We're Living in the (Almost) Best of Times

The best of times, the worst of times. Your instinct on which one we're living through is affected by your basic temperament, but it also depends on how well you're observing -- and quantifying -- things in the world around you.

Temperamentally, in the United States -- or at least in that loud, if not large, part of it dominated by political tweets -- the overwhelming

weight of opinion, crossing party lines that are unusually rigid in this period of American history, is that we live in the worst of times.

President Donald Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living on the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.

Trump opponents, including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party, assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.

To which I say: Nonsense.

As does, in more elegant terms, science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley in the British Spectator. "We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history," he writes of the decade just ending.

Olden times -- multiepisode dramas of Edwardian noblemen or statistics showing a narrower pay gap between 1950s CEOs and assembly line workers -- may look better in warm memories. But cold hard statistics tell another story.
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"Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world's population for the first time," Ridley writes. "It was 60 per cent when I was born," which was in 1958, a year that some of us can actually remember.

Of course, you may say economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there but that over here, in advanced countries, we're not growing, just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world's limited resources.

Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production from it. Thank technological advances and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.

We're also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries and domestically, less violence and more in the way of peace. That's the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Wars are infrequent and less deadly than in the past.

So is violent crime in the United States and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.

The natural tendency of most people is to ignore positive trends. They are neither the lead stories on your local newscast nor mentioned in shouting matches on cable news. People usually focus on complaints and grievances. And there are worrying negative countertrends, like the opioid abuse that has cut life expectancies down for some demographic groups.

And we tend to focus on negative trends, even after they've been reversed. Illegal border crossings peaked just before the 2007-08 financial crisis and are much fewer -- though not zero -- today. Low-skilled workers' wages for years rose little or not at all, as politicians of both parties complained. Since 2016, they've been rising faster than average, but only Trump's fans seem to have noticed; Democrats probably will if the trend continues when their party has the White House.

One can even make the case that where we lament sluggish economic growth -- Japan since 1990, continental Europe since 2001, the U.S. from 2007 up through 2017 -- judged in any historic perspective, living standards remain more than comfortable.

That's a reminder that the positive force of democratic politics tends to produce the negative force of cynical partisanship, visible today not just in Donald Trump's America but in most of Europe and much of Asia. But nationalistic politics has not undermined civil liberties, and the center-left's fumbling attempts to sell economic redistribution suggest that people are actually better off than their grumbles to pollsters suggest.

Of course bad things can happen in even the best of times, and a minor cloudburst can spoil a bright summer day. But at year's and decade's end, our grumbling society is closer to the best of times than to the worst of times

Top 100 Books

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Impeachment from the "Star Chamber"

The Star Chamber (Latin: Camera stellata) was an English court which sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late 15th century to the mid-17th century  The vote to impeach President Trump last week was the culmination of
a trend in the Democratic Party that is just plain weird.

The vote to “formalize” Adam Schiff’s one-sided, secret Star Chamber impeachment hearings in the basement of the House and send the process to the House Judiciary Committee took place on Halloween. One Democratic member, Katie Porter of California, wore a Batman costume to cast her vote that day.

Then the vote by the House Judiciary Committee to recommend impeachment and send the matter to the full House for a vote took place on December 13. That was a Friday. As in Friday the 13th.

Now I am not the superstitious sort. The votes had to take place on one day or another, and Rep. Jerry Nadler had apparently originally planned to hold the House Judiciary Committee vote on Thursday, December 12, but the hearings ran late into the night. Not wanting to take a vote at 10PM, which would miss the zenith of the daily news cycle, he opted to adjourn and hold the vote the next day, when a whole panoply of cameras and microphones would be available for Democratic congressmen to gloat before the world. Still, that makes the timing of the event on Friday the 13th even eerier, since it was seemingly less planned.

When you consider these two events in light of other surreal happenings on the Left, I think I’d be running from the Democratic Party like a teenage girl on Elm Street running from a guy in a hockey mask holding a blood-drenched butcher knife.

Take the recent story about the Texas pro-abortion group called Texas Equal Access Fund, which held a holiday party this month in which the party favors consisted of votive candles with the image of a unicorn and the words “Abortions are Magical!” on them. Seriously. These were given out by an abortion group at a “holiday party” – what us old-school folks call Christmas parties, designed to celebrate the birth of the Savior of the World. They actually posted a photo of their candles on social media, saying, “Getting our holiday party favors ready! Every year we honor our volunteers and make sure they get a token of appreciation at our annual holiday party.” That’s some honor.

