Let’s be honest, it is not a nice thing to say, but it is the truth and sometimes the truth hurts.  According to a report in CNN yesterday , countries with high rates of obesity in their populations, at least 50%, had high numbers of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths. In contrast, countries with low rates of obesity, less than 40%, had low levels of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths. This pattern appears even when accounting for the age and wealth of the nations’ populations. Here are the details:

The report found that every country where less than 40% of the population was overweight had a low Covid-19 death rate of no more than 10 people per 100,000.

Well, here we are, one year of living with the economically and psychologically devastating lock downs. We’ve suffered an entire year of our freedom stolen from us, small businesses forced into bankruptcy, deaths of despair because of forced social isolation, and sky rocketing unemployment. And why? Come to find out it wasn’t because “covid deniers” refused to mask up and socially distance, but because  of obese people. And to think, all this time, we could have lived normal lives if we didn’t have so many obese Americans. I don’t like writing that since I have obese friends and family members and no one likes to reading it, but it is the truth. 

So what is the best way to prevent further Covid hospitalizations and deaths going forward? It is not locking down, closing gyms, staying home, and masking up. It is not getting the non-vaccine or carrying around “immunity passports.” It is getting your caboose to the gym, going outside and taking a walk, changing your eating habits to something healthier. In other words: losing weight!

Update: The New York Post reports that a gobsmacking 90% of all Covid deaths have taken place in nations with high obesity rates, and that researchers behind this new study now want to prioritize obese people for Covid shots. How is this going to work? Will fat front-line workers in hospitals and doctors’ offices going to get the shot before healthy ones?  Will the obese teachers get the vaccine first while the healthy teachers have to wait? Will younger obese people be prioritized over thinner elderly people? The elderly are at a significant vulnerability, too, but they can’t get younger while the obese can lose weight. 

I supposed prioritizing the obese will stem the problem in the short term, but it will do nothing in the long term. Obesity will still be the main source of many deadly diseases and illnesses and is almost entirely the fault of the individual obese person. Again, no one likes to hear this and I’m not saying it to be cruel because as I said I have friends and family members who are very overweight, but it is the truth.

Prager U is a gem. If you are living under a rock and have never heard of it before, you have to head over to Prager U and sign up. I am not being paid to say this; I’m saying it because I believe it. 

Named for Dennis Prager, Prager U filled with fantastic five minute instructional videos about historical events and people, economics, government, philosophy, culture, and so on, all taught by experts in their field. My kids love them and watch them regularly.

I joined Prager U because of the five minute videos, but my favorite part of the site is a series that I just discovered yesterday called The Book Club. Once a month, Michael Knowles and another well known conservative thinker read and discuss a great book, either fiction or non-fiction. In the first episode, Knowles and Dennis Prager discuss Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. As you can imagine, theirs is a heavy discussion about one man’s experience living in the depths of despair and hopelessness of a Nazi concentration camp and surviving. I have been familiar with Frankl’s book for a long time but I had never read it. I’m reading it now.

After that premier episode there are discussions of Hamlet, the greatest play ever written, Pride and Prejudice, one of the greatest novels ever written, and The Divine Comedy, definitely the greatest (and longest) poem ever written. And, of course, no book club about great books could be complete without a discussion of the Book of Genesis.

One book in the series so far has really captured my attention because I’ve never heard of it before but I find it to be so timely: Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. It’s clear from Allen Estrin and Michael Knowles’ talk that Johnson’s book is the one you want to read if you want to truly understand the mind of the political Left today. The ideas the Left is trying to force down our throats today are very the ideas championed and written about by the secular intellectuals two hundred years ago that Johnson analyzes in his book.

In Chapter One, Johnson focuses on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If you grew up believing he was a man of great virtue and truth and one of the world’s great thinkers of the enlightenment, you may be shocked to learn that Rousseau’s actions and his beliefs were in total opposition to anything resembling enlightenment. He was self-obsessed, arrogant, unwilling to accept any kind of personal responsibility, and a parasite who preyed on others’ generosity. In short, he was a conman.

Rousseau was shockingly cruel to his five children who he had with his mistress, Therese Levasseur. He abandoned all five of his babies, forcing Therese to hand them over at birth to a Paris orphanage that was unsanitary and diseased-ridden, with sky high mortality rate, without another thought. He justified his actions only after they came to light publicly by insisting he did what was best for his children, as he was protecting them from a childhood similar to his. In fact, he claimed that he wished he had had the childhood that he was providing his babies. In spite of his public declarations that he had his children’s best interests at heart, he never bothered to determine their sex, to name them, or to even record their dates of birth. Imagine the pain Therese must have felt knowing she would never be allowed to mother her own children.

The people in his life who knew him best came to the conclusion that he was a horrible human being. Denis Diderot, one of Rousseau’s closest friends, said he was “deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice.” Voltaire called him “a monster of vanity and vileness.” 

