The Trump administration recently moved to cancel the de minimis trade exemption, a policy that previously allowed low-cost imports to enter the U.S. tariff-free. This was bad news for Temu, the Chinese e-commerce giant that built its business on ultra-cheap goods flooding the American market. However, many sellers on the platform found a sneaky solution: cheating the U.S. Postal Service. As Rest of World, a global nonprofit journalism organization, recently reported, Chinese sellers on Temu have discovered how to slash their shipping costs to virtually nothing by using counterfeit postage labels that trick USPS into delivering their packages for free. This isn’t a minor scheme. Fake labels can be bought on Chinese social media for as little as 60 cents each, while legitimate shipping costs range from $4 to $10. By dodging these fees, sellers pocket massive savings while the USPS, and ultimately the American taxpayer, covers the cost. The process is simple but highly effective. Vendors purchase fraudulent shipping labels and send them to small warehouse operators in the U.S. who are willing to take the legal risk. These warehouses print and attach the fake labels before dropping the packages at USPS locations. Because the postal system isn’t designed to verify every label in real time, these packages slip through undetected and get delivered, costing the USPS millions each year. Temu thrives on rock-bottom prices, attracting millions of American shoppers looking for bargains. As many as 185 million Americans use Temu every month — a staggering figure that underscores its grip on the U.S. market. But for sellers, staying profitable while keeping prices low is nearly impossible without cutting corners. Some sellers openly admit that they would not make money if they paid for legitimate shipping. One vendor, as the Rest of World piece noted, confessed to purchasing 1,000 to 2,000 fake labels daily, reducing his shipping costs by more than 90 percent. The pressure to compete in Temu’s race-to-the-bottom marketplace makes illegal methods like counterfeit postage an attractive option. The scale of the platform’s dominance raises serious questions about how a Chinese-owned company, operating with little oversight, has been able to reshape American consumer habits while exploiting regulatory blind spots. When the Trump administration temporarily revoked the de minimis trade exemption in early 2025, some Chinese merchants stored goods in U.S. warehouses to avoid customs scrutiny, but others turned to outright fraud to maintain their margins. The real victims of this scam are Americans. The USPS, already financially strained, loses millions of dollars every year because of counterfeit shipping labels. Since the postal service is a government-run entity, those losses ultimately fall on taxpayers. Meanwhile, legitimate American businesses are being undercut by sellers who exploit loopholes to offer artificially cheap products. Small retailers and e-commerce sellers who play by the rules find themselves struggling to compete with prices made possible only through fraud. USPS workers have encountered suspicious shipping labels but often lack the manpower to investigate. Postal employees in New York City have reported seeing fake labels, yet the packages were still processed for delivery. Once fraudulent labels make it past initial screening points, there is little that can be done to stop them. Investigators describe the scale of losses as “astronomical.” The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has begun cracking down, intercepting counterfeit-labeled packages at major ports like New York and Los Angeles. In one high-profile case, mentioned in the Rest of World report, a California logistics operator pleaded guilty to defrauding USPS out of $150 million using fake postage. She now faces up to 10 years behind bars. However, despite these enforcement efforts, the scale of the fraud makes it difficult to contain. Temu’s problems go far beyond the USPS postage scam, presenting a serious economic, security, and geopolitical threat to the United States. At its core, the e-commerce giant operates through deception — dodging import tariffs, violating labor laws, and harvesting vast amounts of user data that could ultimately be funneled to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One of the most alarming aspects of Temu is its data collection practices. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, published last year, reveals that Temu operates like spyware, harvesting user data far beyond what is necessary for e-commerce. Its parent company, PDD Holdings, has documented ties to Chinese state-controlled entities, and under China’s National Intelligence Law, Temu is legally required to provide data to CCP authorities upon request. This means American user data — including shopping habits, personal preferences, and potentially sensitive device information — could be weaponized for surveillance, influence campaigns, or even cyber warfare. Temu’s exploitative tactics are part of a larger strategy by Chinese firms to dominate global digital commerce while gathering vast amounts of data. Like TikTok, it represents another front in China’s strategic competition with the U.S., using economic infiltration as a tool for both financial and informational dominance. The question isn’t just whether Temu is a threat — it’s how long America can afford to ignore it. READE MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: The (Inconvenient) Truth About the War in Ukraine What All Americans Can Learn from Ellen DeGeneres’s Disastrous Escape to Europe The post Trump Closed the Door on Cheap Chinese Imports. Temu Found an Open Window. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

