U.S. car sales remain stuck below pre-pandemic levels amid a struggling auto market, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Higher borrowing costs and increased prices on new vehicles are two key factors steering consumers away from buying, according to the WSJ. Many customers have looked to lease cars to avoid out-of-pocket costs and have turned to purchasing smaller and more affordable vehicle models.
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A college instructor who taught for nearly 30 years was fired due to the strict COVID protocols in Minnesota — just weeks before they were rescinded.
Russ Stewart was an instructor at Lake Superior College in Duluth where he taught ethics, logic and philosophy. The school is part of the Minnesota State System of Colleges and Universities and, as such, Stewart was a state employee.
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New research shows that school enrollment has declined in over 5,000 public schools in the U.S., suggesting families are rejecting traditional schools because of the pandemic.
The Fordham Institute’s new study, conducted by researcher Sofoklis Goulas from the Brookings Institution, released Wednesday, found that families were over twice as likely to leave low-performing public schools.
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In parts one and two of this series, we’ve examined how Democrats and their poisoned ideology have declared war on America’s children. If anyone has any doubt as to the intention of the Progressive left to poison the minds of children and ruin their future, look no further than America’s teachers’ unions, especially Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers.
Historically working in tandem with the Democrat Party, teachers’ unions are intense advocates for curriculum that does not include basic knowledge to get ahead in life. Rather than actual education, its agenda includes social justice propaganda, racial division, climate change dogma, and promotion of sexual deviancy.
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One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”
These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pushing new COVID-19 boosters, claiming that people who don’t stay “up to date” with shots – regardless of how many they’ve already taken – “are more likely to get very sick” while those who take them annually are “much less likely to get very ill, be hospitalized, or even die” from COVID.
The Democratic nominee for president is so committed to staying up to date on jabs that Vice President Kamala Harris made COVID boosting a requirement to work on her campaign, “unless otherwise prohibited by applicable law.” They can also ask the human resources department for a “reasonable accommodation … prior to reporting to an office location.”
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$40,000.
That’s how much Kate Zerby has spent trying to put herself back together after the Moderna COVID vaccine wreaked havoc on her body.
As Intellectual Takeout reported back in 2022, Kate Zerby of St. Paul, Minnesota, suffered a serious adverse reaction to her Moderna shot, beginning the night after she got it, February 16, 2021. At 3:30 a.m., she awoke, gripped by a pervading sense of gloom and foreboding and the unsettling sensation that something strange was slithering through her system. At the same time, an interior voice seemed to tell her, “If you get the vaccine again, you will die.”
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Most of us get the big things right: Don’t touch fire, wrestle alligators, or play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of delusion.
While many of our unmoored beliefs are specific to us – I seem to be the only person who thinks I have a beautiful singing voice – some are universal. Chief among these is the claim: I’m my own worst critic.
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H. L. Mencken apparently never quite said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He said lots of similar things, however, and I like to think he would have been proud of being the sort of chap to whom people attributed such astringent mots.
He would also, I feel sure, regard the theater surrounding the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign as a test case of the proposition.
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An education organization that administers a nationwide assessment has found that students are still not performing as well as they were immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic and that students’ achievement gap worsened in the 2023-24 school year as compared to before COVID.
NWEA, which issues the Measures of Academic Progress, said in a report this week that some middle school students are still an entire school year behind where they were before the pandemic in almost every grade as schools are slated to run out of federal relief this fall.
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Obama elevated Biden to presidential prominence; only he could remove Biden from it. Biden’s leftward policies had created a political deficit that his June 27 debate performance proved he could not communicate his way out of. Democrat elite’s efforts to prod Biden off the ticket had not succeeded. With time running short, push came to shove, but to succeed, that shove could not come from them alone.
Despite Biden having spent more terms in the Senate (six) than Obama spent years (four), the latter raised the former to presidential level by making him his vice president. Exact opposites in every respect, Obama had finally done for Biden what Biden couldn’t do for himself in two short-lived, ill-fated presidential runs (1988 and 2008).
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Whether the economy is currently bubbling along or facing a slowdown, a slow-motion disaster is about to create a real crisis for the government, our future politics, and the shrinking middle class. Half of households have no retirement savings.