It is no surprise then that the philosophy born from such a man as Rousseau, when applied in the real world, would have similarly monstrous results. Pol Pot of Cambodia caused mass murder and human depravity in an effort to implement Rousseau’s grand plan for human existence. Mussolini’s fascist system also applied Rousseau’s belief that all citizens, from birth, are to be trained to see themselves through the lens of the State, rather than as individuals with self-determination. 

After Johnson thoroughly dissects Rousseau, he places other “intellectuals” under his microscope for examination: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman. Every one of Johnson’s analysis is the pulling back of the curtain to reveal how each of them is nothing more than a depraved hypocrite with delusions of grandeur.  

Many of these intellectuals, whether Rousseau, Marx, Sartre, et al., have many bad character traits in common: arrogance, self-obsession, cruelty, and – literally – filthiness. Really. Many of them stunk because they refused to clean themselves. Johnson also notes that one trend that wove its way through each of them is the tendency to claim a love of humanity while treating individual humans, including their own family members, cruelly. 

Unfortunately, it has become clear that modern day Leftists seem to possess the same combination of self-obsession, arrogance, and heartlessness as their intellectual ancestors. John Kerry, Bill Gates, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just a handful of these new pseudo intellectuals who are convinced they alone have some kind of divine knowledge, the key to understanding and organizing the world and humanity, and expect everyone to submit to their brilliance. Also like the intellectuals of Johnson’s book, they break every rule they impose on everyone else, and when they’re called on it, they refuse to take responsibility and insist that their purpose and goals are more important.  

Read Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. Those who don’t understand history are bound to repeat it. Let’s not repeat the blind following of our so-called intellectuals. 

When President Trump contested his November 3rd losses in various states because of election fraud, courts refused to hear his cases. It is clear the courts don’t want to get involved in what they have decided is a political matter, no matter that election laws and the Constitution have been violated. 

President Trump appealed his cases all the way to the Supreme Court, because, of course, a precedent should be set that outlines that all states must follow the Constitution when creating their election laws, which means only the state legislatures have the constitutional authority to write election law. That is what we all hoped would happen, right? That the SCOTUS would hear these cases, see that the executive branches of these states overstepped their authority and interfered in what is clearly only the legislatures’ purview and rule that the changes to those states’ election laws were unconstitutional. But that is not what happened. 

Instead, the Supreme Court of the United States played games that will only further undermine voter confidence in our elections . They refused to hear the cases because they are now moot. Amazing isn’t it? Law suits challenging election laws before elections get tossed on the grounds that the petitioners have no standing because the election hasn’t taken place so there is no injury. Then they get tossed after elections because now that the election is over, they are moot.

This decision by SCOTUS has essentially given Democrats in state executive offices under their control the license to change election laws passed by state legislatures to fit their needs because, no matter how unconstitutional those changes may be, the courts have signaled that they will not step in.

In other words, banana republic, here we come. 

If you think I am over reacting, you would be wrong because it’s clear the House Democrats have gotten the message that election laws and process are political and not legal.

Get this. We have just learned that the Democrat controlled House of Representatives has taken the first steps in a process to oust the duly elected Republican winner of an Iowa house race and seat the Democrat loser instead: 

From The Blaze:

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R) was declared the winner of Iowa’s second congressional district over Democratic challenger Rita Hart last November by just six votes — 196,964 to 196,958.

After Iowa certified Miller-Meeks’ win, Hart appealed to the House by filing a Notice of Contest. Hart’s campaign alleged that “the Miller-Meeks campaign has sought to keep legitimate votes from being counted — pushing to disqualify and limit the number of Iowans whose votes are counted,” the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

Hart claims there are 22 “legally-cast, uncounted votes” from her election — and, of course, she alleges that if those votes are counted, she would be the rightful winner of the contest.

Lawyers for Hart’s campaign allege the Democrat would have won the race by just nine votes had the 22 votes not been excluded.

The House Administration Committee gathered last Friday to establish the process by which Hart’s claims will be adjudicated.

Politico reported, “The Friday meeting was brief. Members unanimously agreed to a resolution that establishes procedures the committee will abide by as it considers recent elections contested under the act.”

Miller-Meeks has asked the committee to dismiss Hart’s claims, but Friday’s action indicates the committee is taking the claims seriously. Formally rejecting Miller-Meeks’ request would begin an investigative process that could result in Miller-Meeks losing her seat if Hart’s claims are confirmed.

Can you believe this? This election took place on November 3rd in Iowa and the results were certified in Iowa. The Democrat, however, has contested the results, but she doesn’t want her objections adjudicated in Iowa courts. Rather, she has taken her objections to the House of Representatives in Washington DC, controlled by hyper-partisan Democrats who have a vested interest in increasing their very slim majority, and has asked them to decide who won. As the Blaze reports above, the Democrats unanimously agreed to begin the process of investigating the results of the election. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue the Democrats will conduct an honest investigation that will provide objective results. I mean, seriously, look at the extremes to which the Democrats went to impeach President Trump on blatantly false charges – twice. 

Will the Democrats succeed? I wouldn’t me surprised if they do. The Democrats play to the death and the Republicans fold at the first application of pressure. 

