• UP TO 50% OF HOUSING COSTS IN CALIFORNIA NOW REFLECT “environmentalism run amok – permitting, zoning & regulations which empower activists to sue and stall every construction project in a state court… The result has been hundreds of thousands fleeing the state every year, a trend that will worsen if the Election allows California policies to get forced on people nationally.” Texas has been the biggest beneficiary, where studies show that building in its three biggest metropolitan areas (Dallas, Houston, Austin) are triple of what gets built in California’s biggest cities (LA, San Francisco/Oakland, San Diego), and Austin actually outbuilds San Francisco by a factor of ten.  [WASHINGTON EXAMINER – 7/24/24]
  • CREATING GOOD EATING HABITS FOR KIDS IS ALWAYS A CHALLENGE, a long term process that involves building a healthy relationship with food, day by day, meal by meal. Since ‘framing’ matters in how kids make choices, presenting them decisions like picking out snacks for the entire week (whether all at once, or selecting one product at a time each day) can be most effective in their learning to actually like a food, versus choosing based on constant media influences for what they should like. A child can even learn to exercise self-control and accept healthy food as an option by gradually learning, if parents can reset their expectations.” [KELLOGG INSIGHT – 7/29/24]
  • THE INTELLECTUALS, ACADEMICS AND ACTIVESTS OF THE RADICAL LEFT “have been mocking the idea of ‘Truth’ for a half century now. Its denizens ‘deconstruct’ rather than interpret texts, and mock the idea of a normative and unchanging human nature and obligatory moral law like the Ten Commandments. Truth for them is ‘subjective’ —my truth rather than a reference to an enduring objective reality, and a spurious ideological narrative from which no fundamental dissent is allowed: The West is an essentially culpable civilization; America is fundamentally a racist country; gender is socially constructed (or a product of subjective whim), and the distinction between men and women is thus arbitrary; Abortion up through birth is a sacred rite; and Hamas stands for freedom and not fanaticism and terror.”  [AMERICAN MIND – 7/26/24]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:     

Some 90% of global population is right-handed and “our world has been engineered for righties. Historically there has been a prevailing bias in many cultures against those left-handed including: (1) forcing those children to alter and reject their natural behavior, which has led to development of conditions such as stuttering and attention disorders; and (2) In Islamic cultures, avoiding eating with or shaking a left hand – which is thought to be dirty, as it is the hand which washes the body.”  [READERS DIGEST]

Treasury Sec’y Yellen has called for an extra $3 trillion annually to fight global warming, during a speech she gave over the weekend at the G20 Summit “to reach the Left’s fever dream of a low-carbon economy and thereby fight the very thing that Joe Biden says is global warming – ‘literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.’ The United States would be expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the burden because we wind up paying for almost all of this madness.”  [PATRIOT POST]

An $884 billion Defense budget was just approved by the House Armed Services Committee after fights over which foreign wars to support and “greedy corporations taking advantage of our Military leaders.” Reality, however, is that monies for war efforts mostly stay with American soldiers & companies who manufacture munitions and/or maintain & update planes/ tanks/ warships which are up to 40 years old.  Last year’s budget went to roughly 22% active military personnel, 39% for operations & maintenance, 15% to research & development, with only 17% for procurement, according to Office of Management & Budget.

“Americans have now witnessed three left-wing veritable coups: (1) In 2020, covert actors decided to ossify the Democratic primary races; (2) Next, they conferred the nomination on a clearly cognitively challenged Joe Biden, tasked with serving as a useful moderate vessel for a virtual, even more radical, Obama third term agenda; (3) When that charade could no longer be sustained, they circumvented the normal transparent democratic process by removing the once useful but now a liability Biden—while insisting that he was still fit enough to keep the Left in power until the anticipated Harris victory in November. And all of this was the shadow work of those who sanctimoniously lectured America that ‘democracy dies in darkness’.”  [VICTOR DAVIS HANSON] 

 The absolutely incredible voice of a 16-year-old now touring the world:  https://youtu.be/Ll1uR_HUOP8