Driven by his biological needs, yet still the NYPost shows no mercy for this candle thief. Tsk Tsk.

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Just last week we were educated by NYC state representative Emily Gallaher that shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK. Despite that, the cruel editors of the NY Post persist in their calls for punishment f these unfortunate people:

150 arrests and he still walks: How NY laws push criminals to grow worse

Meet career crook Shaquan Seth, cut loose last week after five, count ’em five, shoplifting busts in Queens — less than six days after he got out of Rikers after a five-month stint for previous thievery — because New York law forbids cash bail for offenses like Seth’s. 

No matter that he was no sooner back on the streets than he was eagerly reoffending, nor that he stole $600 worth of fancy candles, when the no-bail believers insist such theft is mostly out of need, like Jean Valjean. 

No matter that he threatened to shoot a young female clerk who was brave enough to try stopping him.

He was put right back on the street. 

But that’s what our “reformed” laws encourage: years of offending and reoffending as the perp gradually works his way up from petty crime to homicide. 

Seth has already done jail time for larceny, robbery, resisting arrest and assaulting a cop; it’s clear he has much worse in him than candle theft. 

He belongs in prison (or, conceivably, locked up in a mental institution). 


The global economy is not something that can be flipped off and then on again like a lightswitch — duh

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Many of us were screaming this as the lockdown loomed, but “science” and “experts” insisted we knew nothing. I’ve never believed that the people leading the world into disaster didn’t know better; they achieved exactly their desired result.

Posted this morning on InstaPundit:

SPENCER PRATT: Bombs, Burnt Beef, and the Big $20 Burrito Battle.

At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.

It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.

Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear.

Read the whole thing.

The Week in Pictures was posted yesterday, but I was away from my computer

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And as seen over at InstaPundit:

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And Trump, of course

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PowerLine:


Posted on August 15, 2026 by Bill Glahn in Fake News

“They framed Nixon”

I occasionally see a clip on the interwebs of comedian Bill Murray appearing on the Joe Rogan Podcast talking about his friend John Belushi.

The appearance occurred in early 2025. Murray was describing to Rogan his reaction after having read the first five pages of the Bob Woodward biography of Belushi, Wired (1984),

Oh my God, they framed Nixon.

I’ll let Variety describe the exchange,

If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled for me too. I can’t take it.

Over the past two decades I’ve been directly involved in politics and/or media. I’ve been lucky/had the misfortune to be a direct witness to newsworthy events and then to read/see the media coverage of those same events. If you’ve had that experience, you understand where Murray is coming from. He knew Belushi, personally, they were friends and co-workers. He did not recognize the Belushi that appeared in Woodward’s  book.

If they could frame Nixon, who else did they frame? Joe McCarthy? What else have we been told in our history books that just isn’t true?

On the other side of the coin,

During one stretch in my years in politics, I had the task of going around Minnesota giving speeches on the topic of energy. I gave one such talk to a small audience circa 2009 in the Twin Cities metro area. During Q&A I heard from an audience member, a lady older than me at the time, say,

Commissioner Glahn, if anything that you said was true, I would have already read about it in the Star Tribune.

As I've said here for several decades now, if global warming is real, why do they have to lie about it?

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the money would be better spent stopping the brainwashing of children

Worldwide, we’ve spent an estimated eleven trillion dollars “fighting” global warming, $2 trillion in each of the past two years alone. That’s a windfall for the manufacturers and vendors of windmills and solar panels and the “non-profit” groups who are pushing the hysteria, but a tragedy for the rest of us.

David Strom:

How to Sell a Scam

I am old enough to remember when the Maldives were drowning due to global warming. 

Back in the days when television was broadcast in 4x3 and Al Gore was a thing, the Maldives and Tuvalu both got on the map as early victims of the West's ravenous appetite for fossil fuels, destined to drown due to our slavish devotion to the burning of dead dinosaurs and plankton. 

People were drowning. Coral reefs were getting bleached. Whales were being boiled alive, screaming for us to save them. Cabinet meetings were being held underwater, begging for...foreign aid. 

Which, by the way, they dutifully got. Lots of foreign aid has streamed into climate endangered islands, and no doubt it has done real good. 

Lots of it, in fact. 

It's worth noting that after their theatrical 'emergency' meeting underwater with politicians in diving gear signing a UN climate declaration, they received a multi million dollar 'climate rescue fund' which they spent on brand new beachside airports. It's also worth noting that none of these were underwater airports.

In 2004, the BBC warned the Maldives were "soon to be uninhabitable," claiming sea levels were rising 0.9 cm per year and that 80% of the islands could vanish within a century. 

More than two decades later, though, reality says otherwise. The Maldives haven't sunk, they've exploded with growth: 12 new airports, expanded international terminals, record tourism of over 2 million visitors a year, and more than 170 resorts. 

Instead of drowning, this so-called "paradise in peril" has shown no statistically significant sea level rise since the 1980s, according to satellite data. 

Here we have another climate catastrophe headline completely undone by time.

