SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

BUT I'LL BET THEY'RE WOKE – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Forty-one percent of public high school students in Maryland’s largest city have failed to earn even a “D” grade point average.  This translates to over 8,400 kids out of Baltimore City Schools’ 20,500 total population … and almost twice the amount from the previous school year, FOX-45 reports.  The statistics were obtained by Project Baltimore, a special FOX-45 investigative team.  The district cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the main culprit for the high number: “Consistent with the experience of many school districts across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruptions to student learning […] Starting this summer and beyond, City Schools is providing students with a variety of opportunities to acquire the unfinished learning they lost.”  The station’s report notes the sheer quantity of below-“D” students may account for why the district won’t retain any failing students.  Earlier this year, FOX-45 reported on a student who had passed just three classes during his high school tenure, earning a 0.13 GPA. Remarkably, he was promoted each year to the next grade … and ranked in the upper half of his class.  This kind of failure has gone on for years, and will continue to go on, because part of the city establishment benefits from high crime and low grades.  Just scream "trouble" and in come the federal, state, and local "programs."  The "programs" generally benefit the leaders because they run them.  As for the students, ask the establishment about that next year. 

CRAZY – FROM BIZPACREVIEW:   “The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Monday lifted sanctions on the export of gas to socialist Venezuela,” Breitbart reported on Tuesday, “a boon to the dictatorship in Caracas and its patron government in communist Cuba, which struggles to suppress mounting opposition and calls for the regime’s total abolition.” The lifting of sanctions is significant because “Caracas has further served as an economic lifeline for Havana, supplying much of the regime’s energy needs on credit, with extremely lenient terms.”  As the U.S. announced the lifting of sanctions, the Miami Herald reported, Venezuela’s Maduro regime surrounded the home of opposition leader Juan Guaidó and arrested his former deputy Freddy Guevara. The U.S. move took the establishment media by surprise.  This is madness.  In China, in Russia, they are laughing.

July 19, 2021