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Ruth King

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Diane Bederman; Influencers and Your Children

By on July 1st, 2021

https://dianebederman.com/influencers-and-your-children/

Influence: the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways : sway: the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command:  corrupt interference with authority for personal gain

According to a 2019 survey from Common Sense Media and Survey Monkey: “Teens get their news more frequently from social media sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) or from YouTube than directly from news organizations. More than half of teens (54%) get news from social media, and 50% get news from YouTube at least a few times a week. Fewer than half, 41%, get news reported by news organizations in print or online at least a few times a week, and only 37% get news on TV at least a few times a week.” Among teens who got their news from YouTube, two-thirds reported learning about the news from celebrities and influencers, rather than news organizations.

So what is an Influencer? The figure of an influencer is supposed to change how we behave, to be a spokesperson who should show a deep sense of appreciation (for something), rather than appropriation. It’s an influencer’s responsibility to create experiences, ideas and ways of thinking that entice crowds to follow them.  Many of these influencers have from hundreds of thousands to millions of followers.

These Influencers are speaking to your children in their bedrooms, without you there to mediate, teaching them morals and values that may not be yours but fit in with today’s cancel culture. They are like pedophiles and bullies who come after your children on line.

I remember people of influence. They did not have the title Influencer. They didn’t need the title. They just influenced by example. They certainly were not given the responsibility to create ways of thinking! What a sense of self-importance!

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE OPPRESSED” -by Tom McCaffrey

By on July 1st, 2021

https://www.thepostemail.com/2021/06/29/cultural-cleansing/

This just in: a motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist has broken the world bicycling record for the 4000 meter individual pursuit.

On a more serious note, Colorado baker Jack Phillips, the man who defied the politically correct mob and refused, in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple, is back in court. This time he’s refusing to bake a cake specifically designed to celebrate Autumn Scardina’s transition from being a man to being a “woman.” Rational persons have been wondering for some time why the Democrats ever decided to make an issue of transsexualism, given that the number of persons involved is miniscule. But to ask this question is to fail to understand the dynamics of the cultural cleansing currently under way in the West.

First, though, a brief lesson on the use and abuse of language. Historically “gender” was a term used in grammar. In Latin, for example, the word for water, aqua, which English speakers would consider to be neuter in gender, is feminine, so the forms which the word takes in different contexts reflect this. The word for book, liber, another neuter word for English speakers, is masculine in Latin. Italian and Spanish, among other languages, also work this way, but English does not.

So until relatively recently, no one would have thought of referring to a man as being of the male gender; he was of the male sex. The word “male,” on the other hand, is indeed of the male gender. So we say, “The male seeks his mate” rather than “The male seeks her mate.”

But the culture vandals of the Left needed a word to help them normalize, for the first time in the history of mankind, the phenomenon of a man who considers himself to be “really” a woman (or vice versa). So they began to refer to his sex, which is determined biologically, as male, but to his “gender,” which they would determine in an entirely different way, as female.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trust the Science? By: Judd Garrett

By on July 1st, 2021

https://www.objectivityistheobjective.com/blog1

The new catchphrase these days to bully people into compliance is “trust the science.” We are continually told, we must “trust the science”, and if we don’t “trust the science”, we are some sort of conspiracy theory nut jobs. 

I have some questions:

●  Isn’t it “the science” that created this Covid-19 pandemic in the first place? 

●  Isn’t it “the science” that is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide? 

●  Isn’t it “the scientists” that have lied and covered up the origins of Covid-19 for a year and a half to protect themselves? 

●  Isn’t the reason why we had a pandemic is because “the science” believed it was infallible? 

●  Didn’t “the science” believe that it could genetically manipulate a deadly virus, and no harm would be done? 

●  Didn’t Mary Shelley warn us of this over 100 years ago in her novel, Frankenstein? 

●  Isn’t hubris one of the biggest deadly flaws to which “scientists” continue to fall victim?

Maybe when scientists start acting honestly, responsibly, and ethically, then the rest of us would be willing to “trust the science” they produce. The pure discipline of science is not the problem. Many unbelievably great things for humanity are a result of science. 

The issue is the unabashed arrogance that science displays from time to time, as evidenced in the phrase “trust the science”. That arrogance is where science goes off the rails. So, we need to take a contradictory stance towards science. We need to believe in the importance and potential of science, but at the same time continue to view science with a skeptical eye.

Science is made up of scientists, human beings who are fallible, imperfect, who are susceptible to human frailties like the rest of us; greed, pride, arrogance, selfishness, fear, short-sightedness, bias. 

Scientists are not immune to the corrupting forces of the world to which the rest of us humans fall victim. 

We have seen that on full display over the last year and a half. People can no longer hide behind the moniker of “scientist”, and assume that it makes them infallible, or immune to criticism. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Joe Manchin Is a Fake The West Virginia Democrat is a very savvy politician. But he doesn’t represent Americans or the people of his state or the spirit of compromise. He’s a phony. By Dan Gelernter

By on June 30th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/29/joe-manchin-is-a-fake/

I have a number of friends who are excited about the impending results of the Arizona election audit. I also have a little knowledge of what’s going on there, though perhaps not much beyond what is available to the average American. What I tell my friends is: Don’t get your hopes up.

