Can we all just stop pretending Biden is in charge of this ticket? CNN probably won't, but for a brief moment in time last night, the liberal network managed to say the quiet part out loud about Harris taking over for Biden. In what was a rather awkward headline, Chris Cillizza's piece on the VP pick described things this way.


The piece itself is what you'd expect, i.e. slobbering praise for Biden's. It essentially asserts that Harris was the best pick ever, historical, and offers Trump no lines of attack to open up. How true any of that is will be tested in the near future, as I actually think Harris is wide open for attacks compared to Susan Rice, who would have been a more limited target (i.e. Benghazi, and I don't think that's an effective political attack anymore).

Regardless, here's what you normally don't do when a VP candidate is chosen for a ticket. You don't immediately begin to speculate the top of the ticket is so incapable of doing the job that he may not finish out his first term. That's usually a red flag to not make that person president in the first place.

But we are living in a reality where defeating Trump overtakes all common sense for the left, to the point where the media are salivating at the thought of a senile old man being elected because they can just swap him out for Harris when the time is right.

Left-wing prosecutors have implemented soft-on-crime approaches to criminal justice across America, in some instances making it a matter of policy in major cities not to prosecute specific crimes, a Daily Caller News Foundation review found.

A common, though not universal, feature of prominent left-wing district attorneys is the backing of political organizations funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros. The New York Times has credited Soros with pioneering the "push to overhaul prosecutors' offices" across the country.

Cook County, Illinois, State's Attorney Kimberly Foxx, whose jurisdiction includes Chicago, took office in 2017 after winning her election with the help of a Soros-funded super PAC.

Soros poured more than $400,000 into Illinois Justice & Public Safety PAC in 2016, Illinois State Board of Elections records show. Foxx was the only candidate that the PAC supported in 2016, those records show.

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem." — Ronald Reagan

There's a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests.

Without fail, what should be an exercise in how to peacefully disagree turns ugly the moment looting, vandalism, violence, intimidation tactics and rioting are introduced into the equation. Instead of restoring order, local police stand down.

Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in.

Coincidence? I think not.

This was the blueprint used three years ago in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when the city regularly cited as being one of the happiest places in America, became ground zero for a heated war of words — and actions — over racism, "sanitizing history," extremism (both right and left), political correctness, hate speech, partisan politics, and a growing fear that violent words will end in violent actions.

It was a setup: local police deliberately engineered a situation in which protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to call in the bigger guns.

It is the blueprint being used right now.

In Charlottesville, as in so many parts of the country right now, the conflict was over how to reconcile the nation's checkered past, particularly as it relates to slavery, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything — words and images — that might cause offense, especially if it's a Confederate flag or monument.

That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.

That's when everything went haywire.

The announced roster of speakers at the Democratic National Convention is in line with the party's choice of Joe Biden as the 2020 nominee: doubling down on the establishment past while pretending to embrace a progressive future.

Released on Tuesday, the schedule of speakers for next week's convention is a veritable who's who of the Democrats - with more than a few strange choices and a few notable omissions.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), representing the democratic socialist faction, are both scheduled to speak. They will be vastly outnumbered by the establishment figures, however.

The presence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is a no-brainer. Likewise the appearance by former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, both there to support - however half-heartedly - their former VP.

Having the Clintons speak as well is more problematic. Hillary's arrogance and disdain in 2016 is how Donald Trump crushed the Democrats' expectation that they will rule forever, after all.

If we step back from the details of daily headlines around the world and try to make sense of larger patterns, the dominant dynamic defining world geopolitics in the past three years or more is the appearance of a genuine irregular conflict between the two most formidable powers on the planet — The Peoples' Republic of China and the United States of America. Increasingly it's beginning to look as if some very dark global networks are orchestrating what looks to be an updated rerun of their 1939-1945 World War. Only this time the stakes are total, and aim at creation of a universal global totalitarian system, what David Rockefeller once called a "one world government." The powers that be periodically use war to gain major policy shifts.

