Displaying posts published in

September 2019

John Nolte: Only a Monster Would Afflict Children with ‘Eco-Anxiety’

https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/21/only-monster-afflict-children-eco-anxiety/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=todays_hottest_stories&utm_campaign=20190921

What kind of monster afflicts children with eco-anxiety by telling them they will be dead in 12 years? I’ll tell you who: the child abusers in the establishment media, the environmental movement, and the Democrat Party — that’s who.

What’s especially disturbing is that children are being taught the opposite of empathy. Empathy is the most important value an adult can impart to a child. But what these kids are being encouraged to become is nothing less than wild-eyed, religious fanatics where non-believers are fingered as the enemy, as heretics looking to destroy the world and kill everyone. And this is always the result of such things, of the moral certainty of a zealot mixed with intolerance.

Even if Climate Change were not a hoax, even if Global Warming were real (it’s not), burdening children with eco-anxiety would still be indefensible.

You don’t do this to children. You don’t shit all over their childhood… Even if this massive hoax were not a hoax, it is not the child’s responsibility to fix it. That responsibility falls on the adults, and another responsibility that falls on adults is to not only protect children, but to protect their innocence, protect them from the horrors of real life, protect the magic of those wonder years.

Sadly, once you realize Climate Change is a hoax wrapped in a left-wing political movement, this deliberate act of terrorizing children with lies, a lie every bit as audacious as saying a meteor will hit the earth in 12 years, is revealed as something truly insidious.

Unfortunately, though, and we see this in our public schools and popular culture, the happiest place in the world for a leftist is that spot between parent and child, and that influential spot is mercilessly abused to destroy the most precious gift of childhood — innocence.

More Fracking, or More War? By Kevin D. Williamson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/more-fracking-or-more-war/

It’s our choice.

Here is a news lead that begins with a bang and ends with a whimper: “The strike on the heartland of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including damage to the world’s biggest petroleum-processing facility, has driven oil prices to their highest level in” — here, Reuters should have used some ellipses of irony — “nearly four months.”

Four months!

If the United States declines to go to war against Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia, our increasingly troublesome client state, one of the reasons for that happy development will be: because we do not need to. It is no longer the case that the world sneezes when the Saudis catch a cold. U.S. interests and Saudi interests remain aligned, broadly, but they are severable.

The high-tech method of mining shale formations for oil and gas colloquially known as “fracking” — though hydraulic fracturing is only a part of it — has been a game-changer for more than one game. While countries such as Germany set headline-grabbing, politics-driven carbon-reduction targets only to woefully fail to achieve them (it is very difficult to greenwash 170 million tons of brown coal), the United States has been relatively successful on that front, reducing energy-related carbon emissions by 14 percent from 2005 to 2017, thanks to natural gas; put another way, fracking has helped the United States to what climate activists ought to consider one of its greatest environmental victories.

Warren Tops Biden in Latest Iowa Poll By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/warren-tops-biden-in-latest-iowa-poll/

Senator Elizabeth Warren surged into the lead past Joe Biden in the latest Des Moines Register poll. Warren was the first choice of 22% of Iowa Democrats while Biden was close behind with 20%. Bernie Sanders faded to third place with 11%.

“This is the first major shakeup” in what had been a fairly steady race, said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll. “It’s the first time we’ve had someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the leader board.”

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg follows the three leaders as the favorite of 9% of poll respondents. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California is at 6%. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey are at 3%.

Polling at 2% are U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, businessman Tom Steyer and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Eight others are polling at 1% or less.

Warren’s surge coincides with worrying questions arising about Biden’s age and acuity. The former vice president has made several embarrassing gaffes in recent weeks and many in the press are openly speculating about his fitness for office.

But the race is far from over.

Trump Administration to UNC and Duke: Quit Promoting Islam on Our Dime By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/faith/trump-administration-to-unc-and-duke-quit-promoting-islam-on-our-dime/

Will the Trump Administration move against the radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination and Islamic proselytizing that our nation’s colleges and universities have become?

On Friday, it made a small, long overdue step in that direction: Associated Press reported that “the Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, claiming that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance ‘ideological priorities’ and unfairly promote ‘the positive aspects of Islam’ but not Christianity or Judaism.”

The U.S. Department of Education wrote to the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies, no doubt interrupting these cosseted pseudo-academics as they swapped stories about how oppressed they are, and told them they had three weeks to revise their course offerings or else they could lose federal funds that were intended for instruction in foreign languages.

The Education Department letter came after Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.) noted that the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies had held a taxpayer-funded conference featuring “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” which made it like virtually every other conference on Israel and the Middle East held in every college and university over the last few years, but never mind. The Education Department found that instruction in foreign languages (which, remember, the money was for) and national security had “taken a back seat to other priorities,” and that the Consortium was spending taxpayer money on courses that were “plainly unqualified for taxpayer support.”

