MY SAY: DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY

Today is Veterans Day  honoring men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces. In an era where too many military leaders in every branch of armed services are more consumed with politics and p.c. culture than national security, I turn to General Douglas Mac Arthur’s magnificent farewell speech to West Point on May 12, 1962.

As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, “Where are you bound for, General?” and when I replied, “West Point,” he remarked, “Beautiful place: have you ever been there before?” 

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honorº a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code — the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal, arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.

“Duty, Honor, Country” — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

How Palestinian Leaders Inflict Pain on Their People; EU Shrugs by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17928/palestinian-leaders-inflict-pain

The peaceful protests were swiftly and violently crushed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. Again, those protests and the crackdown did not seem to be of any interest to many in the international community, especially the Western donors that fund the PA. Had the demonstrations taken place against Israel, they would doubtless have received extensive coverage and howls of outrage from the mainstream media in the West.

The protesters have appealed to the European Union for help, to no avail. Attempts by the protesters to gain the attention to their plight from the international media have also been totally ignored. This is the same EU that is quick to criticize Israel over the issue of construction in the settlements….

Abbas’s sanctions… have made the civil servants and their families vulnerable to extreme poverty. — Salah Abdel Ati, head of the International Commission to Support the Rights of the Palestinian People, Alwatanvoice.com, November 3, 2021.

According to [Hamed] Abu Wadi, the PA leadership cut off the salaries as a means of silencing and punishing its critics.

“You are the ones who provide aid to the Palestinian Authority, which is depriving us of our salaries and rights in violation of the law.” — Hamed Abu Wadi, civil servant affected by Abbas’s sanctions, addressing the European Union; Facebook, October 25, 2021.

Palestinian leaders are punishing their own people as part of the power struggle between the PA and Hamas. Again, this is happening as the world turns away from the perpetrators and fixes its obsessive gaze on Israel.

If the Biden administration is serious about reviving a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, it should start by trying to make peace between the Palestinian mini-state in the Gaza Strip and Abbas’s PA entity in the West Bank.

If the EU really cares about ending the suffering of the Palestinians, it first needs to hold Abbas responsible for imposing sanctions on his people and to demand that Hamas cease using the Gaza Strip as a launching pad for waging jihad (holy war) on Israel.

When Palestinians living in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip demonstrate against Israel, many in the international community, including the mainstream media, are quick to notice the protest.

My Ringside Seat on a Crooked New Jersey Election By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/my_ringside_seat_on_a_crooked_new_jersey_election.html

Watching the shenanigans in the still contested New Jersey gubernatorial election, I have to wonder whether there has ever been a truly honest election in state history. From my own experience, I would say probably not and, as I also learned, there are a thousand ways to cheat.

In 1982, through an odd sequence of events, I found myself with a ringside seat on a routinely crooked Newark mayoral election. I had been offered a job as “associate director” of the 1,000-employee Newark Housing and Redevelopment Authority. This being a recession year, and I needing to finish my Ph.D. dissertation, I took it.  This was not a career move.

I had two qualifications that endeared me to the Philippine-born woman who ran the show: I lived in Newark public housing growing up, and I aced her borderline illegal IQ test. An elitist whose role model was the then little-known Imelda Marcos, my “Imelda” took me under her wing.

I put “associate director” in quotes because I was actually the shadow associate director. Imelda hired me to intimidate the real associate director, a political enemy that Imelda and her boss – Judge Milton Buck, a Black politico — could not fire. This was the only time in my life I kept a journal. My notes from day two on the job:

Met late in the day with Imelda. Very candid about self. Style “combative,” learned in trenches. Very smart. Needs to talk about it. Met Judge. Discussed role. Purposely keeping me in dark to confuse opposition, keep them on their toes.

Welcome to Newark, the gateway to Third World living. In a way, my timing was excellent. I arrived in January just in time to witness the mayoral campaign. Ignoring all election laws, Imelda and the Judge threw the whole weight of the Housing Authority behind the incumbent mayor, Ken Gibson, a political ally of the Judge.

History Will Grind Out the Truth As the second-century A.D. skeptic philosopher Sextus Empricus noted, eventually the truth emerges and cosmic justice is rendered: “The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/10/history-will-grind-out-the-truth/

“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists. 

But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.  

Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was man-made. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.  

Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak—who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese—were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab. But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out—as it does with most controversies of the moment.  

Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media, and the majority of the bipartisan Washington. D.C. political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.  

In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.  

That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40-million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.  

For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump Administration. 

They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.  

Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign—and for a time the FBI itself.  