Yes, the group was perhaps trolling right-wingers with their stunt. But at what price to their souls? Or do they have any?

That question isn’t just rhetorical when you consider that Democrats in 2019 passed a shockingly liberal abortion law in New York, to the point where a full-term baby can be murdered (sorry, “aborted”) for virtually any reason right up to its entry into the birth canal.

And in what has to be among the creepiest political interviews ever conducted, Virginia’s governor Ralph Northam, a pediatrician no less, actually endorsed infanticide. That is not hyperbole. He told Washington, D.C. radio listeners in his most soothing bedside manner voice, how in third trimester abortions if a baby to be aborted survives its trip through the birth canal, the doctor and the mother can have a “discussion” about that baby’s fate, with the implication being that if mother and doctor decide that baby will not live, it will be dispatched in one form or another. That is infanticide.

Even more shockingly, that interview did not end Governor Northam’s political career. In fact, Governor Northam was able to weather revelations shortly after that interview that he appeared in his medical school yearbook in a photo depicting someone in blackface standing next to someone in Ku Klux Klan regalia (which character Gov. Northam depicted – blackface wearer or KKK guy – was never definitively determined, although Dr. Northam did later confess to having worn blackface in the past, helpfully advising people not to use shoe polish to achieve the effect, since it’s so hard to remove).

Gov. Northam survived all of these scandals, while his Democratic lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, stood credibly accused of having sexually assaulted two women, also without having to resign. Not to be outdone, the third in line in Virginia’s state government, Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring, admitted himself to having work blackface. He also survived this scandal, which would unquestionably have finished the career of any Republican.

All of these Democratic politicians continue in office to this day. And what is most concerning is that, notwithstanding these bombshell disclosures, the Old Dominion would see the Democrats take control of both the State Senate and House of Delegates six months later. Incredibly, Lt. Governor Fairfax has just announced that he plans to seek the governorship, despite the allegations of the two very serious women who accused him of sexual assault.

Finally, as 2019 neared its end, we saw the Democrats and progressives worldwide loft to stardom a young Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg who, at the ripe old age of 16, stood before presumed adults around the world and scolded them for not doing enough to address global warming, or climate change, or whatever the term du jour is for man’s alleged sins against the planet.

This young lady could easily have been cast in a starring role in the 1960 British sci-fi shlock flick, Village of the Damned, or its 1964 sequel, Children of the Damned. In this Cold War horror story, teenagers in the idyllic English village of Midwich have been experimented on by the military and – oops – things go awry, with the kids developing psychic powers that their military experimenters can’t control. Maybe the scariest part is their glowing eyes and zombie-like stares, not unlike Greta’s.

Presciently, the writers of the sequel had the cast of creepy kids representing countries from all over the world. How diversity-conscious of them. No doubt Greta would approve. But I’m not kidding about Greta resembling these kids. Watch a trailer for Village of the Damned here, and then watch Greta’s “How dare you!” speech at the U.N. I think Greta has a shot for a lead role in a 2020 remake.

But really what’s creepier than some poor brainwashed Swedish teenager spouting programmed talking points about so-called climate change are the number of adults who actually listen to her, or even revere her, such as those at Time Magazine who named her Person of the Year.

That is creepy. What is wrong with the Democratic Party and leftists generally who embrace this stuff?

Let 2019 be remembered as the year the Democrats went full-on creepy. Let’s hope 2020 pulls them back to somewhat sane.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, and The Federalist. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch

Understanding Democrats' March Toward Electoral Defeat

After months of false starts and threats and endless posturing, Donald Trump has joined Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton as the third American president impeached by the House of Representatives. Democrats started promising to do this before the president was elected. Still, it feels kind of weird, surprising, surreal even, that it actually happened. Why? Because impeachment is a terrible idea for the country. At this point, there is no chance the Democrats can remove the president. And in trying, they will only hurt themselves. The polls are clear. Yet -- and here is the fascinating part -- they did it anyway.

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin explained why: "The president's continuing course of conduct constitutes a clear and present danger to democracy in America. We cannot allow this misconduct to pass. It would be a sell-out of our Constitution, our foreign policy, our national security, and our democracy." See if you can follow his logic chain: Leaving a president in office until voters can decide to remove him from office if they want to is "a danger to democracy."