My home state of Connecticut had a Republican governor in recent memory and, not long before that, no state income tax. In the 2010 gubernatorial election, Democrat Dan Malloy was trailing Republican Tom Foley statewide, even as the counting seemed to be wrapping up. But then—shazam!—a bag of uncounted ballots was “found” in McLevy Hall. As the Connecticut Post reported at the time, “Even as Foley’s campaign demanded the ballots be taken by State Police to Hartford for counting by a neutral authority, city officials insisted the existence of the ballots previously had been disclosed and that Bridgeport election workers would count them Thursday night.”

They were still counting in Bridgeport three days after the election. They eventually came up with enough votes in that single city to erase Foley’s statewide lead. Malloy was declared the winner, and Connecticut has been an uncontestable blue state ever since.

Any of this sound familiar?

The problem with a careful audit of the ballots is that most vote fraud has been sanctioned by state law. In Georgia, for example, a consent decree signed by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger changed the process of signature verification so that when an official notices a mismatch he now has to consult with two other officials and they have to agree by a two-out-of-three vote that the signature doesn’t match. Then they have to put their names in writing to record their appraisal of the matter and they mail the voter in question a provisional ballot, giving him an opportunity to “cure” the mismatch. In practice, therefore, signature verification never happens.

And of course, once a ballot has been separated from its envelope—as they all have been by now—there is no way to reconnect the two, even if auditors find a suspicious signature. Which means there is no way to cure the fraudulent vote itself. That is why mail-in voting is such a bonanza for fraud, and why the Democrats have worked so hard to make it the norm. The toxic Voting Rights Lab was proud to note in a recent report that only two-thirds of voters cast their ballots on Election Day in 2016, and in 2020, only one third voted on election day. So we’re told.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Police State by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on June 30th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17515/palestinian-police-state

These [Palestinian] leaders have turned the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank into a police state where political opponents are beaten to death, arrested, tortured and intimidated.

The crackdown was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the West — until the death of Banat. It was ignored because the perpetrators were not Israeli policemen or soldiers. It was ignored because the media could not find a way to blame Israel for the fact that the Palestinian government was harassing, intimidating and torturing Palestinians.

The silence of the international community and media towards the human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority has prompted Palestinian journalists to make a direct appeal to the European Union to provide them with protection.

The protests… are mainly directed at the Biden administration, whose representatives have recently been courting and searching for ways to cozy up to Abbas and his Fatah cohorts. The message Palestinians are sending to the Biden administration: Stop empowering our brutal, corrupt leaders.

Will the Biden administration and the Western world actually legitimize — and reward with millions of dollars and possibly even a state – political leaders who brutalize, torture and murder their own journalists and citizens? To gain what? A legacy of America championing a regime like that?

Earlier this year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas enacted a decree-law on boosting public freedoms ahead of the Palestinian parliamentary and presidential elections, which were supposed to take place on May 22 and July 31.

Article I of the law provides for “establishing an atmosphere of public freedoms in all the territories of Palestine, including the freedom to practice political and national action.”

Article II provides for “banning the detention, arrest, prosecution of, or holding to account, individuals for reasons relating to the freedom of opinion and political affiliation.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The “Iran Deal” Soon to Be Resuscitated by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on June 30th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17513/iran-deal-resuscitated

Raisi’s election, “engineered to guarantee his victory,” looks suspiciously like a ploy by Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to terrify the American negotiators into capitulating to Iran’s demands even faster and more recklessly, to avoid negotiating with an opponent more uncompromising than the one with whom they are negotiating at present.

The JCPOA is allegedly designed to prevent, or at least postpone, Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapons capability along with the means to deliver them. Among the deal’s many major drawbacks is that after it expires, Iran can enrich as much uranium to have as many nuclear weapons — and the means to deliver them — as it likes.

Despite signs that the P5+1 negotiating team will subscribe to a re-constituted JCPOA “understanding,” there seems to exist no trust that the Islamic Republic will comply with any agreement. The IAEA’s catalogue of doubts regarding Iran’s compliance with any nuclear safeguards is lengthy.

Based on Iran’s pattern of obstructionism, the impending renewal of the JCPOA does not inspire confidence that the Islamic Republic — even if it verbally agrees, or this time signs a document — will ever be in compliance.

It is also sadly assumed, based on past patterns, that the US, in its eagerness to secure a deal — any deal — will back down when faced with any Iranian demand.

The latest alteration before the Americans trying to revive the “nuclear weapons deal” — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — with Iran is the carefully staged election this month of Ebrahim Raisi to its presidency. A clerical hardliner known as “the Butcher,” he is responsible for thousands of executions of oppositions leaders, torture and other “ongoing crimes against humanity.”

