Famed director Peter Jackson’s (They Shall Not Grow Old, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy) epic documentary The Beatles: Get Back dropped on DisneyPlus during Thanksgiving weekend. It’s a feast for Beatles fans. Unfortunately, for those not immersed in everything Beatles, the nearly nine-hour, three-part documentary series is a slog.

With a little more context, however, even non-Beatles fans can extract a great deal of insight from this film footage of the most commercially successful and iconic band of the last seventy years.

Upending Convention

Jackson has achieved an admirable and historically important feat. Painstakingly editing more than 150 hours of previously unknown audio and video tape, Jackson and his team have corrected a persistent and inaccurate narrative surrounding the most important pop music band of the last fifty years.

Perhaps one of 2021’s most anticipated big-budget Hollywood films will end up as the year’s biggest flop. Steven Spielberg’s update to West Side Story had enough buzz to rake in four Golden Globe Nominations just three days after it hit American theaters. Yet, even without streaming services to siphon off audiences, the movie tanked—generating just $10 million during its opening weekend. Few analysts expect it to cover its reportedly $100 million production budget before going into online streaming.

This is unfortunate. Spielberg’s version of West Side Story is better in many respects than the 1961 film. It’s also more true to the long-running 1957 Tony award-winning play, which was inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. West Side Story’s tale of the tragic consequences of prejudice and retributive justice is perhaps even more relevant today.

The Biden-Harris administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) Act is a bad spending bill. But it wasn’t until Friday, December 10, 2021 that anyone fully appreciated how bad it really is.

That was the day the Congressional Budget Office released its estimate of the full cost of H.R. 5376, the legislation containing the BBB Act’s spending. In its updated analysis, the CBO dropped the pretense that politicians would allow the bill’s new spending and welfare measures to expire.

Using human missiles, i.e. migrants, against another state for political reasons is one of the oldest tricks in the diplomatic playbook.

Turkey’s Erdogan used it quite successfully since the Syrian refugee crisis that began ten years ago—and got the Europeans to take in a million refugees, give him money and turn a blind eye to his regime’s domestic authoritarianism and foreign policy antics. Castro’s Cuba used it long before Erdogan, for instance in 1980 and 1994, creating internal problems for his archenemy—the U.S.— and gaining political oxygen by diffusing both the internal and external pressure for change.

Business Insider‘s Dave Levinthal broke a big story in the week before Christmas 2021. After a five-month investigation, he found 52 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers have violated the STOCK Act.

What Is the STOCK Act?

The Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act is an anti-corruption law. It requires lawmakers and employees of the Congress, along with their close family members, to report all their investment transactions involving individual stocks, bonds, and commodity futures to regulators. The law aims to prevent members of Congress and their staff members from cashing in on the insider knowledge they possess of what’s in legislation and budget bills that can affect the fortunes of businesses. Under the law, they get up to 45 days to report their investment transactions.

It is a bellwether moment for state and local government pensions funds around the country. CalPERS, the pension fund for California state government employees, is turning to high-risk strategies to juice its investment returns.

The Federal Reserve and the Biden administration seem to have a very casual attitude toward inflation. When inflation started to draw some attention, the Federal Reserve’s official line was that it was transitory.

In June, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said it was temporary, and John Williams, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, predicted inflation for 2021 to be around 3%. In response to this month’s inflation numbers, President Biden said this is the peak, and inflation should decline rapidly after this peak. He blames inflation on supply chain issues.

On December 2 at the National Institutes of Health Joe Biden told reporters “I’ve seen more of Dr. Fauci than I have my wife. We kid each other. But — hey look, who’s president? Fauci.”

The Biden advisor, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently announced the arrival of Omicron. The Biden White House hinted at draconian measures such as seven-day quarantines after returning from abroad, mandatory testing under threat of legal punishment, and preventing non-compliant passengers from boarding flights.

Imagine a state that puts the pensions of its government employees ahead of just about everything else it does. Would you choose to live there? And if you did live there, how long could you afford to stay?

These are real life questions that were faced by people who lived in cities like Detroit and Stockton. In these cities, public officials gave very generous pensions and benefits to government employees in return for their political support. So generous, they contributed to their bankruptcies in a very non-virtuous cycle.

It’s not often you get to see cause and effect in action for government spending. Take the Biden-Harris administration’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue” plan. That’s the one I described as a “failure of fiscal discipline” for which “ordinary Americans will ultimately pay” back in March of this year.

That spending bill is back in the news because it lived up to that billing! If you saw the October 2021 inflation report, you already know how ordinary Americans are paying for it. Whatever “sugar high” President Biden’s spending gave to the Americans who got “stimmy” checks has worn off.