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/in_a_rant_joe_biden_tells_reporters_what_kinds_of_questions_they_can_ask.html

.In a crazy rant, Joe Biden tells reporters what kinds of questions they can ask By Monica Showalter

Is Joe Biden losing it?

Falling in the polls in Iowa, looking at that indirect political backlight on his son Hunter’s sleazy Ukrainian business dealings as Democrats desperatedly scramble to make a new scandal about Trump, he’s now reduced to yelling at reporters.

Jabbing and pointing at a dweeby harmless-looking reporter, and slurring his speech, Joe aggressively hollered:

‘…You should be asking [Trump] the question: Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader? (pauses for wild finger waving) …if that’s what happened, that’s (inaudible) what happened. You should be looking at Trump! Trump’s doing this because I beat him like a drum!

www.theblaze.com/news/bombshell-revelation-buried-deep-in-cnn-report-unravels-whistleblower-scandal-involving-president-trum

Bombshell revelation buried deep in CNN report unravels whistleblower scandal involving President Trump[From CNN of all places!]
The whistleblower who lodged a complaint with the intelligence community inspector general about communications between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not have “direct knowledge” about the communications — but filed a complaint

When Negotiation Is Impossible and War Is Unnecessary by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14903/iran-negotiation-war

It is likely that whoever planned the attacks was more interested in testing the waters, seeing how far it was possible to go in provocation…

What the mullahs did not realize was that the new status quo came at no cost to the Americans, who could thus afford to prolong it as far as needed. All that Trump did was announce that anyone trading with the Islamic Republic could not trade with the US, and that the US would no longer allow the mullahs to use American global banking and trade facilities.

In every case, the tyranny of the underdog worked and the mullahs managed to continue crushing their opponents at home and fattening their cohorts abroad while casting themselves as champions of the downtrodden resisting the diktats of the “Great Satan.”

Khamenei’s best hope is for Trump to go for a pin-prick operation that would shake but not topple the Khomeinist regime while mobilizing Iranian and international opinion in its support as a victim, thus forcing the easing of sanctions that are beginning to break the bones of his regime.

Will the attacks on Saudi oil installations last week upset the status quo that has taken shape in the past 17 months, that is to say, since President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the “Iran nuke deal” concocted by Barack Obama?

“Convert, Marry Me, or Die”: Persecution of Christians, July 2019 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14904/persecution-of-christians-july

“How ready is the government to go up against certain groups that try to impose their own will on others.” — Reverend Timotheus Halim, head of the Family of God Church ucanews.com, July 25, 2019, Indonesia.

Fatemeh Azad, a 58-year-old Muslim woman who had converted to Christianity against her Muslim husband’s will and fled to Germany, was denied asylum there and deported back to Iran. There she was immediately arrested by authorities waiting for her plane to land…. “When Fatemeh made her asylum appeal, her lawyers argued that apostasy (conversion away from Islam) is punishable by the death penalty in Iran.” This, however, was insufficient for Germany…. — Persecution.org; July 25, 2019.

Finally, a 14-year-old Christian girl was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, forced to marry a Muslim man, and then taken before a Muslim judge to sign a statement saying she had acted on her own free will….”[G]irls often give such statements because they are already living with their kidnappers,” and “death threats are made towards their family, and therefore the victims have no choice but to say what their kidnapper wants them to say in court…..” — Lawyer, AsiaNews.it; July 26, 2019; Pakistan.

Slaughter of Christians

Syria: Islamic jihadis gang-raped a 60-year-old Christian woman before stoning her to death. When no one in Yaqoubiya, a small Christian village in Idlib governorate, saw Susan Grigor (or “Gregory”) on July 9, the worried priest sent parishioners to search for her. They eventually found her mangled and bloodied corpse on the ground of a field adjacent to her home.

The autopsy revealed that Susan had been repeatedly raped and tortured over the course of nine hours before finally being murdered by stoning. The men responsible are believed to be members of the al-Qaeda-linked jihadi group, al-Nusra. Described as a pious Christian, Susan had never married and lived her entire life as a virgin. Although she never children, Susan reportedly loved them and, after retiring, volunteered much of her time helping educate the youths of her local church.

Another Week, Another Pseudo-Scandal Roger Kimball

amgreatness.com/2019/09/21/another-week-another-pseudo-scandal/

Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click—click—click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine!

Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the “intelligence community” and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press.

Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump Administration.

Just this last week, we saw the New York chapter of the left-over Left make a last-ditch effort to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh by fabricating yet another spurious complaint that an 18-year-old Kavanaugh had been over-served and acted rudely to a fellow female student at Yale. Only the student in question had no memory of the incident.

Like every other complaint against the teenaged Kavanaugh, it was a matter of “my cousin Ernie’s brother’s girlfriend heard from her college roommate that three people whose names she cannot remember told her best friend that someone who might have been Brett Kavanaugh was rumored to have exposed himself at a drunken white-privilege party at Yale 35 or maybe 36 years ago.” That was enough for the wretched New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly to take to the bank.