Raisi’s election, “engineered to guarantee his victory,” looks suspiciously like a ploy by Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to terrify the American negotiators into capitulating to Iran’s demands even faster and more recklessly, to avoid negotiating with an opponent more uncompromising than whomever they are negotiating with at present. Upon his victory, Raisi immediately announced that he will not meet with US President Joe Biden, and that Iran’s “ballistic missile program and its support of regional militias” were “nonnegotiable.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Zampolits of Wokeness Veterans-turned-lawmakers, with active duty whistleblowers, are the nation’s last defense against the Pentagon’s racialist commissars. By J. Michael Waller

By on June 30th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/29/zampolits-of-wokeness/

Wokeness might do to the American military what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls.

Wokeness—extreme ideological intolerance of opposing views and the imposition of life-destroying punishments for the insufficiently woke—is organized fratricide. 

The fratricide has a higher purpose: A political purge of a targeted institution or culture through mass action, the destructive power of which will create a new utopian status quo. 

The Soviets tried this. Their armed forces had a dual command structure, one military and one political, throughout the ranks. The purpose, amid purge after woke purge, was to purify the military along ideological lines. 

Wokeness itself isn’t an ideology, however. It isn’t critical race theory. It’s a behavioral system of dictatorial political and cultural control. 

The wokeness that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denies he is imposing throughout our armed forces, is nothing new. Robespierre of the French Revolution was woke. So were the Bolsheviks. The Wehrmacht was woke, as was the National Socialism it served. In America, the Ku Klux Klan, Weather Underground, and the Black Liberation Army were woke. The latter two groups from the 1970s became incubators of the critical race theory that has flowered into controversy today.

Once implemented, wokeness swarms upon people to pit them against one another. It destroys national, cultural, and professional identity and unity. It decays mutual respect and trust. It rots our institutions and our spirits from the inside.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

NY mayor’s race in ‘chaos’ as 135,000 extra votes show up By Thomas Lifson

By on June 30th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/ny_mayors_race_in_chaos_as_135000_extra_votes_show_up.html

Don’t you dare question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election because Democrats can always be trusted to run fair, honest and transparent elections. That’s the narrative and you’re expected to stick with it, even in the face of then nation’s biggest, richest, most sophisticated city obviously bungling the race to elect its next mayor.

It’s so blatant that even the New York Times recognizes the problem and applies the word “chaos.” Katie Glueck writes:

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Generals, veterans and citizens issue petition accusing Sec of Defense Austin of violating his oath to the US Constitution By Carol Greenwald

By on June 30th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/generals_veterans_

The Committee to Support and Defend has initiated a petition to the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to “honor his oath” to “support and defend” the Constitution of the United States. The petition “respectfully insists” that Austin immediately countermand orders he has issued since taking office that have eroded military cohesion and readiness. The petition argues that Critical Race Theory is a toxic Marxist ideology with anti-Constitutional objectives. Ordering its teaching in the military endangers America’s national security, in contravention to Austin’s oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the United States from all enemies.

The petition is the third scathing criticism of the Biden administration’s policies which retired generals and admirals and other military veterans have issued in recent weeks, citing concerns over national security and the dangers to our liberties.  In an unprecedented action, over 200 retired generals and admirals issued a letter in May which stated that the United States was facing the “greatest danger to our constitutional Republic since 1776”. The letter stated that our nation is in “deep peril” as we fight the supporters of Marxism who are opposed to our constitutional freedoms and liberties.

Last week, the Committee to Support and Defend led by LTC Allen West (ret) issued a letter signed by over 1000 military veterans which stated that as veterans they were still morally and ethically bound to protect our Constitution and country. They wrote:

“As such, we put our nation’s leadership on notice. We believe that the hard left turn toward Socialism and Marxism endangers our citizens and the future of this great nation…We are disgusted by the dismantling of the rule of law in our great country. We never thought we would see the return to Vietnam style disdain for public service. Unfortunately, this disregard and disrespect is corrosive and will lead to dangerous situations for citizens and law enforcement.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Rebuild Gaza — why? By Abraham H. Miller

By on June 30th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/rebuild_gaza__why.html

If the Biden administration wants to rebuild something, there is plenty of need in American cities.

Nearly anyone who follows events in the Middle East believes that the ceasefire imposed on Israel by the Biden administration won’t last more than three or four years, if that long, before Hamas’s Iranian rockets are once again launched from Gaza.

So, why should America be on the hook for rebuilding Gaza when Hamas’s next round of indiscriminate rocket attacks and Israel’s response with tactical air strikes is inevitable?

Since Israel left Gaza in 2005, there have been either major engagements or minor skirmishes almost every year.  The pattern is familiar. Hamas indiscriminately fires Qassam rockets into Israel, kidnaps Israeli soldiers, or organizes a military assault on the border, and Israel responds with artillery, airstrikes, or ground assaults, and sometimes all three.

To call the ensuing ceasefires after those engagements “fragile” is an understatement.  The most recent one will be no different.

Israel agreed to the current ceasefire because of the Biden administration’s pressure. It is no secret that Israel sought to further degrade Hamas’s fighting capabilities but was restrained from doing so. 

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