron pulses indistinguishable from one another. Faceless, nameless, interchangeable, disposable, expendable, godless orphans having no sense of belonging, purpose, or honor. Numbers on a silicon wafer.
We have tolerated, if not welcomed, depravity, where the descent into madness is normal, perversion celebrated, indeed championed as the perfect good.
We have been bystanders, indifferent witnesses to right and good marginalized, dismissed, or canceled. We have allowed decency to be considered a character defect. Evil is just a string of commonplace transactions, unremarkable, virtue disagreeably oppressive.
“Pfizer has asked a U.S. court to throw out a whistleblower’s lawsuit on the basis that the company can’t be guilty of fraud, abuse, and protocol violations in its COVID Vaccine clinical trials because its contract with the U.S. government allowed them to skirt regulations and federal laws that typically apply to government contracts.
In other words, Pfizer was allegedly able to make false statements to the government, and lie about the safety and efficacy of its product, “because the government was in on it with them!” according to Robert Barnes, the lead lawyer in the case.
The whistleblower, Brook Jackson, was the regional director for the Ventavia Research Group, the company that was conducting Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial in Texas in 2020.
In September of 2020, Jackson emailed a complaint to the FDA, informing the agency of the company’s allegedly dangerous and shoddy research practices. The FDA took no action on her email, and Pfizer continued to use the company.
Ventavia fired her after she tried to expose the alleged fraud, abuse, and protocol violations she witnessed during the trials.
In January 2021, Jackson filed a False Claims Act lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division.
The case was placed under seal from January of 2021 to February of 2022, preventing Jackson from speaking publicly during the mass vaccine rollout. She told American Greatness that she decided to go public in September of 2021 anyway, and told her story to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in September of 2021.
“The amount of guilt I felt … still feel about having to keep this from the public is a horrible, horrible feeling,” Jackson lamented.
She said that her attorneys from Berg and Androphy withdrew from the case after she decided to go public, leaving her without counsel. In an email obtained by American Greatness, one of the lawyers warned Jackson that if she broke the gag order, “the government will come after you.”
In the BMJ report published last November, Jackson said she witnessed researchers falsifying data, unblinding trial participants, and employing inadequately trained vaccinators. She also said researchers were slow to follow up on a multitude of adverse events.
Jackson has since claimed in multiple interviews that the Pfizer clinical trial was riddled with errors, fraud and abuse of the scientific process.
Her False Claims Act suit against Pfizer, Ventavia, and ICON claims that Pfizer violated clinical trial regulations and federal laws, including the False Claims Act.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene on behalf of Jackson in the suit.
Pfizer argued in court that the company did not violate its contract because its agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense allowed them to skirt the rules, Epoch Times reported.
In its motion to dismiss, Pfizer says the regulations don’t apply to its vaccine contract with the U.S. Department of Defense because the agreement was executed under the department’s Other Transaction Authority (OTA), which gives contract holders the ability to skirt many rules and laws that typically apply to contracts.”
And we have a senile president who will do nothing to solve any of it. Joe and an out of contrl Fed built this with money they printed out of thin air.
“Import tsunami sinks US GDP in first quarter
US manufacturing continues to shrink as imports surge”
“US real gross domestic product (GDP) shrank at a 1.5% annual rate during the first quarter, more than the preliminary estimate of -1.3%, the Commerce Department reported on May 26. The worst trade performance on record took 3.2% off GDP, more than accounting for the entire drop. Nothing like this has happened before.”
Personal consumption rose at a 3.1% annual rate but the additional demand was more than met by increased imports.
America’s trade deficit in goods spiked to $128 billion in March, or an annual rate of 1.54 trillion, while US manufacturers’ sales plunged after adjustment for inflation. In real terms, US factory sales have fallen by nearly 10% since 2018, and by nearly 20% since 2007.
Consumers spent the lion’s share of the $6 trillion Covid stimulus on imports. That’s another first: US manufacturing never contracted in the past following a big increase in demand.
Net exports took 3.2% off GDP growth only once before, in 1982 but that happened while GDP was booming. Americans typically import more when the economy expands, and import less when it contracts, simply because there is less overall demand in a shrinking economy.