Twenty-two years ago, here is how the BBC described a visit to the Maldives, a dying hellhole that needed our help badly. They needed international aid to deal with the impending doom the West created, and they needed us to impoverish ourselves by stopping the insane use of fossil fuels — something the British government proceeded to do. 

To visit the Maldives is to witness the slow death of a nation.

For as well as being blessed with sun-kissed paradise islands and pale, white sands, this tourist haven is cursed with mounting evidence of an environmental catastrophe.

The country is portrayed by travel companies as a tropical paradise

To the naked eye, the signs of climate change are almost imperceptible, but government scientists fear the sea level is rising up to 0.9cm a year.

Since 80% of its 1,200 islands are no more than 1m above sea level, within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.

The country's 360,000 citizens would be forced to evacuate.

The Maldives' survival as a sovereign nation is truly at stake.    

No wonder it was the first country to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for cuts in industrialised countries' greenhouse gas emissions.

No wonder that Male, the capital, is surrounded by a 3m-high (9.8ft) wall, which took 14 years to construct at a cost of $63m. Unable to foot the bill themselves, the government happily accepted aid from Japan, which paid for 99% of the cost.

But the wall offers protection for just one of the Maldives' 200 inhabited islands - and then only against tidal surges rather than the rising sea level, the longer-term threat.

Strom": “A few years back I decided to check on how the Maldives was doing. Were they becoming as extinct as the polar bear? When I decided to check in on these dying islands, I found this on their website. “


….. There's a reason why I compare liberal politics to organized crime. It's because liberal politics, or essentially almost all politics, is akin to organized crime. As bad as it is, though, the disorganized crime of radical politics is even worse, and climate change politics combine the two in the most toxic of all brews. 

Well, not quite. COVID politics was far more toxic, and DSA-style communism is a step even farther, which is why even the Organized Crime Democrats are fighting like hell to kill it. 

By now we should recognize the scams as they come along, and many of us do. We are far more cynical today than we were back in the 1990s or the 1970s, when fewer of us immediately scoffed when "experts" told us that overpopulation would kill us or that global warming would cause mass extinctions the world had never seen since the dinosaurs died off. 

Unfortunately, a large proportion of the population hasn't learned the lesson, and with new generations being born those of us who have die off all too quickly.

There's a new sucker born every minute. 

See also:

John Stossel: The ‘climate crisis’ racket

… . “Climate change is making droughts worse,” writes Earthjustice.

“Droughts are absolutely not getting worse,” says Lueken. “The media love to share stories when there is a drought somewhere, some specific location. They completely ignore previous years with record low amounts of drought.”

Globally, there’s been no increase in drought.

Climate alarmists have a better argument when they say rising sea levels will cause floods.

But the media’s claims are silly.

In 2004, The Guardian claimed a “secret report” said: “European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas… by 2020.”

Yes, six years ago.

The “experts” also predicted rising seas will “completely cover” the Maldives. But since then, the islands have grown in size. They are even building new airports.

“Sea level rise is absolutely occurring, but it’s been slow,” says Lueken. “About an inch a decade. There is no way people wouldn’t be able to adapt.”

More than 100 million people already live below sea level in places like Holland. Dikes hold back water.

Climate change may cause real problems. But we can adapt, rather than get hysterical about mythical threats.

…. Environmental groups push these myths to get your money.

“Scares drive donations,” says Entine. “The oxygen for these organizations is money donated by people who think they’re doing good.”

We think of environmental groups as little guys — fighting big polluters. But today environmental groups are big guys spending millions on lawsuits that block progress.

Greenpeace pulls in more than $400 million a year.

Your donations to the World Wildlife Fund pay for its elegant 250,000-square-foot headquarters.

The Natural Resources Defense Council funnels your hard-earned dollars into extravagant, star-studded galas.

Update: Even CNN Admits It: Americans “Don’t Care” about Climate Change Hysteria

In fact, honey, those items are stolen for resale, but your point is insane in any case

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Former Queens Councilman Robert Holden (D) SUMS IT UP NICELY:

“Gallagher is a major dope,” 

Socialist NY lawmaker Emily Gallagher says shoplifting for ‘biological need’ is OK

A Brooklyn socialist lawmaker declared this week that shoplifters have a right to swipe items like soap and toothpaste from local stores without getting busted — because of their “biological need” for the products.

State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher strongly suggested shoplifting should be legalized while joined at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday by other lefty pols and criminal justice advocates with Court Watch NYC. The group claimed it monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found more than half were for misdemeanor offenses.

“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them,” said Gallagher, who reps Greenpoint and other sections of woke northern Brooklyn.

“And we are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies, like CVS and Walgreens, over the people who are struggling to get by. So I would say that the true crime is that there is such incredible wealth disparity in this city that there are people who can be thrown in jail simply for having a biological need.”

The card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America said she would continue to push for “treatment-not-jail” punishments – all but ignoring that first-time shoplifting offenders rarely get jailtime and that lack of enforcement pushed by lefty pols like herself statewide has forced many drugstores to lock products in plastic cases.

