Opinion
By Jeff Childers
04-11-23
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup today includes: our long national nightmare is over, mostly; San Fran Whole Foods gets out of Dodge; downtown claims more victims; California voting on bill allowing permanent detention of people who won’t take their medicine; Texas eyes gold-backed digital currency; citizen journalists expand OMG’s Act Blue investigation; Thor abruptly announces retirement, and a long-time democrat politician suffers sudden and unexpected family loss.
🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞
🔥 It only took three years, but it’s finally over! On the last possible day before it became law — with or without him — sleepy Joe Biden startled himself into consciousness and signed House Joint Resolution 7, ending the federal state of emergency a month earlier than Joe said he wanted to end it.
I’m thinking of having that framed and put up in my office under a metal plate reading, “15 Days To Slow the Spread.” You know, so I can remember for next time.
Many, but not all pandemic measures are conditioned on the federal state of emergency. For example, the jab mandate for incoming foreigners is set to expire soon but could be extended. Still, lots of federal, state and local emergency provisions will end along with the federal state of emergency, and the remaining ones will be harder to defend.
While this is a very happy day for most of us, please keep in your thoughts those negatively affected by the conclusion of the national emergency, like folks who’d been making money hand over fist selling cheap off-label PPE to government agencies that didn’t need them at three times retail on no-bid contracts awarded by their friends and relatives in various government offices.
So — officially — there IS NO EMERGENCY. So there.
🔥 Downtown San Francisco Whole Foods’ premium store location, 67,000 square feet of organic goodness, has closed, the free-range eggs carefully packed up, the hand-ground coffee shipped back to environmentally-friendly farms in Costa Rica, and the non-GMO turkey bacon trucked away to other stores.
The woke retailer blamed the closure — after just one year of operation — on the inconvenience of fishing used needles out of the salad bar, homeless transvestites aggressively complaining to workers about demons and UFO aliens stealing their methadone, and customers’ and workers’ parking lot experience being painfully similar to competing in the Hunger Games.
City officials squawked ineffectively at the news like angry chickens waiting for the henhouse news cycle to rotate, promising San Fran citizens they’d somehow refill the city’s depleted police force “within five years,” right after they figure out how to pay $5M dollars each in “reparations” to completely-neutrally-selected citizens with no nepotism or favoritism whatsoever for something that happened two hundred years ago.* (*But not anything that happened four hundred years ago, or six hundred years ago, and only things that happened in the Confederate States, not anything that happened in California* (*not a slave state), or Africa, or Europe, or China, or anyplace else that interferes with the carefully-considered and totally well-thought-out plan. It’s Science-ish.)
According to official statistics, San Francisco’s goal is to have 2,100 full-time officers, but currently is scraping the bottom around 1,500, and the trend is sinking. Folks who used to live in the area, like Elon Musk, expressed concern over the condition downtown:
In related news, it looks like Gavin Newsom might be planning a Presidential campaign, so he can make all of America like San Francisco.
🔥 In related news, tech giant Bob Lee, 43, founder of a new privacy-focused digital currency platform, and former CTO of popular payment system Square, was brutally stabbed to death last week in downtown San Francisco in a baffling, random killing.
Mr. Lee was repeatedly stabbed in San Francisco early on April 4th, making a chilling final 911 call where he pleaded for help and gasped the gravity of his injuries. In audio from a police scanner, a dispatcher tells responding officers: “There’s a male screaming ‘help,’ saying, ‘someone stabbed me’. Advised he is bleeding out.”
Over the next couple days in San Francisco, cyclist Ethan Boyes would be killed by a speeding car, and former fire commissioner Don Carmignani would be brutally beaten by a man armed with a metal pipe in the Marina district.
So Whole Foods might have a point.
🔥 In even more related news, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story last week headlined, “California Bill to Make It Easier to Place People on Psychiatric Holds Advances.”
In other words, after creating the crisis, California is poised to make it easier to temporarily or PERMANENTLY detain, and give involuntary medical treatment to any people with any “mental illness or drug addiction [that] inhibits their ability to keep themselves safe.”
I wonder if refusing to get jabbed would count? I mean, being deluded by disinformation into not taking the shot that would save them from nearly certain death from a mild respiratory virus.
The law defines people at risk of “serious harm” as “failure to meet certain conditions, including, among other things, attend to needed personal or medical care and attend to self-protection or personal safety.”