This is the first time that net exports went sharply negative while GDP was falling, and the first time that negative net exports caused a drop in GDP.”
The biggest increase in US imports came from China, which shipped 55% more to the United States in April 2022 (in seasonally-adjusted dollar terms) than it did in August 2019, when then-president Trump slapped 25% tariffs on most Chinese imports.”
——–
Just Joe taking care of the Chinese so he and Hunter can say they earned their grift.
But up next, the hurricane….
"You better brace yourself" he says, to 300 million people who absolutely cannot afford to brace themselves under any circumstances. https://t.co/ytv2S9CzNW
They mean the hate from his base in the inner cities, where these attacks are rampant.
It was great to meet with you, @bts_bighit. Thanks for all you’re doing to raise awareness around the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination.
“As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.
A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Joe Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.
But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.
Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.
But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes.
While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises that his board will carry on.
In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.
In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.
The FBI recently has been knee-deep in political controversies. It illegally doctored a FISA application to entrap an American citizen. Its former directors, under oath before Congress, either claimed faulty memory or admitted lying to federal investigators.
The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their childrens’ education.
We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.
Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”
Later Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administration policies that have affected supply and demand.”
Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil fuel production, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.
Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S. economy.
The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for over a year. Since last fall dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.
During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not at work. Instead at the height of the crisis, he took a two-month paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.
Such paternal concern is a noble thing.
But Buttigieg is supposed to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped Americans.
This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routinely looted in the Old-West style of train robbing—without much of a response from Buttigieg’s transpiration bureau.
In Senate testimony Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow walking federal oil and gas leases at a time Americans are paying between $5 and $6 a gallon for gas.
Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid talking points to her—given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information about U.S. energy production on federal lands.”
If only they’d been so concerned about strangers on their property last week when they left the door open for a killer.
UvaldeISD Chief Pete Arredondo at school distict offices. District officials say their building is private property and have police order media off the lot pic.twitter.com/vF8XuQqRVc
— Guillermo Contreras (@gmaninfedland) June 1, 2022
———
School spokesperson came out to us before our live shot to say the school will release a statement. She refused to answer my repeated questions about the door not locking.
Here is the statement just released. It addresses none of the questions. They say they’re cooperating with investigators. DPS told reporters yesterday the police chief has not returned their calls. pic.twitter.com/VYsdktHR8n
Funny how the home in which Joe Biden lives, the building in which his employees work, is hardened against attacks. If hardening a building doesn't work, then why do we spend so much money on security and maintenance at the White House?
There was no SRO at all on campus and the door was unlocked — yet Biden isn't at all interested in improving school security and protecting kids. https://t.co/LSKr7vTpkz
Intersex is a thing, but maybe not in the way some may mean it these days. There are people who are born with ambiguous sex organs and such, and that has been called intersex. However, it used to be considered an abnormality, not a different gender.
Yes, one can be born a hermaphrodite. I know someone born this way. Doctors did (and do, I would imagine) what seems to be the proper sex. Mistakes could be made. Of course, none of the push today is about this, whatsoever.
Wandering Views 
How could we know?
Pay attention.
“Texas School Shooter Made Multiple Rape and Death Threats. Here’s Why Nothing Happened to Him.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/05/31/texas-school-shooter-made-multiple-rape-and-death-threats-heres-why-nothing-hap-n2607973
“Another mass shooter that was all but saying he was a ticking time bomb—and no one did anything. This seems to be a pattern. Salvador Ramos shot and killed 19 students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas which has spurred another wave of anti-gun activism, opportunism by desperate Democrats, and all-around sensationalism in the media who are also hoping to use this mass shooting to distract us from the failing Biden presidency. We all know this.
What is keeping these wounds raw is the ongoing investigation into this shooting, specifically the police response which has earned low marks. The Department of Justice is launching an investigation as the Texas Department of Safety is now saying the decision to hold back and not breach the classroom where Ramos was barricaded was the wrong decision. It’s not known yet, but it wouldn’t shock me if this decision to hang back cost lives. It was nearly an hour before police breached the door which could be locked from the inside.