AOC was making the same claim back in 2022; it was debunked then, thoroughly, yet its flawed logic and “facts” persist among the criminal political class.

Coming Our Way

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Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the biggest far-left party in France, explains why the alliance between progressives and Muslims is necessary. “If you’re counting on white Christian workers to bring about socialism in France, it won’t happen. But our Muslim brothers and sisters will.”

Thousands for French Bulldogs and frozen eggs, not one penny for debt

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Two days after posting about her ovaries, the former barista was asked about ditching her white fiancee in preparation for her run for higher office; she declined to answer: “I don’t comment on my private life – thank you,” the Democrat darling said with a smile — and sans engagement ring — before clamming up and refusing to respond to any follow-ups.

AOC’s student debt unpaid as she embarks on costly egg-freezing journey

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has made at least $174,000 annually for nearly eight years as a member of Congress, but like many of her “Squad” colleagues, she has yet to put a substantial dent in her student loan debt, according to House financial disclosures.

The Bronx and Queens Democrat has owed between $15,001 and $50,000 in federal student loan debt since her election to the House in 2018. That’s the same amount she owes now, according to her August disclosure, where lawmakers report ranges for debt and income. [Originally $20,000, she still owes $19,000 — Ed]

The “Tax the Rich!” pol reported less than $81,000 in total assets.

Recently, Ocasio-Cortez has suggested that she’d been saving up for some time instead to freeze her eggs, a process that can cost between $10,000 and $20,000 per cycle.

Ocasio-Cortez amassed the loans while attending Boston University as an international relations and economics major between August 2007 and May 2011 — and went on to tend bar in Manhattan before her successful run for Congress.

The “Squad” Democrat has consistently backed student debt cancellation. During former President Joe Biden’s term, she even pushed the 46th commander-in-chief to cancel as much as $50,000 in debt per student borrower. ….

“Entire generations of working class kids were encouraged to go into more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong,” she said in February 2021. “Nowhere does it say we must trade-off early childhood education for student loan forgiveness. We can have both.”

I asked Chat to calculate how much our socialist parasite would have had to pay each month to retire her $19,000 debt:

Even at a fairly high 8% interest rate, approximately $300 per month beginning in late 2019 would have retired the entire $19,000 by around now.

There's an additional wrinkle that's quite important: federal student-loan payments and interest were suspended for a substantial period beginning in March 2020. Depending on the type of federal loan she had, that could have meant 0% interest and no required payments for roughly 3½ years. Consequently, simply applying an ordinary 6–8% amortization schedule over the entire period actually makes repayment look more expensive than it may have been.

Related morality of the pampered idle class:

New Yorkers take Zohran Mamdani free bus promise literally as MTA loses millions in skipped fares

Bus fare collections drop $31M as transit bosses warn high-earning commuters pass costs to taxpayers

Mamdani made the slogan "fast and free buses" a major part of his 2025 mayoral campaign. However … experts [and what would we do without experts? — Ed] and union leaders say the "free bus" rhetoric has already contributed to fare evasion.

John V. Chiarello, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, the city’s largest transit union representing more than 40,000 transit workers, told Fox News Digital that current fare evasion levels are the "worst" his drivers have seen.

He noted that buses were temporarily free during the COVID-19 pandemic and said the MTA worked to reverse the resulting habit of not paying fares, but that behavior has resurfaced in recent months.

"Once you make something free, and you give people a feeling of entitlement, and then the mayor says that he wants to make buses free, you have a perfect storm of people not wanting to pay," Chiarello said.

Chiarello noted that union rules strictly instruct bus operators not to confront fare evaders for their own safety following past violent attacks on drivers. He also pushed back on claims that fare-jumpers are strictly low-income New Yorkers.

"I can see myself when I'm sitting in the buses where people with suits are coming on. These are people that have the money. It's just that they're not paying because it's in vogue now," Chiarello added.

Lieber made similar comments, calling on higher earners to pay their fares rather than pass the cost on to other taxpayers.

"For all the people who are on their way to office jobs, who are making a good income, who walk by the bus driver and don’t pay or get on the back and don’t pay, I say it’s time to be New Yorkers," Lieber said, according to The New York Post. "You’re just passing along the cost to another taxpayer. Somebody’s going to have to pay for that ride."

The MTA is also losing fare revenue from riders who do not pay. Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute specializing in urban policy, explained the fiscal impact of the mayor’s proposal.

"The [Independent Budget Office] has estimated free buses would cost the MTA about $1.1 billion a year in fare revenue. And we need that money. The MTA [is] already looking at a $300 million deficit for next year," Gelinas told Fox News Digital. "The idea of giving up a billion dollars plus in fare revenue from the buses, when you have no way to replace that, it's just not fiscally wise."

Gelinas said a herd mentality is also at play, with paying riders watching others board without paying.

"You pay your fare, and then you watch 10 people get on and not pay the fare. So at some point, you're just going to think like, ‘Why am I paying the fare?’" Gelinas said. "So you really want to move back from that tipping point because, right now, if you're paying the fare, you're basically subsidizing the people who are not."