This is just one of many shifts in the economy that reflect the declining fortunes of the middle class. Wages have remained mostly flat for most workers—particularly those without a college degree—since the early 1970s. Recent high rates of inflation further cut into the ability of the self-identified middle class to make ends meet. But the biggest change has been the abolition of employer-provided pensions and their replacement with rickety and self-managed 401k savings plans.
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The iconic photo of Donald Trump standing tall and defiantly after an attempted assassination speaks volumes. It reminds the whole world that Trump is a fighter. In his case, it is more than a metaphor, as “fighter” is for most of the political class. He showed real physical courage, and this cannot fail to impress.
As society has gotten more modern and organized, physical courage has become less necessary and less valued. Physical ability in general, such as the brawn and endurance required to be a cowboy or coal miner, doesn’t have much to do with the ability to analyze Excel spreadsheets, run a cash register, or do any number of office jobs. Softer skills are in higher demand and are rewarded accordingly.
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Vermont Sen. Peter Welch on Wednesday became the first Democratic senator to call for President Joe Biden to drop his bid for reelection, after a dismal debate performance last month.
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After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our nuclear codes.
In 2019, Democratic primary candidates often hit rival Joe Biden for his apparent senior moments and incoherence. During the 2020 campaign, Biden often became in bizarre fashion animated and nasty (“you ain’t black”/“fat”/“lying dog-faced pony soldier”/“junkie”).
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A 30-year veteran of the Food and Drug Administration said at a congressional hearing this week he resigned in part because top brass sidelined his office to rush the full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in August 2021, apparently to legally enable a vaccine mandate, then a booster under emergency use authorization over the objections of the agency’s outside advisers.
But former Office of Vaccines Research and Review Deputy Director Philip Krause perhaps saved his biggest embarrassment to the FDA for the end of Wednesday’s hearing on alleged Biden administration political interference in COVID vaccine review: He declined the booster.
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President Joe Biden addressed his supporters at a campaign event in North Carolina on Friday after political analysts, Democratic commentators and political figures described his debate performance as a disaster that’s approaching a crisis.
“I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said at the podium.
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While sometimes it is unavoidable, lawyers do everything they can not to become witnesses in their own cases. Such a contingency may require new counsel, adding to client expense. It also leads to some real ethical minefields. While as a witness they are obliged to tell the truth, they are also bound as lawyers by their duties of confidentiality and zealous advocacy for their clients, creating conflicts between these competing obligations.
Journalists, too, used to have certain ethical restrictions, some formal and some that arose as part of the culture. One of those restrictions is similar to that facing lawyers: journalists are not supposed to “become the story.” Journalists should be neutral conduits through which the facts are presented.
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Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.
Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.
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In his book Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt makes a famous distinction between good and bad economists:
The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.
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In February, Harrison Butker kicked the longest field goal in Super Bowl history—a massive 57-yard three-pointer—to help carry the Kansas City Chiefs to a rollicking win over the San Francisco 49ers.
Recently, he’s made headlines again—this time, arguably, for far more profound reasons.
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With “Teacher Appreciation Week” now behind us, it’s crucial that we pay close heed to the well-being of the students, and the news is not good. Gen Z-ers and the newest crop—Generation Alpha—are struggling, and schools are the focal point of the problem.
A new report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students between the ages of 12 and 18 and found that just 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to go to school. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. On a similar note, a new EdChoice survey reveals that 64 percent of teens said that school is boring, and 30 percent feel that it is a waste of time.
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Telehealth has become a health care gamechanger for tens of millions of Americans.
We all know the time and effort an in-person health visit takes – travel to the appointment, time off work, hours spent in an office, follow ups that require us to do the whole process over again. But telehealth expansion in the post-COVID world has changed everything.
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We are in the midst of a presidential campaign year. It’s supposed to be the Super Bowl for political junkies like me. But it feels strange and muted, and, so far, its vibe is uncomfortably similar to 2020.
The 2020 election was strange because of COVID, which became a pretext to change the rules in order to rig the outcome. This time, there is no such excuse for a “basement campaign.” It’s true that Biden is old, feeble, and unpopular. And Trump has been sidelined, quite deliberately, by a malicious New York judge who won’t allow him to travel and conduct his signature rallies. The problem, however, now infects all electoral politics.