La humanidad es el único dios totalmente falso. [Humanity is the only totally false god.] — Nicolás Gómez Dávila I Imagine waking up from a coma, or returning from your rest-cure after a nasty bout with Influenza B, and finding the entire media ecosystem caught up in an acrimonious debate over some obscure Christian doctrine like Preterism or Monophysitism. Surely you would think you were still in the grip of a somnolent hallucination or bizarre fever dream. Yet that is essentially our reality, as the flame war over Vice President JD Vance’s reference to the Augustinian doctrine of ordo amoris (“order of love” or “order of charity”) enters its third week with no sign of dying down. Turn on CNN and you might encounter an utterly wet Passionist priest chastising the vice president for his theological stances. Browse the pages of Newsweek and you might find lefty journalists eagerly citing bizarre fringe figures like Joash Thomas, a self-styled “Masala Chai theologian,” who has apparently determined that Vance’s interpretation of the ordo amoris is “not a Christian concept; it’s a Western individualistic one,” as if those were necessarily at odds. And turn on Fox News and you might just catch Border Czar Tom Homan announcing that he has “harsh words for the pope.” What a time to be alive. Incredible things are happening in the Year of Our Lord 2025! So much ink has been spilled over Vance’s forty-eight-word-long tweet, with the debate drawing in conservatives and nationalists, woke Catholics and leftwing journalists, globalists and effective altruists, and even the Supreme Pontiff himself, that I almost hesitate to add to a veritable flood of commentary. What is more, abstruse theological speculation is not the sort of thing I am particularly immense at, though I would never begrudge the contributions of various theologians and ecclesiastics past and present. For my part, I have always preferred to cast my lot with the likes of Nachman of Breslov, who in his Likutey Moharan maintained that “the greatest wisdom of all wisdoms is not to be wise at all, rather to be pure and honest with simplicity,” for “philosophies and intellectual wisdoms are not needed at all. Only pure and simple faith. Because too much sophistication can greatly damage a person.” And then we have the First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which we are told how “it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” For this reason, I tread rather warily, but the very fact that an Augustinian theological construct has become a topic of contentious political debate all throughout the Western world is simply too delicious to pass up. In any event, the devoted reader of The American Spectator is likely aware by now that on Jan. 30, 2025, while sparring with the former Tory politician Rory Stewart over the Trump administration’s America First immigration policies on the X platform, JD Vance directed his opponent to Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? Vance then called Stewart a mid-wit — perhaps a touch cruel but fair enough on the merits. Stewart’s response came in the form of a frantic tweet-storm that I would like to think Vance never bothered to read, culminating in the accusation that the vice president’s “attempts to speak for Christ are false and dangerous. Nowhere does Jesus suggest that love is to be prioritized in concentric circles. His love is universal.” As a riposte, this left something to be desired, since nobody has ever disputed the universal nature of Christ’s love for humanity, and Vance was not “speaking for Christ,” but was simply addressing the practical nature of our own duties, obligations, and affections when interacting with our family, community, nation, and world. Who could have guessed at that juncture that the ordo amoris debate would last for weeks on end, even prompting an intervention from the Vatican itself? (RELATED: The Vice President and the ‘Ordo Amoris’) II We have seen Vance’s tweet subjected to incessant and increasingly perfervid criticism by leftwing Catholics and their ideological allies, but it is noteworthy that none of them ever bother addressing the question the vice president so straightforwardly posed: are our moral duties to our own children really the same as our duties to a stranger living thousands of miles away? Does anyone, anyone, actually think or (more importantly) behave this way? Well, one person does come to mind, albeit a fictional one: the satirical character Mrs. Jellyby from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a “telescopic philanthropist” more concerned about the Borrioboola-Gha tribe on the left bank of the Niger than her own flesh and blood. The tactful but eminently sensible orphan Esther Summerson sets the scene: [Mr. Jarndyce] asked me what I thought of Mrs. Jellyby. “She exerts herself