Reading excerpts from Anthony Fauci's ill-advised diary, saved on government servers, it's clear to me above all that he's a money-grubbing, narcissistic liar.

Fauci helped fund the Wuhan Level 4 Virology Lab, knowing full well that the lab was tinkering with bat viruses. And when the Chinese Communist lab loosed COVID-19 upon the world, wee Tony felt two overwhelming urges: the immediate urge to cover his butt, and a burning and probably lifelong desire for the little rat to finally become a big cheese.

So Fauci lied about the virus's origins, and pressured other spineless scientists to agree that the "novel," i.e., never before seen, virus came from some Wuhan local enjoying bat soup or a pangolin hero, and not the obvious source, a nearby Fauci-funded virology lab. To believe that, you'd have to be a Democrat, one of their media handmaidens, or a complete moron, but I repeat myself.

After all, those folks are all fond of fairy tales, telling us it's fine for men to beat up female athletes, Muslims were instrumental in founding America, ObamaCare lets you keep your doctor and your plan, and Joe Biden's Stage 4 prostate cancer was only recently discovered.

Having dodged all accountability for helping

"Politically correct." I was introduced to that fatuous phrase about 35 years ago while watching an episode of the television series Thirtysomething. The following day, I mentioned it in a casual conversation with a colleague. Confessing that I had never before heard the expression, I told her I found an astounding clumsiness in its construction. "(The character) said it without a hint of irony," I complained. "Isn't 'politically (long pause) correct,' a contradiction in terms?"

"Not at all," she educated me. "We used it all the time at Occidental," explaining everything I needed to know. "Some things simply cannot be said," she continued, "or even thought."

We were both in our early 30s, and it had been years since either of us had sat in a college classroom. It dawned on me that my colleague had carried the burden of that knowledge for both of us for over a decade. I was impressed. As her lesson continued, I learned that speech that is hurtful or "denies what we know to be true" must be suppressed. I don't recall whether she tried to enlighten me about what type of things constitute "what we know to be true." If she did, it didn't take.

Over

The reality of the Social Security system and laws is that the system design is fundamentally and fatally flawed. Unless we fix the design flaws, any other changes to the system are purely cosmetic and doomed to perpetual tinkering, temporary fixes, and eventual failure.

We will have failed our younger citizens by failing to address the flaws. The options are painfully simple. Do nothing, which our federal government has done well since the program's inception, or truly fix the system.

The crux of the problem is that the Social Security system was never structured to keep the beneficiary front and center of every investment decision. Most pension-fund fiduciaries are held to a prudent expert standard. The Social Security trustees are not in the same position because Congress has largely removed their investment discretion.

That lack of investment discretion creates an insurmountable obstacle to the system -- the sacred trust of Social Security stewardship. It is the fatal flaw.

We have done a great job of masking the reality of the failure. As a result, they are clamoring for more of the very system that failed them because our citizens have been lied to about Social Security -- the sacred trust is anything but.

To

Envy is the second of the seven deadly sins, after Pride.  In Catholic theology, deadly sins are serious failings that result in further spiritual harm if not repented.  Envy is especially common and pernicious because once it enters the soul, it is especially difficult to discharge.  In Dante's Purgatorio, the envious are shown huddled together in poverty, their eyes sewn shut with wire so they cannot see the wealth of others.  As always, Dante has chosen an appropriate symbolic punishment for the particular sin.

Where does this leave Zohran Mamdani?  He appears to be not only envious himself — standing outside the apartment building of billionaire Ken Griffin's penthouse apartment, pointing to where Griffin lives and asserting he will impose a pied-à-terre tax on the property, the most expensive in Manhattan — but inciting others to envy.  In response, Griffin's company issued a statement hinting at the possibility of canceling an $8-billion project there.

Actually, inciting envy is the modus operandi of all socialists.  It is their means of fomenting division and attracting voters, but it is a particularly ugly way of doing so because it demeans the very people they would lead and creates the potential for violence.  One reason envy is so destructive is that it

In previous articles (here and here), I detailed wins for conservative principles, law-and-order candidates, and the cause of liberty in Latin America. That's all good, but we should not ignore the Caribbean.

In Jamaica, the center-right Labour (yes, the "Labour" party is conservative in the land of Cool Runnings and Rastafarianism) government has won power in three elections in a row! Prime Minister Andrew Michael Holness has enacted aggressive public safety reforms, cracking down on crime and advertising the country as a renewed tourist destination. Property rights and tax reform have turned the island into a business destination rather than a flight.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines moved to the right last year, throwing out a two-decade left-wing communist regime. The Dominican Republic remains a model of sane, safe, and sound government, forming stronger ties with the United States while enforcing its immigration laws and protecting its sovereignty—even rebuffing detractors from the American Left! Antigua and Barbuda is prospering under a center-right government, as well.

With the waves of conservative, liberty-minded reforms making their way throughout the region, only one nation stands out for the worse, overrun by the left, descending into quasi-communist tyranny:

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court justices ruled that children born to parents here unlawfully, or only temporarily, still claim U.S. citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, with a few longstanding exceptions. That decision landed on June 30.

Less than six weeks later, the president signed a pair of executive orders that take advantage of every centimeter of leeway the Court allows. He aims to shut down the lucrative, gangrenous industry of birth tourism for good.

On August 6, Trump signed two new executive orders to curtail anchor birthing. One order identifies categories of children whose parents fall inside the historical exceptions the Court itself acknowledged. These exceptions include alien enemies, foreign government employees, those who buy access to citizenship through commercial schemes, or births in certain territories. Trump directed agencies to withhold recognition of citizenship in those situations.

The second order specifically ends birth tourism. It defines the practice as foreign nationals entering on temporary visas for the express purpose of giving birth on U.S. soil, or helping others do the same. Trump empowered the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to deny visas, revoke existing ones, bar entry, and target the businesses

On July 16, 1988, Florence Griffith-Joyner sprinted 100 meters in 10.49 seconds at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. Nearly four decades later, no woman has run faster, and her world record still stands.

Her 200-meter record, set at the Seoul Olympics later that year, has also stood for almost forty years.

Flo-Jo remains the fastest woman who has ever lived.

Yet her 100-meter record has repeatedly been surpassed by American high school boys.

The current U.S. high school boys' record is 9.92 seconds, set in 2025 and more than half a second faster. Many boys have run faster than Flo-Jo's legendary mark, and each year more join that list.

At the 2026 California state track championships, seven of the eight finalists in the boys' varsity 100 meters ran faster than the women's world record.

If any of those athletes had identified as female and been permitted to compete in the women's division, Florence Griffith-Joyner's forty-year-old world record would no longer stand.

Image created by ChatGPT

The same pattern appears across sports.

The women's long jump world