Friday in North Carolina is going to be crazy. Kamala Harris, who doesn't list any policies on her website, is expected to announce her economic plan. President Joe Biden seems convinced that she's going…

Kraftwerk is playing at my house. The post ‘Disco Infiltrator’: The LCD Soundsystem songs that pay homage to Kraftwerk first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The date: Nov. 13, 1979.  Almost full 45 years ago. Americans — including my younger self — tuned into their televisions at 7:30 that night to see an announcement from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Typically, Reagan got to his point in the very first sentence. He said:   Good evening. I am here tonight to announce my intention to seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States. A hat tip here to radio host Jake Smith of WGMD 92.7. The other day on his show (where, full disclosure, I was a guest), Jake recalled Reagan’s now long-ago announcement for president in 1979, noting how relevant Reagan’s words still are today.  As America heads into another presidential election, every bit as important as would be the 1980 election with then-President Jimmy Carter — the Kamala Harris of the day — it is decidedly worth looking again at Reagan’s words.  Among other things, the then-new presidential candidate said this that night, with bold print for emphasis supplied today: There are those in our land today, however, who would have us believe that the United States, like other great civilizations of the past, has reached the zenith of its power; that we are weak and fearful, reduced to bickering with each other and no longer possessed of the will to cope with our problems. Much of this talk has come from leaders who claim that our problems are too difficult to handle. We are supposed to meekly accept their failures as the most which humanly can be done. They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where because of our past excesses it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don’t believe that. And, I don’t believe you do either. That is why I am seeking the presidency. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity. I don’t agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands. I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other free peoples of the world. The crisis we face is not the result of any failure of the American spirit; it is a failure of our leaders to establish rational goals and give our people something to order their lives by. If I am elected, I shall regard my election as proof that the people of the United States have decided to set a new agenda and have recognized that the human spirit thrives best when goals are set and progress can be measured in their achievement. …The people have not created this disaster in our economy; the federal government has. It has overspent, overestimated, and over regulated. It has failed to deliver services within the revenues it should be allowed to raise from taxes. …The key to restoring the health of the economy lies in cutting taxes. …We must put an end to the arrogance of a federal establishment which accepts no blame for our condition, cannot be relied upon to give us a fair estimate of our situation and utterly refuses to live within its means. I will not accept the supposed wisdom which has it that the federal bureaucracy has become so powerful that it can no longer be changed or controlled by any administration. ….We need more energy and that means diversifying our sources of supply away from the OPEC countries. Yes, it means more efficient automobiles. But it also means more exploration and development of oil and natural gas here in our own country. The only way to free ourselves from the monopoly pricing power of OPEC is to be less dependent on outside sources of fuel. …I believe this nation hungers for a spiritual revival; hungers to once again see honor placed above political expediency; to see government once again the protector of our liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege. Government should uphold and not undermine those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded: religion, education and, above all, family. Government cannot be clergyman, teacher and parent. It is our servant, beholden to us. We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of pilgrims, We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, andabove allresponsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill. I believe that you and I together can keep this rendezvous with destiny. It takes no imagination to realize that what Reagan said that long ago night applies perhaps even more to America today. Watching the socialist, Marxist campaign of the Democrats latest successor to 1979’s President Jimmy Carter – Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, the equally socialist Minnesota Governor Tim Walz- there is no imagination in realizing that the failures of the Biden-Harris Administration are because they have made a point of following the policies of 1970’s Democrats. Policies which Reagan would go on to illustrate with their dismal results in every step of the 1980 campaign. “You don’t have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be,” former President Donald Trump said during his press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club on Thursday. Indeed you don’t. A Harris–Walz presidency would double down on the seriously bad results of the Biden–Harris administration. With a little over two months to go until the November election, Americans have now reached the point where the summer vacations are winding down and the kids will soon be back in school. They will be forced by reality to understand the seriously bad results that are coming from the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. Just as Americans in 1980 had to come to grips with the results of President Jimmy Carter’s administration. That November night of 1979, Ronald Reagan laid out the policy reasons for the abundant failures and misery of the Carter administration. All these years later, Kamala Harris is campaigning for exactly the same Jimmy Carter policies that were failing Americans in 1979. To say the least, Reagan’s question from his later debate with Carter in October of 1980 is more than relevant coming from former President Donald Trump.  That famous question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” As in 1980, in 2024 the same question is still more than relevant.  