Huh. The Chronicle noted the bill is racing though the legislature with bipartisan support and is expected to easily pass.
Problem, reaction, solution.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. What say you?
🔥 ZeroHedge ran a story yesterday headlined, “Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency.”
On my birthday, March 10th, two matching bills were filed in the Texas legislature that would establish a digital currency backed by gold, that would be redeemable in cash or gold, and usable in everyday transactions.
The state of Texas would hold enough gold to back the currency on behalf of the digital currency holders. They might need to expand Fort Knox.
ZeroHedge quoted Professor William Greene, an expert on constitutional tender, who said in a paper for the Mises Institute that if people in multiple states actually started using gold instead of Federal Reserve notes, it would effectively nullify the Federal Reserve and end the federal government’s monopoly on money. So.
While it remains to be seen how a court would rule, most analysts think Texas’ proposed currency would be Constitutional. The Constitution states in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall…make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
In other words, gold and silver coins are Constitutionally okay.
Electronic currency has often been called a “coin:” BitCOIN, StableCOIN, and so forth. Texas’ digital currency might simply be found to be an electronic “coin.” On the other hand, the Supreme Court might find that the Drafters relied on the widely-used definition of “coin” at the time, which was a physical, round, metal currency, and so that definition should control.
While I can’t confirm this, I got some intel yesterday that one of the organizers of the Texas bill is meeting with another large-state governor on Friday. I’m not a big fan of digital currencies in general, but competing options might be a good idea in light of whatever the Fed announced earlier this month it is cooking up as a CBDC (or something similar to one).
Currency backed by gold seems like a good idea just now.
🔥 James O’Keefe’s OMG’s story about apparent ActBlue donation-laundering is gaining some momentum. Just in the last week, the story has been covered in TownHall, RealClearPolitics, The Post Millennial, The American Spectator, and other conservative outlets. “Citizen journalists” are repeating James’ investigation in their own states and finding similar responses from elderly homeowners who seem baffled that thousands of donations were made in their names.
Corporate media is still embargoing the story. We’ll see if they can hold out.
💉 Buff Hollywood A-list action hero Chris Helmsworth is bowing out. The Melbourne Herald-Sun ran a story last week headlined, “Chris Hemsworth Taking on Fewer Acting Roles After Alzheimer’s risk.” The sub-headline explained, “Chris Hemsworth denied he was planning to retire from acting anytime soon – but leaked details about his upcoming schedule have painted a different picture.”
The official story, reported in Variety, is that Hemsworth, 39, took a genetic test recently on a lark and discovered he’s at high risk for Alzheimer’s. It’s not a diagnosis, it’s just a genetic profile connected with higher rates of the disabling disease.
Helsworth said the results of his genetic test “triggered something in me to want to take some time off.”
Hmm.
A leaked schedule of Chris’s upcoming projects showed the Australian actor is actually wrapping up ALL his pending projects — with nothing scheduled after that. Helmsworth said “I’ve been completing the things I was already contracted to do,” adding that he plans to “go home and … to have a good chunk of time off and just simplify. Be with the kids, be with my wife.”
It sounds a lot more like retirement than a little time off, and reminds me of Bruce Willis’s tragic story. I’m not the only one who thinks so. News Wire’s headline explicitly stated, “Chris Hemsworth Will Reportedly Retire After Wrapping Up Current Projects.”
Who knows? It could be just what Chris said, and who could blame him? He’s married with three kids. Hollywood does not sound like a whole lot of wholesome fun these days.
But his explanation seems a little … thin. The jabbed actor could have provided a little more detail for his career-ending decision than a random retail genetic test.
💉 Democrat representative “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) announced last week that his daughter Rosa, 28, had died overnight in her sleep AT HOME.
Chuy García, a fixture of Chicago politics for over thirty years, was elected to Congress in 2018. He recently lost in the primary and then backed Brandon Johnson’s successful run for Chicago mayor.
I read about two dozen short news articles and couldn’t find a cause of death mentioned anywhere. It’s very SADS when a young, healthy person dies suddenly and unexpectedly in their sleep.
We grieve with the García family and pray that the real cause of their daughter’s untimely demise will soon be discovered.
I think it will be any day now.
Have a terrific Tuesday, and I’ll catch you right back here tomorrow for more!
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