very much for Africa, sir,” I said. “Nobly!” returned Mr. Jarndyce. “But you answer like Ada.” Whom I had not heard. “You all think something else, I see.” “We rather thought,” said I, glancing at Richard and Ada, who entreated me with their eyes to speak, “that perhaps she was a little unmindful of her home.” “Floored!” cried Mr. Jarndyce. I was rather alarmed again. “Well! I want to know your real thoughts, my dear. I may have sent you there on purpose.” “We thought that, perhaps,” said I, hesitating, “it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them.” That charity starts at home is proverbial, and no less a figure than Thomas Aquinas addressed the “order of charity” in his encyclopedic Summa Theologiae, laying it all out in decidedly commonsensical terms: We ought out of charity to love those who are more closely united to us more, both because our love for them is more intense, and because there are more reasons for loving them. Now intensity of love arises from the union of lover and beloved: and therefore we should measure the love of different persons according to the different kinds of union, so that a man is more loved in matters touching that particular union in respect of which he is loved. And, again, in comparing love to love we should compare one union with another. Accordingly we must say that friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle. Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers. Perhaps Thomas Aquinas, the great Doctor Angelicus, was some sort of un-Christian bigot caught in the grip of a false and dangerous belief when he had the temerity to suggest that we should love our kindred most, or that a soldier should prefer his fellow soldiers to his enemy on the battlefield. Or maybe he possessed a basic grasp of human nature. “The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” Closer to our own time, we find C.S. Lewis, in his apologetic novel The Screwtape Letters, giving voice to the Senior Tempter Screwtape, who suggests to his demonic nephew that “Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s [i.e. victim’s] soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” Was C.S. Lewis, with his talk of neighbors and remote circumferences, also espousing a “false and dangerous” belief? Was Pope Benedict doing so when he issued his 2011 message “One Human Family,” which acknowledged the profound link between all human beings, but also recognized that “States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person. Immigrants, moreover, have the duty to integrate into the host Country, respecting its laws and its national identity.” Floored! It would be so very easy for Vance’s detractors to say the magic words “Yes, I have precisely the same affections, duties, and obligations towards a member of the Borrioboola-Gha tribe as I do towards my own offspring,” but none of them ever get around to saying this, presumably because none of them actually believe it, or realize that it would sound laughable if they did, just as it would come across as preposterous (and likely impeachable) if the vice president of the United States of America declared that he would henceforth place the interests of the Borrioboola-Gha tribe on equal footing with those of his own country. It is not a repudiation of the lessons of the parable of the Good Samaritan to insist that Christian notions of all-embracing love not be construed as necessitating socially, politically, economically, or militarily self-destructive behavior. The Constitution, as the old saying goes, is not a suicide pact. Neither, one assumes, is the gospel. III Why are Vance’s critics so allergic to common sense? It is an interesting question, involving political, psychological, spiritual, economic, and political considerations. Take Rory Stewart. It has subsequently come to light that his wife is a bit of a telescopic philanthropist herself. As Brendan O’Neill of the Spectator and Spiked has pointed out, Stewart’s spouse heads a “batty British charity” called Turquoise Mountain which recently had its USAID handout of a million dollars slashed. It was Rory who broke the story. Looking even soppier than normal in his weekly conflab with Alastair Campbell on their surreally successful podcast, The Rest Is Politics, he said USAID funding for Turquoise Mountain “just stopped.” It had a contract with USAID, and it “had another million dollars to go,” and yet mad, bad Trump pulled the plug, Rory almost sobbed … [Turquoise Mountain] does some good stuff, like restoring historic buildings, and it does some insane stuff … In a remarkable scene in Adam Curtis’s 2015 documentary, Bitter Lake, a woman from Turquoise Mountain was shown extolling the virtues of Duchamp’s inverted urinal to a roomful of incredulous Afghan women. It was super rad when Duchamp “put this toilet in an art gallery,” she said, as the women shook their veiled heads in disbelief. Now, just like that, the U.S. will no longer fund such valiant crusades to enlighten the most brutalised women on Earth about Dadaist stunts from a century ago. If Americans come to the conclusion that “it is right to begin with the obligations of home … and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them,” they might very well decide that combatting the fentanyl crisis, or