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A record number of students are skipping school, propelling chronic absenteeism to a national crisis, according to an analysis of public-school attendance data.
The analysis comes as public school districts nationwide are laying off teachers, citing high inflationary costs, budget deficits, and spending decisions related to federal COVID-era funding, which is running out after schools received windfalls in federal subsidies for three years.
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A majority of Americans disapprove of the job President Joe Biden is doing, according to a new poll.
The Center Square Voter’s Voice poll released Wednesday asked voters, “When it comes to President Joe Biden, do you approve or disapprove of how he’s handling his job?”
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Were I of a more entrepreneurial bent, I might go into the statuary business. I would specialize in those statues of “Justice” one sees, or used to see, decorating the façades of courthouses. The old-fashioned, now deprecated models featured a berobed and blindfolded female figure holding aloft a pair of scales. The symbology, now on its way to the graveyard of discarded ideas, was simple but noble. Justice was blindfolded because she was no respecter of persons. Neither rank nor party nor sex nor ethnic origin would figure into her calculation of guilt or innocence. She held scales to emphasize her devotion to impartiality.
Since those ideals have long since been superseded, my thought was to go into business producing new statues of Justice. The figure could still be female, or at least identify as female, but it should probably be obese and sport dreadlocks. She—or “she”—should not be wearing a robe but rather a T-shirt and dungarees. Instead of a blindfold, this new figure of justice would sport a pride-flag pin and a WinBlue membership card. She would still brandish scales, but one side would be loaded down with affidavits, subpoenas, and indictments.
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The scientist who first blew the whistle on the DNA contamination in the COVID mRNA injections last year, said Monday that regulators and fact checkers have been “continually wrong” about his alarming discovery, downplaying its significance and telling flat out lies about the potential dangers.
Last April, microbiologist Kevin McKernan, published a paper establishing that simian virus 40 (SV40), a virus found in monkeys and humans, is present in Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 injections. The discovery was highly significant because SV40 has been linked to cancer in humans, and since the rollout of the mRNA products, the western world has seen a dramatic increase in cancers, especially in previously healthy working aged people.
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It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.
The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)
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The pandemic years have all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse, which has now hinged onto the nebulous goal of “preserving democracy”.
Despite representing one of the most pivotal Black Swan events in modern history – maybe even in human history – the pandemic and its impact on culture has been relegated to an occasional footnote in modern politics.
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In April 1983, U.S. Secretary of Education Terrell Bell created the National Commission on Excellence in Education, directing it to “examine the quality of education in the United States.” The panel found that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
The report famously asserted, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.” It also insists that “…academic excellence [is] the primary goal of schooling [and it] seems to be fading across…American education.”
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Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.
The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.
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The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.
But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.
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The Food and Drug Administration wants to continue its selective promotion of off-label drug use: good for COVID-19 vaccines, bad for alternatives to those vaccines. It just doesn’t want the public to see its full reasoning for the latter.
The FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services filed a renewed motion to dismiss a lawsuit by doctors claiming the agencies have a practice of demonizing ivermectin by conflating its human and animal doses and using “command” language, such as “stop it,” to discourage using the anti-parasite drug against COVID.
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The window that opened in 2019 to allow United Methodist churches to depart their embattled denomination closes in a week or so, at the end of the year, and at this late hour, approximately one-fourth of the member churches that constitute Protestantism’s second-largest denomination have climbed through that window.
In the largest U.S. church schism since Civil War times, nearly 7,700 churches of the roughly 30,000 in the United Methodist Church (UMC) have voted to take their property and go elsewhere.
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Two Minnesotans have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against HealthPartners, Regions Hospital, and affiliated healthcare workers relating to the hospital’s protocols for treating COVID-19. The lawsuit claims that these protocols caused the deaths of two patients.
Specifically, the civil suit alleges that the plaintiffs’ spouses “were given Remdesivir against their wishes as part of a protocol which actually harmed them; and which protocol has served to financially enrich Health Partners, Inc., and Regions Hospital.”
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Public opinion on the pharmaceutical industry has declined sharply over the past decade, according to new polling released by Gallup.
The proportion of Americans who believe pharmaceutical companies provide good or excellent services declined 21 points between 2010 and 2023, according to a poll released Monday. Public controversies over COVID-19 vaccines and the opioid crisis have implicated the pharmaceutical industry in recent years.