In fact, it was worse, for the fount of the rumor they published, without mentioning that the woman in question had no memory of the incident, wasn’t even your cousin Ernie; it was a Democratic Party activist named Max Stier. The dynamic duo did not mention the ideological coloration of their source, nor did they mention that Stier was part of Bill Clinton’s defense team when the priapic former president was endeavoring to extricate himself from l’affair Lewinsky without damaging any more cigars.

Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click—click—click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine!

Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the “intelligence community” and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press.

Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump Administration.

Just this last week, we saw the New York chapter of the left-over Left make a last-ditch effort to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh by fabricating yet another spurious complaint that an 18-year-old Kavanaugh had been over-served and acted rudely to a fellow female student at Yale. Only the student in question had no memory of the incident.

Like every other complaint against the teenaged Kavanaugh, it was a matter of “my cousin Ernie’s brother’s girlfriend heard from her college roommate that three people whose names she cannot remember told her best friend that someone who might have been Brett Kavanaugh was rumored to have exposed himself at a drunken white-privilege party at Yale 35 or maybe 36 years ago.” That was enough for the wretched New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly to take to the bank.

In fact, it was worse, for the fount of the rumor they published, without mentioning that the woman in question had no memory of the incident, wasn’t even your cousin Ernie; it was a Democratic Party activist named Max Stier. The dynamic duo did not mention the ideological coloration of their source, nor did they mention that Stier was part of Bill Clinton’s defense team when the priapic former president was endeavoring to extricate himself from l’affair Lewinsky without damaging any more cigars.

Who Killed Horatio Alger? The decline of the meritocratic ideal Luigi Zingales *****(2011)

https://www.city-journal.org/html/who-killed-horatio-alger-13413.html

The title character of Horatio Alger’s 1867 novel Ragged Dick is an illiterate New York bootblack who, bolstered by his optimism, honesty, industriousness, and desire to “grow up ’spectable,” raises himself into the middle class. Alger’s novels are frequently misunderstood as mere rags-to-riches tales. In fact, they recount their protagonists’ journeys from rags to respectability, celebrating American capitalism and suggesting that the American dream is within everyone’s reach. The novels were idealized, of course; even in America, virtue alone never guaranteed success, and American capitalism during Alger’s time was far from perfect. Nevertheless, the stories were close enough to the truth that they became bestsellers, while America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

To this day, Americans are unusually supportive of meritocracy, and their support goes a long way toward explaining their embrace of American-style capitalism. According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. If the drifting continues, the result could be a breakdown of popular support for free markets and the demise of America’s unique version of capitalism.

The fundamental role of an economic system, even an extremely primitive one, is to assign responsibility and reward. In animal packs, the responsibility of leadership and the reward of mating opportunities are generally assigned to the strongest. In human societies, responsibility tends to take the form of employment, and the rewards are money and prestige. Because physical strength has long since lost its importance, economic systems determine in various ways who receives the responsibilities and the rewards. The dominant criterion in traditional society was birth: the king’s firstborn son was the next king; the landowner’s firstborn son, the new landowner; and the son of the company’s owner, the next chief executive. Most modern societies, by contrast, try to select and reward according to merit. Indeed, surveys show that in the abstract, most people in developed countries agree with the idea that merit should be rewarded.

It isn’t easy to decide what constitutes merit, of course. Consider an environment with which I’m familiar: American academia. Let’s say you want to determine who the best professors are. How do you rank publications? Do you value the number of papers that someone has written, or their impact?

Democrat Censured for Voting with Trump 19% of the Time. Bipartisanship Is Dead. By Fletch Daniels

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/democrat_censured_for_voting_with_trump_19_of_the_time_bipartisanship_is_dead.html

One of the more interesting news items this week was the revelation that Arizona Democrats were considering a censure vote against Senator Kyrsten Sinema for being too pro-Trump. 

Apparently, voting against the president 81% of the time constitutes being a raging right-wing reprobate in today’s liberal hive mind.

It is worth noting that the most anti-Obama senator in his last year in office was Richard Shelby, who voted against President Barack Obama 63.9% of the time.  That made the most anti-Obama senator far friendlier to the Democrat president than a Democrat who is being threatened with censure for her apostasy. 

Shelby supported Obama almost 40% of the time.  On average, Senate Republicans opposed Obama’s position less than half the time in 2016.  Bipartisanship was very much alive and well.

Sinema is not even close to being a moderate, unless you define moderation against how far to the left the Democratic Party has swung.  Sinema’s sin is voting for David Bernhardt for secretary of the interior, a name unlikely familiar to 99% of Americans.  She also voted for William Barr for attorney general and opposes the Democrats’ “net neutrality” internet scheme.

But, in today’s resistance-minded Democrat party, any sign of compromise is treated as a cardinal sin.