Yet, we’re also getting reports that Ramos was not some quiet kid, at least not online. He posted various death and rape threats. He was reported. And nothing happened (via WaPo):
He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.
But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.
Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”
In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting in a decade, many have asked what more could have been done — how an 18-year-old who spewed so much hate to so many on the Web could do so without provoking punishment or raising alarm.
But these threats hadn’t been discovered by parents, friends or teachers. They’d been seen by strangers, many of whom had never met him and had found him only through the social messaging and video apps that form the bedrock of modern teen life.
[…]
The girls who spoke with The Post lived around the world but met Ramos on Yubo, an app that mixes live-streaming and social networking and has become known as a “Tinder for teens.” The Yubo app has been downloaded more than 18 million times in the U.S., including more than 200,000 times last month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
On Yubo, people can gather in big real-time chatrooms, known as panels, to talk, type messages and share videos — the digital equivalent of a real-world hangout. Ramos, they said, struck up side conversations with them and followed them onto other platforms, including Instagram, where he could send direct messages whenever he wanted.
But over time they saw a darker side, as he posted images of dead cats, texted them strange messages and joked about sexual assault, they said. In a video from a live Yubo chatroom that listeners had recorded and was reviewed by The Post, Ramos could be heard saying, “Everyone in this world deserves to get raped.”
A 16-year-old boy in Austin who said he saw Ramos frequently in Yubo panels, told The Post that Ramos frequently made aggressive, sexual comments to young women on the app and sent him a death threat during one panel in January.
There are many avenues here. The fact that parents or teachers never saw these posts explains why nothing really happened here. There is an attempt to rope in online harassment of women which is a legitimate issue—conservative women are some of the most viciously attacked—but we may have a First Amendment issue here. How do we know what’s real and what’s the usual teenage angst and anger? Maybe the pictures of dead animals might be a good starting point when sifting through bad jokes and all-around kids saying stupid things and folks who need mental health assistance. If anything, it shows that our laws are a good quarter-century behind current technology and that’s an ongoing issue. It’s a periphery one with regards to this tragic shooting, and it might not be one we may be able to police effectively. ”
LikeLike
Our cultural rot isn’t helping.
“See nothing, say nothing, do nothing”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/see_nothing_say_nothing_do_nothing.html
“We are told we have an epidemic of gun violence.
No, we have an epidemic of willful disengagement.
We are disengaged from each other. We are disengaged from reverence for life, disengaged from moral instruction, and disengaged from actions to confront the reality of evil and those who would do harm among us. We are disengaged from those tormented by mental illness or dark personality disorders, and we are disengaged from remediating the sociopathology of abnormal isolation.
We are disengaged from the bonds of the two-parent family structure, from childrearing at home, from teaching good from evil and imposing consequences on those who would slaughter the innocent and who have committed unspeakable atrocities. And yes, we are disengaged from God, willfully dismissive of His commands, grace, and truth.
Perhaps the most alarming common thread among the school, church, and supermarket shootings from Newtown, Connecticut to Parkland, Florida to Sutherland Springs, Texas to Buffalo, New York, and to the sidewalk massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to last week’s Uvalde, Texas apocalypse is that the gunman or perpetrator in each tragedy had previously displayed severe signs of mental illness or instability and/or possessed an abundant criminal record whose morbid premeditations were well known by family members, schoolyard pals, teachers, law enforcement, social services, and social media surfers.
No one saw anything; no one said anything; no one did anything.
We have become the world where Henry Adams invited the modern industrial state to replace the erstwhile ancient veneration of the Blessed Virgin, willingly foreswearing that once-upon-a-time when the moral and spiritual life was vivid, having life-affirming meaning, where individual names and faces had meaning. While Renaissance painter Pieter Breughel the Elder’s peasants’ lives were brutish and short, their outsized expressive faces effused personalities, believing that the Virgin knew each of them by name.