homelessness, or chronic disease, or the cost-of-living crisis, or anything else you might think of, should take precedence over whatever the bright minds at Turquoise Mountain are cooking up. This is not meant to be an indictment of all international NGOs, many of which do vital work, as I know from personal experience, but a recognition of the duties, responsibilities, and legitimate interests of the American government and the finite nature of its resources. (RELATED: Trump Should Shutter USAID — Development Economics Is a Hotbed for Corruption) If Rory Stewart has a bit of a personal stake in the free and unmonitored flow of U.S. foreign aid, so too do the many Catholic and other religious charities that have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to support migration and refugee services. The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell has discussed the insidious nature of some of these organizations, which “basically complete the last leg of the human smuggling chain. The cartels bring them to the border. Illegal aliens turn themselves into Border Patrol because they full well know they’re not going to get removed. And then Border Patrol drops them off at the NGOs. And then the NGOs liaises their travel and gets them wherever they need to go in the country. Oftentimes, for a lot of folks, that means to a place that they were trafficked to work or a human smuggling design.” The new administration’s policies are an existential threat to this racket, making it all the more urgent for supporters of open borders and unfettered illegal immigration to oppose restrictionist policies that are proving increasingly popular both in polls and in the polling booth. It is as if we are trying to rescue our own drowning children while being asked to permit more children to come in and drown in our pond. Some of the criticisms leveled against Vance thus come as a result of vested interests. The more philosophical and theological objections have, however, proven equally unpersuasive. A few examples should suffice. The least interesting reproaches have probably come from the effective altruist camp. Scott Alexander Siskind, the Bay Area psychiatrist and author of the Slate Star Codex blog, responded to Vance with the following hypothetical: “I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.” This is such a disingenuous and profoundly stupid argument that it hardly warrants a response. The situation we are in, as a nation, bears no resemblance to Siskind’s immature scenario; instead, it is as if we are trying to rescue our own drowning children while being asked to permit more children to come in and drown in our pond, while demands are made to write checks on behalf of children drowning in other, far-flung ponds, with no assurance that the money will even help save them from peril. If this is at all indicative of the intellectual attributes of effective altruists, then I can’t imagine there is much of a future in that particular philosophical movement. Only marginally more thought-provoking are the reactions from the Catholic left. The Jesuit writer and editor James J. Martin, SJ, in various posts on X, Instagram, and Facebook — which are invariably accompanied by stock photographs of tousle-haired war-orphaned moppets sipping on juice boxes — has gamely tried to recast St. Thomas Aquinas’s conception ordo amoris as being “primarily for reminding people what to do in families,” which is of course rubbish since, as we have just seen, the medieval theologian went out of his way to mention “civic fellowship” and the “comradeship of battle.” Martin may contend that “No one in the early church thought that the call to discipleship was to take singular care of your family and then give strangers the leftovers,” but there have to be priorities, given that Saint Paul warns us quite clearly that “if any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Again, one can recognize the existence of “one human family,” and live a life of charity and goodwill toward men, without advocating on behalf of anarchy at the border or profligate, often counterproductive spending abroad, however profitable those may be to certain institutions. Practical considerations do exist. And I would find it very surprising if Catholic doctrine absolutely requires, with no questions asked, the toleration of the presence of criminal illegal aliens within one’s borders, or the establishment of 2SLGBTQI+ outreach centers in Bratislava with taxpayer dollars. Father Martin did manage to confine his remonstrance mainly to the theological arena; far more obnoxious were the televised remarks made by the Passionist Father Edward Beck, who during a Feb. 12, 2025 appearance on CNN contrasted the pope’s “eighty-eight years as being pope” with Vance, “a Catholic only for six years.” The idea that Catholic converts, usually far more conversant in scriptural and doctrinal matters than their cradle Catholic counterparts, should be denigrated as second-class adherents is quite disturbing. Beck presumably thought he was serving as Pope Francis’s strongest soldier, and accidentally went a bit overboard, which brings us to the pope’s own reaction to Vance’s tweet. In his Feb. 10, 2025 letter from the Vatican to the American bishops, the pope stated that “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” and proposed a “true ordo amoris” that is a “fraternity open to all, without exception,” which isn’t really an ordo, is it? For Pope Francis, “worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.” Obviously, there is an element of hypocrisy here. As Tom Homan alluded to in his “harsh words” for the pope, Vatican City is secured by stout walls and the ever-alert and well-armed Gendarmerie Corps and Pontifical Swiss Guard, and penalties for trespass (severe fines and jail time) have even been toughened in recent months. It is not just a matter of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness, though. The pope is undeniably a man of the left, who regards inequality not as an ineluctable aspect of human nature but “a state of social sin that cries to Heaven,” and who has consistently indulged in anti-capitalist rhetoric, in stark contrast to his two predecessors. A leopard cannot be expected to change his spots. But there are times of crisis in which airy universalist abstractions are less than helpful. Consider Pope Francis’s studious neutrality during the Russia–Ukraine War, during which he has regularly urged Ukrainians to have the “courage of the white flag,” and for Ukrainian youth to “be patriots, reject war, and forgive,” even as Russian invaders have turned their country into an abattoir while destroying churches and persecuting priests, among other atrocities. Contrast this rhetoric with the righteous, genuinely soul-stirring prayers of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in these times of armed conflict: We ask You today: save, O God, Your people and bless Your inheritance, our people, our government, our Army. Hear the cry, the lamentation of Your people of Ukraine. Give victory to the Ukrainian Army over the unjust Russian occupier and aggressor. Bless our volunteers and doctors. Bless all those who save the human life given by You. Today we beg You for our brothers and sisters in the occupied territories, in the war zone. We plead to You for displaced persons and refugees, for all those to whom the war has inflicted deep wounds. O, Lord, You are our Savior, the only physician of our souls and bodies, save us today! In Your fortitude, Ukraine is and will be Your invincible State! O, Mother of God, we give our Motherland under Your protection today. Cover it with your honest omophorion. Mother of God, Kyiv Oranta, pray for Your people! Amen. Has the Father and Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church His Beatitude Sviatoslav taken leave of his senses? What of the “true ordo amoris,” which does not distinguish between Ukrainian defenders and Russian aggressors? Niccolò Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy, submitted that Now even if it seems as if the world has become effeminate and heaven powerless, this is certainly due to the cowardice of the men who have taken our religion to be one of inaction rather than strength. For were they to consider that religion permits us to exalt and defend our homeland, they would see that religion demands that we love and honor our homeland and that we train ourselves to be such as can defend it. Pope Francis’s skepticism of “personal, community or national identity” should set off resounding warning bells for Christians, even those whose faith is of a less muscular variety than Machiavelli’s. We should not be fretting about the continued existence of personal, local, or national identities. Indeed, at the end of the day, it is the individual’s soul that matters most, for as the Catholic philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila observed: Nuestra alma tiene porvenir. La humanidad no tiene ninguno. [Our soul has a future. Humanity has none.] IV Those increasingly outspoken leftists in the Roman Catholic hierarchy are playing a dangerous game. One questions the wisdom of, say, the incoming Archbishop of Detroit, Edward Weisenburger, who recently waded into the USAID debate, and who is infamous for having explored the possibility of issuing “canonical penalties,” i.e. excommunication, against Trump administration officials enforcing the immigration laws of the land. (I doubt papal officials will be similarly threatened with canonical penalties when persons convicted of illegal entry into Vatican City are fined 25,000 euros, imprisoned for four years, and banned from entering Vatican territory for a period of up to 15 years.) One questions the wisdom of priestly publicity hounds who intentionally distort the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or tell Catholic converts that their (altogether sensible) opinions inherently count for less. And one questions the wisdom of a pontiff who imagines that personal, community, or national identities distort social life rather than serve to define and protect it. What to do, then? The pseudonymous Nietzschean internet personality Bronze Age Pervert has archly suggested that “Allowing the communist pope to elect church officials within the United States is an attack on American national sovereignty … only the elected representative of the American people should appoint bishops and such.” This was indeed the solution during certain periods of the Holy Roman Empire, although it set off numerous investiture crises, and