The entire impeachment saga has become detached from reality. Here are the facts: Democrats do not have the votes to remove Trump from office. They never will have the votes to remove the president. The point of impeachment is to remove a president. They cannot do that. This process is doomed. By the way, they don't have the votes because voters don't support it. The irony is that our democracy is working just fine. Voters support it. After a full month of watching public hearings on impeachment, Democrats have not gained support. They have lost it. In late October, when this began, about half the country backed impeachment and 44% said they were opposed. In the most recent polling, those numbers have inverted. In other words, the more people learned about impeachment, the less they wanted impeachment. That's not one person's opinion. That is the sum total of the polling.

Even in the face of all the data, elite Democrats still will not admit it. They are in denial. Democratic Party cheerleader and CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin attacked his own company's polling when it didn't match what he believes to be true: "You see a decline from our last poll in Democratic support from 90% down to 77%. Can I just say, that I don't believe that poll for one second...The 90% to 77%. You know, it's just I don't believe it. Like it makes no sense that that the numbers would change like that. I mean... sometimes polls are sometimes wrong."

Why doesn't he believe it? Because he doesn't. Says the legal analyst. I look out my window and I see the horizon. That means it's flat. You can tell me the Earth is round. But I just don't believe it, never mind your dumb numbers and scientific theories. I just don't believe it. This is the definition of ideological extremism. It's an inability to change course no matter what the evidence tells you. At that point, this is no longer politics. We left that a long time ago. What we are seeing is religion. And, of course, being the Democratic Party, it's always the exact opposite of what they claim it is.

As Trump noted in the recent letter to Nancy Pelosi: "You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting American democracy. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to the republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain." The public, whether they like Trump or not, agrees with that. Polling shows it.

But the Democrats can't acknowledge that they are stuck. In 2016, even before the election, they went all-in on denouncing Trump and his supporters as beyond the pale racists not worthy of being hated. When they lost, they refused to learn. They refused to think about why they may have lost. Instead, they moved seamlessly from calling voters who wouldn't support them "racists" into a conspiracy about Russia that was so bizarre they could never fully explain its outlines. That collapsed, too. But what hasn't changed is the rage storm they've created with years of propaganda. Democratic leaders whipped their voters into such a frenzy that the voters can't be pulled back now. They want blood. The Democrats have no choice but to march forward even though it will inevitably destroy them, and they know it will.

Xbox Series X Specs similar to Playstation 5 (16 GB of RAM)

The CPU will be a custom AMD ZEN 2 chipset, accompanied by a custom GPU built on the AMD RDNA architecture, with ray-tracing touted as a standout capability. Confirmation of a solid-state drive should be welcome news for those sick of loading times.
Microsoft also claimed that the new console handles "4K at 60FPS, with possibility of up to 120FPS, including support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and 8K capability."
This obviously falls short of detailed information on its capabilities, so we turn to rumours for specifics. As reported by Windows Central's sources, Series X might boast:

• CPU: 8-core targeting around 3.5 GHz.
• GPU: Xbox Series X GPU and custom processor.
• Compute Power: 12 TFLOPS.
• RAM: 13 GB for games, 3 GB for operating system (16 GB total).
• Storage: Custom non-volatile memory express solid-state storage (NVMe SSD).

 Phil Spencer, Microsoft's Xbox chief, said: "We wanted to have a dramatic upgrade from the Xbox One base console. So when we do the math, we're over eight times the GPU power of the Xbox One, and two times what an Xbox One X is."
For comparison, here are the Xbox One X specs:

• CPU: 2.3 GHz AMD-customized Jaguar Evolved (8-core).
• GPU: 1172 MHz AMD-customized UC RX 580.
• Compute power: 6 TFLOPS.
• RAM: 12 GB GDDR5.
• Storage: 1TB HDD.

Problem arrives where Dragon Quest XI looks great on PS4 and I have nobody to brag to about Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X to! I get the same likes of old Super Nintendo games as I do Nintendo Switch games on Instagram. Although at my Laptop Chips job, they were bragging about Xbox One X and their 4k TV. Xbox One doesn't have many really great games and I have a Xbox One!  Nobody comes over to play multiplayer on my Playstation 4. My Wii had more multiplayer action when I was younger!  I'm nearing 40 when Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) is activated. It's 5 years away and I need a job.  I feel I"m unemployed because ADEA didn't activate soon enough (like age 35).  Minnesota starts age discrimination laws at age 18, but I'm in Wisconsin only under ADEA.