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Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.
First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.
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A public health worker in New Zealand was arrested on Sunday for allegedly accessing personal information on work databases.
Barry Young, a whistleblower from New Zealand’s public health agency, Te Whatu Ora, leaked the information to tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, a prominent vaccine critic, on November 9. In an interview explaining his motives, Young said the data shows that the COVID jab “is a killer’ and is causing a “river of tears.”
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The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.
That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.
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by Robert Romano The U.S. economy has been on a rollercoaster ever since the COVID pandemic of 2020, first with high unemployment and near deflationary levels as the global economy was locked down, followed by a deluge of government spending, borrowing and printing almost $7 trillion, followed by inflation that has largely outstripped incomes. The last of the COVID transfer payments, which contributed substantially to the inflation — what Milton Friedman dubbed “helicopter money” — went out in March 2021, and so the question is how have the American people been faring since? Nominal personal income has increased at an average, annual rate of 4.4 percent, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the meantime, the Consumer Price Index has increased at an average annual rate of 6.1 percent. The Bureau of Economic Analysis defines personal income as “The income that persons receive in return for their provision of labor, land, and capital used in current production, plus current transfer receipts less contributions for government social insurance (domestic).” That’s slightly confusing, and so the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank defines personal income it as “the income that persons receive in return for their provision of labor,…
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American populism’s rise is directly connected to the failures of our self-styled elites. American elites have in numerous instances missed the coming of important crises, some of which they have caused. Average Americans have borne the brunt of these crises. Today’s populist rise is simply the people’s recognition of the elites’ hypocrisy and culpability in what they have had to endure.
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Like the cassette music format among hipsters, COVID-19 vaccine mandates live on in select educational settings.
Students may not be told until they’re already well into a program, however.
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A new report shows that the average high school student’s ACT college admissions test scores have fallen to their lowest point in 30 years, reflecting an ongoing decline in the quality of education in the United States after the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.
As Fox News reports, the average scores for the American College Testing (ACT) exams have fallen for the last six years in a row, with the decline becoming noticeably faster in the years during and after COVID. The average score in 2023 was 19.5 out of 36, which comes out to a percentage of 54%. In 2022, the average score was 19.8.
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Labor markets appeared buoyed by still-working Baby Boomers in September as the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.8 percent, with 296,000 seniors finding jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey.
With more than 11.1 million seniors still working — a national record — peak employment still abounds, even as a massive 47.21 million seniors are no longer in the labor force — also a record — amid the Baby Boomer retirement wave that has seen those 65-years-old-and-older not in the labor force have increased about 19 million the past 25 years.
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The Democrat Leftists and oligarchical elites are very capable people; it brings pain to admit it, but it’s true. In the midst of seeking the demise the 45th President and his legal team from 2020, they have managed to continue the fear factor that ushered in mail-in ballots and multiple week voting ensuring a myriad of unexplained discrepancies, ballots without a chain-of-custody, and the White House.
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Looking to get around Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ veto pen, Republican lawmakers have introduced the second consideration of a constitutional amendment to bar the use of private funds in election administration.
Passage would send the proposed amendment to referendum, letting voters — not the liberal governor — decide if controversial “Zuckerbucks”-like funding of elections is legal in Wisconsin.
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You can call it a “road diet,” or “15 days to stop the spread,” or a “fifteen minute city,” or a “smart city,” a “central bank digital currency,” or just an EV that comes with a virtual leash attached in the form of limited range and limited recharging options.
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Arizona students have been majorly impacted long-term by virtual learning throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new report from the Common Sense Institute Arizona estimates a possible 18,419 fewer high school graduates by 2032 and 26,281 fewer college graduates in 2026 in Arizona stemming from poor standardized testing scores in the aftermath of the pandemic.
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One of the most alarming aspects of the new COVID-centric regime is how people have been deprived of the truth regarding potential harms of the COVID-19 vaccines and how citizens have been forced to get the vaccine due to bullying from medical authorities, the government, or an employer.
When the medical decision to get the jab, whether well-informed or not, is that of a parent making the choice for a child, such a potentially life-altering move might devastate two people, not just one patient. Good parents always want to do the best for their children, and making a medical decision for your child that might have terrible consequences is scary to consider.
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