the 1516 Concordat of Bologna did give the French king the right to regulate ecclesiastical policies, to appoint bishops and abbots, and to restrict the influence of the papacy. But that couldn’t possibly happen in this day and age, you say? Well, it is happening, right now, only it is happening in Communist China. He Yuyan, a contributor to Bitter Winter, has shown how the papacy has no say whatsoever in Chinese bishopric appointments: First, the CCP “elects” a bishop and publicly announces the news. Second, for several months there is no reaction from the Holy See, which strongly suggests it had not previously been informed of the election. Third, after a hiatus of months the Pope “appoints” the bishop — whose election the CCP had already announced months earlier. Fourth, a consecration ceremony is held where the Papal mandate is not mentioned at all as if it were irrelevant, while a letter of approval is read by the “Bishops’ Conference” of the Patriotic Catholic Church, which is not recognized as such by Rome. That is not going to happen in the United States, needless to say, but it is curious to note the abjectly supine and cowardly posture the Vatican adopts in its dealings with the communist-atheist regime in Beijing, as opposed to its antagonistic attitude towards the second Trump administration. Outraged at common sense policies, and reacting rather like vampires to sunlight when the slightest mention of the down-to-earth ordo amoris doctrine is made, leftist Catholics and their fellow travelers are running a grave risk. In thrall to universalism, it seems that they would like to see a confrontation between Ecclesia and Mundus, but if the Ecclesia is going to be interpreted as standing against the individual, the community, the nation, native intelligence, sovereignty, and the safety of the people, then it is a confrontation that is bound to favor strength over inaction, common sense over absurdity, and sound policy over the self-destructive abnegation of basic duties and responsibilities. The great doctors of the Church gave us the ordo amoris for a reason. Let us not try to replace it with abstract notions of “humanity,” the “only totally false god” there is. READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: Never Had It So Bad: The Decline of the Great British Empire The Cold Goddess: Anne de Kyiv and Her Brigade Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness The post The Obligations of Home: JD Vance and the Ordo Amoris appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As Elon Musk targets fathomless waste in the federal government, protests ring out that the DOGE boss is not elected. As Victor Davis Hanson points out, neither was Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan or other powerful players in government. Elon Musk has “far more legal authority than did FDR’s best friend Harry Hopkins. He moved into the White House and de facto set U.S. foreign assistance policies toward Stalin’s Russia.” Trump’s DOGE boss is more like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, and William Knudson, “appointed by FDR to run the wartime economy.” Musk’s critics from California also seem unaware that the Golden State once boasted an intrepid foe of government waste and fraud. For state auditor Elaine Howle, California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) was a primary target. As the title of her report explained, “EDD’s Poor Planning and Ineffective Management Left it Unprepared to Assist Californians Unemployed by COVID-19 Shutdowns.” That all took place on the watch of Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for labor secretary, never confirmed by the Senate. (READ MORE: Biden Forgot to Pardon One of His Picks — Trump Must Prosecute Julie Su) Howle also rode herd on the state’s vaunted “bullet train,” which carries no passengers but maintains a Sacramento headquarters and three regional offices. The state’s High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) once took down thousands of pages of public records from its website, but Howle was able to uncover conflicts of interest with HSRA and contractors. The auditor titled her report “California High-Speed Rail Authority: Its Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.” This boondoggle did not distract Howle from the vaunted University of California. In 2013, the state’s choice for president of the 10-campus UC system was former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, who headed President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. Napolitano had no experience as an educator but UC Regent Sherry Lansing hailed her as “a distinguished and dedicated public servant who has earned trust at the highest, most critical levels of our country’s government.” As UC boss, it didn’t exactly turn out that way. As Elaine Howle revealed in 2017, Napolitano maintained a hidden slush fund of more than $175,000,000, a lot of money by any standard. As the auditor wondered, “Why did we need to increase tuition if the Office of the President has $175 million in reserve that nobody knew about?” In her April 2017 report, Howle revealed, that Napolitano’s office “intentionally interfered” with the audit. Despite the outcry from embattled UC students, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra declined to investigate. It was hardly Napolitano’s only brush with California law. The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), the victorious Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot, eliminated racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. In 2020, Napolitano supported Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, which targeted CCRI for repeal. California voters opted to keep the law in place, by a margin greater than in 1996. That did not prevent the University of California from establishing a costly DEI bureaucracy producing no educational benefit. Elaine Howle retired at the end of 2021 and her reports prompted little if any reform in state government. Despite no path to completion, the bullet train continues to waste taxpayer dollars. By contrast, Elon Musk’s DOGE has recovered billions and made a strong case that some bureaucracies deserve elimination. Such agencies can also be found in California. (RELATED: Most Americans Support DOGE and ‘Energetic’ Trump) The unelected California Coastal Commission (CCC) overrides scores of elected city and county governments — and by extension, the voters — on land-use issues. The CCC takes a dim view of Californians’ property rights and discourages the clearing of brush, which provides kindling for wildfires. By nixing desalination projects, the Commission prevents California from fully accessing its major natural resource, the Pacific Ocean. Consider also the unelected California Air Resources Board (CARB) which seeks to achieve the state’s carbon neutrality goals by 2045. CARB is fond of imposing new regulations on gasoline, particularly when prices are running low, as in 2014. CARB boss Mary Nichols, like Napolitano, a lawyer, had been pushing for $5-a-gallon prices since the 1990s. Nichols also kept on staff Hien Tran who bought his statistics Ph.D. in a New York City diploma mill and fudged air pollution figures. CARB offers no hard data to back claims that its low carbon fuel standards benefit public health and environmental quality. On the other hand, it remains clear that inflated gas prices punish all Californians, particularly the workers. If Californians thought that was CARB’s ultimate goal it would be hard to blame them. CARB and the CCC make a strong case for their elimination, but in his quest to “Trump-proof” California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced no plans to reform or eliminate any state bureaucracy, however inefficient, counterproductive, or unaccountable. In these conditions, more waste, fraud, and wildfires will come as no surprise. READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Anthony Fauci Museum Exhibit Cancelled DEI in the Ashes: Special Envoy Ric Grennel and EPA Head Lee Zeldin Visit LA Biden Forgot to Pardon One of His Picks — Trump Must Prosecute Julie Su Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. The post California’s Elaine Howle — DOGE Before DOGE Was Cool appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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from BullionStar: Unprecedented Spreads Between Spot and Futures Prices in Gold and Silver Over the past few weeks, financial markets have experienced an unprecedented widening of spreads between spot and futures prices for both gold and silver. Traditionally narrow, these spreads have expanded to as much as USD $60 for gold and over USD $1 […]

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star: Well, it’s happened yet again folks.  The US Navy seems to have either revived the old  naval tactic of ramming, or it is becoming a hotbed of nuttery and incompetence, for yet another US Navy warship has collided with yet another merchant ship.  All this strangeness with American […]

Feb. 18, 2025: 8:50 p.m.: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejects Trump proposal for rare earth minerals  President Trump wants Ukraine to repay America for all the money that was funneled to them for the war effort during the Biden administration. Zelenskyy isn’t having the 50 percent fee of all its rare earth minerals as repayment, especially since he feels the proposal doesn’t do an adequate job of projecting Ukraine from additional Russian attacks, according to NBC News.

(FOX NEWS) — Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum said that despite singing at a recent charity concert, Steven Tyler won’t be going on tour again. “It was a really big moment for him because he hurt himself bad,” Sorum told WBAB radio recently of Tyler’s performance at the Jam for Janie Grammy Awards Viewing Party, which benefits his charity Janie’s Fund, after injuring his larynx last year. Will Steven Tyler Tour Again? “No, He’s Not”. Ex-Guns N’ Roses Drummer Matt Sorum Confirms Steven Tyler’s Touring Future With Three Firm Words. Tap below for details. https://t.co/Z26iScuU45 — American Songwriter (@AmerSongwriter) February 18, 2025 “Now is he going to tour again? No, he’s not, and I explain this to people. Steven cannot put himself under the rigors of doing a full worldwide tour because it’s a lot of pressure and if you’re not a singer you wouldn’t understand what he goes through, but he’s 77 years old, and he’s a perfectionist, and if he doesn’t sing correctly, it bothers him.”