This is an unprecedented action by a political body to overturn the results of a certified congressional election. Track this process carefully. If the Democrats succeed and are able to unseat the Republican winner and install the Democrat loser, you can take it to the bank that the Democrats, should they maintain their majority in 2022, will use this process for all the contested elections their candidates lose. 

Casablanca was on Turner Classic Movies Saturday afternoon. The acting, characters, and emotional force make it one of the greatest films ever made and my personal all time favorite. It is also the source of lines of dialogue that are so famous that even now, almost 80 years after its 1942 release, people love to quote them, even if they don’t know where they come from.

“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”

“We’ll always have Paris.”

“I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” 

As much as I love watching the characters deliver these lines, there’s one scene that stands out even more because it chokes me up so much: the “Play La Marseillaise” scene. I’ll set it up: Victor Laszlo is a Czechoslovakian Nazi resistance leader who has been so successful at rallying Europeans against them that they pursue, persecute, and eventually arrest him and imprison him in a concentration camp. After an unknown time of imprisonment, Laszlo escapes and makes his way, along with is wife Ilsa, to Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca, Morocco (Vichy France) in search of stolen letters of transit to America. Rick’s Cafe, owned by American expatriate Rick Blaine, is a sort of headquarters for French refugees who are themselves awaiting their own letters of transit. Rick has the stolen letters but refuses to sell them or even sell them to Laszlo. 

Victor and Rick’s argument is interrupted when they hear Nazi officers in the bar singing Die Wacht am Rhein, a German anthem. It’s the Nazis way of rubbing salt in the refugees’ wounds. Laszlo understands what’s happening and marches straight over to the cafe’s band and demands they play France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise. With Rick’s approval, the band begins a spirited rendition with Laszlo belting out the lyrics. Laszlo’s fearlessness in the face of Nazi intimidation inspires the cafe’s French refugees, and they leap to their feet and sing with impassioned pride.

The raw emotion as they sing makes this the most powerful moment in the film. Some believe it’s the most powerful scene in movie history. La Marseillaise eventually overpowers Die Wacht am Rhein, forcing the Nazis to surrender and take their seats in humiliation. Once again, Laszlo proves he is a force the Nazis can’t suppress or control. Major Strasser demands Sergeant Renault close the bar. Watch:

As I watched Victor Laszlo sing in defiance of the Nazi officers, it dawned on me that he is like Donald Trump. Or maybe Donald Trump is like Victor Laszlo. In essence, Laszlo is to Nazi resistance as Donald Trump is to globalist resistance.  Both are fearless and indefatigable in standing up to totalitarianism, which connects with and inspires others to do the same. It’s also hard to miss that the Nazis’ reaction to Laszlo is the same as the globalists’ reaction to Trump: shut it all down.

President Trump inspired patriotic Americans because he thought like they did and spoke like they did. His “Make America Great Again” wasn’t just a political campaign; it was a rallying cry for Americans whose jobs were outsourced, whose needs were ignored, and whose values were disrespected and dismissed by the globalist elites, a cabal of wealthy establishment politicians, Big Tech, Leftist activists, and mainstream American media outlets.  

Donald Trump’s win shocked and terrified all of them. From Inauguration Day on, their goal was to remove him from office.  They hounded him everywhere he went, tried to overturn every policy no matter how much it benefitted everyone, lied about him and his family, leaked private phone calls with world leaders, accused him of treason, and impeached him – twice – on ridiculously false, trumped up charges. They pursued him tirelessly until they finally managed to unseat him, but only by stealing the 2020 election. In spite of this final blow, nonetheless, President Trump refused to back down or give up. His unwavering perseverance in the face of attack after attack solidified his position as leader of the globalist resistance. When he called for a Rally to Save America on January 6th, easily close to a million people showed up.

In Casablanca, Victor and Ilsa escape to America, ensuring his resistance efforts will continue. While real life doesn’t guarantee anyone a Hollywood happy ending, it’s not yet over for President Trump. He moved back to his headquarters at Mar-a-Lago, where he is continuing to promote his America First agenda. Unfortunately, the globalists are in charge of the federal government now. You’d think they’d be thrilled but they’re not. They’re still angry and obsessed as ever with President Trump and his influence, which has made destroying him their one and only priority right now.

Nonetheless, President Trump is undeterred. He has already announced that he will begin vetting new Republican candidates that he thinks can  carry on his anti-globalist MAGA, America First policies. And later this week, he will address freedom loving Americans at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. It will be his first public appearance since his re-election was stolen from him. It will be the most watched speech in CPAC’s history. You know the globalists will be glued to his speech, too. 

Laszlo and Trump represent that rare, put-it-all-on-the-line resistance to tyranny and totalitarianism that don’t exist in movies or real life anymore. Instead, we’re told we must conform, fall in line, assimilate to the globalists’ radical agenda or we are a danger to democracy  or some such nonsense and  will be canceled. 

America was founded on Laszlo and Trump’s philosophy to never, ever give up, no matter how bad it may look, which is expressed perfectly in this exchange between Rick and Laszlo: 

Rick: Don’t you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all this? I mean what you’re fighting for.

Victor Laszlo: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.

Indeed.