Instead, we have followed Adams into the cold and aloof realm of infatuation with the Dynamo, electricity-generating artificial intelligence seducing the world to venerate dehumanized packets of voltage, waveforms, and electron pulses indistinguishable from one another. Faceless, nameless, interchangeable, disposable, expendable, godless orphans having no sense of belonging, purpose, or honor. Numbers on a silicon wafer.
We have tolerated, if not welcomed, depravity, where the descent into madness is normal, perversion celebrated, indeed championed as the perfect good.
We have been bystanders, indifferent witnesses to right and good marginalized, dismissed, or canceled. We have allowed decency to be considered a character defect. Evil is just a string of commonplace transactions, unremarkable, virtue disagreeably oppressive.
Silence.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Our govt was complicit in it’s origins in Wuhan, and it’s complicit with this as well.
“Whisteblower’s Lawyer: Pfizer Got Away With Vaccine Fraud Because Government Was Co-Conspirator”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/30/whisteblowers-lawyer-pfizer-got-away-with-vaccine-fraud-because-government-was-co-conspirator/
“Pfizer has asked a U.S. court to throw out a whistleblower’s lawsuit on the basis that the company can’t be guilty of fraud, abuse, and protocol violations in its COVID Vaccine clinical trials because its contract with the U.S. government allowed them to skirt regulations and federal laws that typically apply to government contracts.
In other words, Pfizer was allegedly able to make false statements to the government, and lie about the safety and efficacy of its product, “because the government was in on it with them!” according to Robert Barnes, the lead lawyer in the case.
The whistleblower, Brook Jackson, was the regional director for the Ventavia Research Group, the company that was conducting Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial in Texas in 2020.
In September of 2020, Jackson emailed a complaint to the FDA, informing the agency of the company’s allegedly dangerous and shoddy research practices. The FDA took no action on her email, and Pfizer continued to use the company.
Ventavia fired her after she tried to expose the alleged fraud, abuse, and protocol violations she witnessed during the trials.
In January 2021, Jackson filed a False Claims Act lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division.
The case was placed under seal from January of 2021 to February of 2022, preventing Jackson from speaking publicly during the mass vaccine rollout. She told American Greatness that she decided to go public in September of 2021 anyway, and told her story to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in September of 2021.
“The amount of guilt I felt … still feel about having to keep this from the public is a horrible, horrible feeling,” Jackson lamented.
She said that her attorneys from Berg and Androphy withdrew from the case after she decided to go public, leaving her without counsel. In an email obtained by American Greatness, one of the lawyers warned Jackson that if she broke the gag order, “the government will come after you.”
In the BMJ report published last November, Jackson said she witnessed researchers falsifying data, unblinding trial participants, and employing inadequately trained vaccinators. She also said researchers were slow to follow up on a multitude of adverse events.
Jackson has since claimed in multiple interviews that the Pfizer clinical trial was riddled with errors, fraud and abuse of the scientific process.
Her False Claims Act suit against Pfizer, Ventavia, and ICON claims that Pfizer violated clinical trial regulations and federal laws, including the False Claims Act.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene on behalf of Jackson in the suit.
Pfizer argued in court that the company did not violate its contract because its agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense allowed them to skirt the rules, Epoch Times reported.
In its motion to dismiss, Pfizer says the regulations don’t apply to its vaccine contract with the U.S. Department of Defense because the agreement was executed under the department’s Other Transaction Authority (OTA), which gives contract holders the ability to skirt many rules and laws that typically apply to contracts.”
———
Read the rest.
LikeLiked by 1 person
One of the tragedies of that first article, which you alluded to, is young men seem to think they can be so ugly to women–both online and in person.
Can you imagine how hard it is to be a young demeaned teenage woman these days?
It was bad enough 30 years ago when I had an argument over a nasty-toned play a teacher wanted to use in our school district.
The playwright understood the language was rough, he freely volunteered anyone could change it.
I suggested we take him up on the offer–and then I had no problem with the clever pointed play.
Some pompous man at our “Controversial Book Committee” monthly meeting stood up and shouted I was a censor and a prude.
I kept pointing to the last page where the author volunteered to make the change.
But, as so often happened in those days–I was the only person who had read everything.