That answer: A resounding NO! READ MORE: Harris Campaign Ad Calls Her ‘Tough’ on the Border From GDP to Reality: Putting the $35 Trillion Debt Into Perspective Selling Harris by Hiding Harris The post Remembering Reagan’s Warning appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As a journalist, it’s easy to turn around copy on any of the public policy and political debates of the day, but I struggle to write about religious issues in a meaningful way. My American Spectator columns detail the usual insanity in the California Capitol and Washington, DC, but what can I say about matters of faith, where my usual tool — reason — isn’t entirely useful? I grew up Jewish, the son of a Nazi Holocaust survivor. Our religion was important, but I was raised in a secular home where religious observance didn’t reflect any deep expression of faith. That led me on a journey to try to make sense of this inexplicable world. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. I became a Christian thanks to the patient evangelism of some friends in a college fellowship. My wife, Donna, still finds it a bit funny that the person who played the most significant role in this East Coast Jewish kid’s conversion was a traveling pastor from rural Kentucky. God does indeed work in mysterious ways. Donna, who grew up Catholic, and I eventually were married in the Episcopal Church and then attended various denominations as we embarked on our careers and started a family. Nearly thirty years ago, we found ourselves living in a small city in Ohio where I worked as the editorial page editor of a daily newspaper. We bopped from church to church and found the experience depressing. After attending a service that combined smarmy music with altar calls, I had finally had enough. I thought that there must be an alternative to emotional nondenominational services and atrophied mainstream congregations. I was a political writer, but I was tired of politics in the church. This article is taken from The American Spectator’s latest print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. At that time, a former Baptist minister showed up in town to start an Eastern Orthodox mission. I attended with a good friend who was also the newspaper’s religion editor. We read everything we could about Orthodoxy, which I had previously chalked up as the province of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Greece. I dragged along my wife, who at first came kicking and screaming. We hosted the fledgling mission in our living room and became members. My kids have been raised Orthodox. Recent news reports point to growth in Orthodox churches in the United States as people with no related ethnic affiliation or Orthodox background have flocked to join. A Wall Street Journal article reported last year that “[s]ome [Orthodox] pastors across the country report growth of their flocks by 15% or more in a single year owing to conversions, defying an overall trend of decline similar to that in other denominations.” The article added that the COVID-19 pandemic, “with all its social and economic disruption,” played a strong role in “usher[ing] in newcomers” who were “drawn by the ancient faith’s traditional teachings and the beauty of its worship, which prominently features the veneration of icons.” Many of the new converts, it further reported, are conservative young men. Actually, the church’s growth in America goes back to the mid-1980s, around a decade before my wife and I joined. Metropolitan Philip Saliba, a leader of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America (based in the Middle East), “made the controversial decision in the mid-1980s to embrace waves of evangelical converts (I am one of them),” wrote Terry Mattingly in his Eastern Christian Insights blog in 2014 after the metropolitan’s death. He reported that the number of Antiochian parishes subsequently increased from 66 to 275. American Orthodox Church leaders finally began to treat the church as one that has a vital mission in America and doesn’t merely provide (important as it may be) a place for religious observance for immigrant communities and their descendants. The church I attend in Sacramento was originally composed of converts. The one I attended in Southern California always made clear that it was a pan-Orthodox church, meaning it was welcoming to everyone, regardless of their ethnic background. There is sometimes a tension between those two groups. However, in well-received remarks delivered at a Greek Orthodox event in New York in 2004, Metropolitan Philip said: “I told them that if I could sum up this new [church] constitution, I would begin with the words, ‘We the people.’ We cannot ignore this truth — Americans are infested with freedom. We cannot ignore that our churches are in America and we are here to stay.” What can Orthodoxy bring to Americans? I was initially drawn to the beauty of its liturgies and icons and its embrace of church history. I learned to appreciate the long and grueling schedule of observances and fasts. I joke that at each service we have a service, the service before the service, the service after the service, and then the service after the service after the service. It takes conditioning to attend Pascha (Easter) liturgy at 11 p.m. and finish at 2 a.m. — and then break the weeks-long fast with fellow parishioners. But it’s wonderful. Beyond these observations, Orthodoxy has a network of monasteries; an emphasis on prayer, contemplation, and repentance; and a focus on the lives of the saints and on the next world. It attempts to provide a respite from the fixations of the day. It offers theological differences (you can read about those on your own), but it mostly offers an otherworldly outlook — one that is comfortable with the profound mysteries of our world and doesn’t try to systematize and explain everything. As the fifth-century bishop Saint John Chrysostom wrote: “I know that God is everywhere, and I know that he is everywhere in his whole being. But I do not know how he is everywhere.… My reason fails to grasp how it is possible for an essence to exist when that essence has received its existence neither from itself nor from another.” So, as Metropolitan Philip explained, Americans bring an important perspective to the table, but I believe Orthodoxy is growing in our country because it brings something Americans need. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine on the future of religion in America. The post Eastern Orthodoxy: Why an Ancient Faith Grows in Modern Times appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Press For Truth:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Peter Schiff, Schiff Gold: A nuclear tragedy could be “dangerously close,” according to the UN’s top nuclear watchdog. “Let me put it plainly–two years of war are weighing heavily on nuclear safety at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” said Rafael Mariana Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “…Reckless attacks must cease immediately.” […]

The news of Jack Russell's death comes just a month after he announced he was suffering from two degenerative illnesses