On behalf of the Powers That Be (PTB), World War II was orchestrated by the circles of the City of London and of Wall Street to maneuver two great obstacles — Russia and Germany — to wage a war to the death against each other, in order that those Anglo-Saxon PTB could reorganize the world geopolitical chess board to their advantage. It largely succeeded, but for the small detail that after 1945, Wall Street and the Rockefeller brothers were determined that England play the junior partner to Washington. London and Washington then entered the period of their global domination known as the Cold War.

That Anglo-American global condominium ended, by design, in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 1991.

Around this time, with the onset of the Bill Clinton presidency in 1992, the next phase - financial and industrial globalization - was inaugurated. With that, began the hollowing out of the industrial base of not only the United States, but also of Germany and the EU. The cheap labor outsourcing enabled by the new WTO drove wages down and destroyed one industry after the next in the industrial West after the 1990s. It was a necessary step on the path to what G.H.W. Bush in 1990 called the New World Order. The next step would be destruction of national sovereignty everywhere. Here the USA was the major obstacle.

Kamala Harris is rising in the polls after dramatically confronting Joe Biden during the Democratic primary debate about his opposition to federally mandated busing for desegregation. The following week, however, Harris backed away from saying that busing should always be federally mandated, calling it just one "tool that is in the toolbox" for school districts to use. When asked to clarify whether she would support federal mandates for busing, she said: "I believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district." But Biden's poll numbers are falling as a result of Harris's theatrical attack.

Harris, who served as San Francisco District Attorney from 2004 to 2011 and California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, describes herself as a "progressive prosecutor­­­­." Harris's prosecutorial record, however, is far from progressive. Through her apologia for egregious prosecutorial misconduct, her refusal to allow DNA testing for a probably innocent death row inmate, her opposition to legislation requiring the attorney general's office to independently investigate police shootings and more, she has made a significant contribution to the sordid history of injustice she decries.

COVID-19 is a collective risk. It threatens everyone, and we all must cooperate to lower the chance that the coronavirus harms any one individual. Among other things, that means keeping safe social distances and wearing masks. But many people choose not to do these things, making spread of infection more likely.


When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they're defecting from the public good. It's the moral equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: If everyone shares the same pasture for their individual flocks, some people are going to graze their animals longer, or let them eat more than their fair share, ruining the commons in the process. Selfish and self-defeating behavior undermines the pursuit of something from which everyone can benefit.


Democratically enacted enforceable rules - mandating things like mask wearing and social distancing - might work, if defectors could be coerced into adhering to them. But not all states have opted to pass them or to enforce the rules that are in place.


My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what's best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?


It's a far-out proposal that's bound to be controversial, but one I believe is worth at least considering, given the importance of social cooperation in the struggle to get COVID-19 under control.

The Democratic Party's reliance on identity politics led to controversy on Tuesday as the lineup of speakers for next week's Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee seemingly failed to include any politicians of Asian descent.

"The gross underrepresentation of Asian American speakers in the four days of the DNC Convention is tone deaf and a slap in the face," Representative Ted Lieu said on Twitter. Lieu, a California Democrat with Taiwanese ancestry, also noted that Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in multiple swing states.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as his running mate on Tuesday, ending months of speculation over one of the most consequential decisions of his 2020 presidential bid.

Biden called Harris, a former rival in the Democratic primary, the best equipped to help him defeat President Trump and lead the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, economic downturn and racial divide.

Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, would be the first woman to be vice president if Biden is elected.

The odious right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong recently posted a video of a man being brutalized by an unseen tormenter which he captioned "Chinese communism", adding "I don't know who needs to hear this but this is what real oppression looks like, not cops in Portland pepper spraying rioters for throwing molotovs at them."


There's nothing in the video footage that shows that this is happening in China, nor that the person performing the abuse is a government authority figure. But many people credulously shared the video around, because anti-China sentiment has exploded over the last two years with the help of careful narrative management by the western political/media class.