The Federal Reserve System (Fed), established in 1913, was designed to operate independently of the federal government. The Fed is overseen by a seven-member Board of Governors who are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate for 14-year terms. The terms are staggered so that one Governor’s term expires every two years. Once their terms expire, Board members cannot be reappointed (although if they were appointed to a partial term because their predecessor left early, they could be).

So, what sort of judges is President Biden nominating to the federal courts? If Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren is a baseline, we are in trouble. 

As we noted, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has plans for your automobile. In the style of Josef Stalin, who pulled The Grapes of Wrath from Soviet theatres, WEF bosses dislike the concept of people owning cars and driving wherever they want. Now from the same quarters comes strange ideas about what people should be able to say. 

You may have heard about a device that can be attached to handguns to turn them into rapid-fire automatic pistols. Called “machine gun conversion devices” or “switches,” they definitely make handguns more dangerous. After the first round is fired, recoil from that and subsequent rounds make such a gun difficult to control. Absent a skilled shooter, rounds are likely to strike targets they were not intended to hit.

Legend has it that an art collector once asked Michaelangelo to describe the challenges he faced in sculpting one of his most iconic works. 

“It was actually quite easy,” Michaelangelo drolly replied, “I just chipped away the parts of the stone that didn’t look like David.” 

California’s SB 876 is a bill that would create a state Digital Education Equity Program (DEEP). This program will be run by the California Department of Education, and the sponsors of the bill argue it would give help and training to schools and other educational organizations in using technology in their classrooms.

Hollywood has a reputation for entrenched nepotism: Fairbanks, Houstons, Douglases, Barrymores, and Redgraves all got the industry’s plum roles for generations. A recent New York Magazine article spoke about the “nepo babies” and that they are thriving in an industry where a famous last name is valuable intellectual property. A young celebrity brings instant marketing appeal with millions of TikTok followers as the young and restless range of acting ability consists of modeling a variety of bathing suits and creating drama on the world’s best beaches. The short film The Rightway was directed by Steven Spielberg’s daughter, starred Sean Penn’s son, and was written by Stephen King’s son.

As The Epoch Times reports, “the era of cars as the ultimate tool for personal freedom and mobility will, if the future the World Economic Forum (WEF) envisions comes to pass, soon be over.” This prophecy recalls actions taken in the late 1940s by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The U.S. government has once again smacked into the national debt ceiling. Technically, that means the U.S. government can’t borrow more than the $31.4 trillion previously approved by the U.S. Congress. But in practice, what it means is that the U.S. Treasury will start playing a shell game called “extraordinary measures” with the funds it controls. That game will continue until the U.S. Congress votes to reset the debt ceiling to a new level.

On January 12, British historian Paul Johnson passed away at the age of 94. Johnson authored many books, including A History of Christianity, A History of the American People, Birth of the Modern, and Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties. In this book, widely considered to be his most influential work, Johnson exposes one of the many attempts to divide the world into an oppressor class and a victim class:

In due course, the term “Third World” began to seem a little threadbare from overuse. The Paris intellectual fashion-factory promptly supplied a new one: “North-South.” It was coined in 1974 when French President, Giscard d’Estaing, called a conference of “oil importing, oil-exporting and non-oil developing nations.” The idea was to link guilt to “the North” and innocence to “the South.” This involved a good deal of violence to simple geography as well as to economic facts. The so-called “South” was represented by Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Zaire and Zambia. The “North” consisted of Canada, the EEC powers, Japan, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. Eleven of the “South” states were actually north of the equator, and one of them, Saudi Arabia, had the highest per capita income. Australia, the only continent entirely south of the equator, had to be classified as “North,” presumably because it was predominantly white and capitalist. The Soviet Bloc was omitted altogether though entirely in the North. In short, the concept was meaningless, except for political abuse. But for this it served very well. 

Writers with that kind of perception are hard to find. The prolific Paul Johnson rests in peace and his works will live on.