I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.

Actually, they're wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. "California dreamin'," pace Mama Cass, "was no longer a ray-al-it-tee." It hasn't been for a long time.

Now everybody knows about the 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of bubonic plague.

And those figures are what we're told. The real numbers could be three or four times the number.  Why are they here?

The saga of Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has lurched from one embarrassing episode to another.

The vessel (technically classified as a “heavy aircraft cruiser” to be able to adhere to Montreux Convention restrictions on aircraft carriers passing through the Turkish Straits) is currently undergoing repairs and retrofitting .It will not be replaced with a more modern carrier for at least another 15 years—and quite possibly never.

The situation brings to mind Richard Hough’s classic 1958 study, The Fleet That Had to Die, about the failure and destruction of the Russian naval fleet in 1905 at the hands of the Japanese. Like that long-ago event, which culminated in the disaster at the Tsushima Straits, the current history is replete with bold promises of breakthroughs but marred by malfeasance, corruption and incompetence.

Not only does all this highlight Russia’s decline as a naval power, it also underscores the problematic natures of the Russian defense establishment and political system.

If it’s true that “natural right is dynamite,” as political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote, then Justice Clarence Thomas just went nuclear on the abortion debate.

While Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood (5/28)has received considerable commentary, his deepening of the judicial and, hence, the political debate over abortion demands further elaboration. His reply to the leading threat to the principles of the Declaration of Independence is his latest attempt in a career of restoring its authority.

The ugly nakedness of the eugenics dogma, with its attendant euphemisms, stands exposed in Thomas’s explanation of Roe. No longer can credible critics of the court turn away from the monstrosity and focus on federalism and substantive due process clause interpretation issues.

The new, politicized abortion goes to the core of American political principles and the abiding integrity of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s how deeply the Thomas charge cuts:

One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons.

In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.

In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself?

Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators  --  or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?

Mark Levin appeared at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California last Saturday night (6/08).

The event was a celebration of his new, bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press.  It was a glorious evening.  The auditorium was packed with several thousand fans with an overflow crowd in another room.  Levin delivered not a speech but a conversation.

John Heubusch, the director of the Reagan Library introduced Levin then the two of them sat down.  Heubusch asked  questions and Levin answered in his usual inimitable fashion.  The crowd loved it.

But as we were all sitting in that spectacular library in California, the state of our state was the initial topic of discussion.  How did this state, once the envy of all others, become the pathetic, indebted Third World loser state it is today?  The answer is simple, single-party Democrat rule.

With Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), it became increasingly clear China was a totalitarian police state willing to do almost anything to advance its aims.

That attempt to forcefully move from an agrarian to a socialist industrial society cost tens of millions of Chinese lives. One historian's estimate runs to a staggering 56 million deaths for that period alone, making Mao easily the greatest mass murderer of all time.

These days, however, the Chinese communists have become more subtle in the control of their populace. They are in the process of instituting a social credit system that allows the state to monitor technologically virtually every aspect of a person's life and reward or punish him or her accordingly.

And where did this ability to control such a giant country come from in the first place? As Pogo would say, I have seen the enemy and he is us! Namely, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie.

China’s economy is reeling from President Trump’s strategic tariffs, and Beijing is getting desperate.

In a futile effort to compensate for China’s losses by developing economic ties with new global partners, Chinese leader Xi Jinping last Friday (6/07) met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both leaders touted the meeting in typically hyperbolic terms, presumably in the hope of deceiving American policymakers into believing that they had accomplished something significant.

Putin and Xi negotiated numerous economic partnerships, such as agreeing to boost energy and technology cooperation in the coming years. Those agreements, however, are only papering over the cracks.

[Note by JW: TTP views China’s seizure of Russia’s Eastern Siberia as an inevitability – the only question is how many years in will take.  See Chinese Siberia from November 2006.  Here, my old friend Paul Goble describes the latest moves of Beijing to accomplish this. 

Note the hilarity of Russian obliviousness, such as the Russian “expert” claiming the US is the threat to Russia’s Arctic sovereignty and not China.  If anything, the US is more on Russia’s side than China’s, as Paul points out.]

Three developments in early June 2019 call attention to China’s unrelenting efforts to become the dominant player on the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—the increasingly ice-free Arctic waterway along Russia’s northern coast, and the main segment of the longer Northeastern Passage, linking Asia and Europe.

(As you can see in the map above how much shorter (over 50%) the Northern route Yokohama to Rotterdam is versus the Suez Canal route.)

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