Ignorance and me being a prudish censor suited his agenda better.
I took my kids out of school that day–after I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper warning people.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A tsunami followed by a hurricane.
And we have a senile president who will do nothing to solve any of it. Joe and an out of contrl Fed built this with money they printed out of thin air.
“Import tsunami sinks US GDP in first quarter
US manufacturing continues to shrink as imports surge”
https://asiatimes.com/2022/05/import-tsunami-sinks-us-gdp-in-first-quarter/
“US real gross domestic product (GDP) shrank at a 1.5% annual rate during the first quarter, more than the preliminary estimate of -1.3%, the Commerce Department reported on May 26. The worst trade performance on record took 3.2% off GDP, more than accounting for the entire drop. Nothing like this has happened before.”
Personal consumption rose at a 3.1% annual rate but the additional demand was more than met by increased imports.
America’s trade deficit in goods spiked to $128 billion in March, or an annual rate of 1.54 trillion, while US manufacturers’ sales plunged after adjustment for inflation. In real terms, US factory sales have fallen by nearly 10% since 2018, and by nearly 20% since 2007.
Consumers spent the lion’s share of the $6 trillion Covid stimulus on imports. That’s another first: US manufacturing never contracted in the past following a big increase in demand.
Net exports took 3.2% off GDP growth only once before, in 1982 but that happened while GDP was booming. Americans typically import more when the economy expands, and import less when it contracts, simply because there is less overall demand in a shrinking economy.
This is the first time that net exports went sharply negative while GDP was falling, and the first time that negative net exports caused a drop in GDP.”
The biggest increase in US imports came from China, which shipped 55% more to the United States in April 2022 (in seasonally-adjusted dollar terms) than it did in August 2019, when then-president Trump slapped 25% tariffs on most Chinese imports.”
——–
Just Joe taking care of the Chinese so he and Hunter can say they earned their grift.
But up next, the hurricane….
LikeLike
———-
LikeLike
Meanwhile, a senile Nero fiddles…..
——–
They mean the hate from his base in the inner cities, where these attacks are rampant.
LikeLike
If you think it can’t get much worse, think again.
Victor Davis Hanson nails it again.
“A Cabinency of Dunces
The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/a-cabinency-of-dunces/
“As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.
A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Joe Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.
But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.
Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.
But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes.
While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises that his board will carry on.
In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.
In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.
The FBI recently has been knee-deep in political controversies. It illegally doctored a FISA application to entrap an American citizen. Its former directors, under oath before Congress, either claimed faulty memory or admitted lying to federal investigators.
The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their childrens’ education.
We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.
Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”
Later Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administration policies that have affected supply and demand.”
Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil fuel production, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.
Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S. economy.
The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for over a year. Since last fall dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.
During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not at work. Instead at the height of the crisis, he took a two-month paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.
Such paternal concern is a noble thing.
But Buttigieg is supposed to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped Americans.
This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routinely looted in the Old-West style of train robbing—without much of a response from Buttigieg’s transpiration bureau.
In Senate testimony Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow walking federal oil and gas leases at a time Americans are paying between $5 and $6 a gallon for gas.
Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid talking points to her—given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information about U.S. energy production on federal lands.”
LikeLike
They ruin everything they touch.
——–
They’re a bad joke, on us.
Thanks idiots who voted for this nonsense.
LikeLike
———-
LikeLike
If only they’d been so concerned about strangers on their property last week when they left the door open for a killer.
———
LikeLike
LikeLike
Silly reporter, less attacks means less fundraising and tragedies to exploit for said fundraising.
Hardening schools is common sense.
——–
LikeLike
——–
These are facts people.
LikeLike
Intersex is a thing, but maybe not in the way some may mean it these days. There are people who are born with ambiguous sex organs and such, and that has been called intersex. However, it used to be considered an abnormality, not a different gender.
LikeLike
Yes, one can be born a hermaphrodite. I know someone born this way. Doctors did (and do, I would imagine) what seems to be the proper sex. Mistakes could be made. Of course, none of the push today is about this, whatsoever.
LikeLiked by 1 person