RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/import-americans/

A skills-based immigration system is a possible answer to American demographic decline.

Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to just 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1. Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die), the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.

Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.

Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.

In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer Eric Kaufmann, have made parallel arguments. What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value. Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.

https://www.city-journal.org/smash-and-grab-retail

When police busted a shoplifting ring operating out of a liquor store last spring, they calculated that the dozen or so people involved had swiped at least $375,000 worth of goods from retailers such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Walgreens. The pair heading the ring relied on small-time thieves, including several with drug arrest records, to launch brazen “grab-and-go” operations in which they snatched expensive goods and then raced out of stores and fled in cars with phony license plates. Though police and prosecutors often categorize shoplifting as a nonviolent crime, the gang’s sprees resulted in several physical confrontations, including one in which a gang member assaulted a store employee with a stun gun. This may sound similar to the organized smash-and-grab lootings that have plagued high-end retailers in San Francisco and other Northern California communities recently, but this gang was operating out of Daytona Beach, Florida—and had done so for nearly two years.

In fact, retail crime has been rising throughout the U.S. for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.

Even more troubling, shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal. Corie Berry, CEO of Best Buy, recently said that store crime had become so pervasive that it was depressing profits and traumatizing staff. Like retailers, top law-enforcement officials place some of the blame for the crime surge on a widespread lessening of penalties for shoplifting. “As we’ve witnessed brazen smash and grabs, consequences are key,” Laura Cooper, head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said before Thanksgiving. “Without deterrents and accountability, communities will be victimized, and businesses terrorized.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/is_the_tide_finally_turning.html

Yours truly has been pretty down in the mouth for quite a while, for good reasons.  I mean, look around.  Mask mandates.  Experimental drug mandates.  De facto quarantines.  Literal quarantines.  Destroyed small businesses.  Large businesses unable to fill their shelves.  Men pretending to be women.  Joe Biden in the White House.  Not a lot of happy-face material there. 

I’m getting a sense the tide may be turning.  It sure seems that the super-insulated bureaucratic Deep State is beginning to understand that it is not invincible.  Ironically, there may also be new hope politically if Democrats don’t correct course and remain blind to how self-destructive their Trump obsession will be.

On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business “skin-backs.”  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that’s particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.

I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.

So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brad-raffensperger-vs-noncitizen-voting-democrats-new-york-eric-adams-republicans-11641848856?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Eric Adams has made his first mistake as New York City’s new mayor, endorsing a City Council bill to let roughly 800,000 noncitizens vote in local elections. Mr. Adams said Saturday he looks forward to “bringing millions more into the democratic process”—assuming a court doesn’t block the plan, which is possible.

In either case, New York’s Democrats are handing Republicans a political issue. Note what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on TV over the weekend: “I think that we should have a constitutional amendment, a U.S. constitutional amendment, that only American citizens vote in our elections.”

The host, CBS’s Margaret Brennan, tried to do an instant fact check. “Only U.S. citizens do currently vote in elections, but go on,” she said. This ill-informed response from somebody in the news business suggests average Americans will be blindsided when they hear what New York is doing. It goes way past the experiments with noncitizen voting that a handful of other cities have tried.

San Francisco, notably, opened up elections only for school board, and turnout has been low. In 2020, a city official says, 36 noncitizens registered and 31 voted. In 2018 there were 59 ballots. For context, the current registration form warns that data provided by prospective voters, including name and address, “may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”