Can the People Keep Resisting Big Government Tyranny? Why we must do more than just periodically slow down progressive excess. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/can-people-keep-resisting-big-government-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

Last week voters in Virginia delivered a rebuke to the party of consolidated power and technocratic statism when a Republican political tyro defeated a deep-state Democrat in the election for governor. Like Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of this victory signals a growing resistance to the Democrats’ overweening, unconstitutional interference in families, businesses, civil society, and state sovereignty. A message has been sent to the Biden administration, a portent of the greater backlash increasingly likely in next year’s midterm elections.

Yet tempering this optimism and faith in our Constitutional guardrails against tyranny is an ancient question, one at the heart of political philosophy for 2500 years: Do the non-elite, ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern? When government power exceeds its Constitutional bounds, will the people use their votes to rein it in? Or is the idea that the common people can govern as delusional as, to use Socrates’ analogy, the crew and passengers of a ship selecting a captain by a majority of their votes?

What happened in Virginia is one of those periodic reactions of voters to policies that are indifferent or hostile to their  beliefs and principles. Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe encapsulated this arrogant disdain for the people when he said during a debate, “I don’t think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” following his defense of an earlier veto of a bill while governor that would have given parents some oversight over sexually explicit books in the schools’ libraries. This statement became the emblem of the progressives’ overreach and technocratic disdain for parents.

And the pushback came not just in Virginia. In state and local elections from Pennsylvania to deep-blue Seattle, voters are standing athwart the progressive transformation of this country and yelling “Stop!” Even progressive flaks like The New York Times have warned that these Republican successes “are a grave marker of political peril,” and that the Dems need to return “to the moderate policies and values” that won in 2018 and 2020.

Yale Has More Administrators Than Faculty Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/11/yale-has-more-administrators-faculty-daniel-greenfield/

The proliferation of administrators has long been the ticking time bomb of academia. 

The number of executive, administrative, and managerial employees on university campuses nationwide continued its relentless rise right through the recession, up by a collective 15 percent between 2007 and 2014, the federal data show. From 1987 to 2012, it doubled, far outpacing the growth in the numbers of students and faculty. 

And the numbers keep getting madder to the point where the American university is on the verge of becoming a Monty Python sketch with administrators outnumbering students and faculty.

Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members. 

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike.

The scale of administrative growth continues to increase exponentially like some sort of virus.

Biden Seeks To Prove That Crime Pays Compensating illegal aliens supposedly separated at the border. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/biden-seeks-prove-crime-does-pay-michael-cutler/

In Joe Biden’s America U.S. citizens face increasing scrutiny while illegal aliens are encouraged, aided, abetted and induced to enter the United States why whatever means possible.  Furthermore, once in the United States, illegal aliens have nothing to fear.  Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of DHS the Department of Homeland Security, (Department of Homeland Surrender?) has ordered that agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will no longer arrest aliens who are working illegally or punish employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens.  This was the focus of my recent article, Biden Admin Powers Up Magnet to Attract Even More Illegal Aliens.

This is all in direct contradiction to the provisions of a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S. Code § 1324.

Even though immigration fraud was identified by the 9/11 Commission as being the key method of entry and embedding of international terrorists, DHS Secretary Mayorkas Plans to Shield Immigration Fraudsters – After DHS Officer Arrested for Naturalization Fraud.

While we consider terrorists, Biden and his Attorney General Garner are now Targeting American Parents who may question the curriculum that their own children are being indoctrinated with in American schools while blatantly ignoring how Biden’s Afghanistan Catastrophe Increases Terror Threat in US especially as our borders are now wide open and immigration law enforcement from within the interior of the United States has been all but terminated.

My dad sagely told me that nothing is so good it could not be made better or be so bad that it could not get worse.

How much worse could things get under Mr. Biden and his wrecking crew?

Consider that while Biden has proposed hiring an army of thousands of IRS agents to scrutinize the tax returns filed by Americans and drilling down into bank accounts with balances as low as $600 to make certain that the federal government captures every cent Americans taxpayers owe on November 6, 2021 the Washington Times reported, Biden: Migrant families separated at border deserve compensation.

President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions came up with the “Zero Tolerance” policy to attempt to discourage the human tsunami of illegal aliens who were pouring through the highly porous and dangerous U.S./Mexican border.  The clear goal was to deter what could only be described as an invasion of the United States.

France’s Trump? The rise of Éric Zemmour. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/frances-trump-bruce-bawer/

France’s next presidential election will take place in April, and the international media are already alarmed that the winner just might be a man named Éric Zemmour. He’s “shaking up France’s presidential race before it’s even begun,” warns the BBC. Among Zemmour’s unsettling views: he says “that France is being ‘submerged’ by migrants” and that the French media are “a propaganda machine that hates France.” In other words, he does that most unforgivable of things, in the eyes of the corporate media: he dares to tell the truth about certain uncomfortable subjects.

To the Financial Times, Zemmour is an “anti-immigration polemicist” whom “critics see” (yes, that cheap rhetorical dodge) “as a dangerous, Donald Trump-style provocateur” (because, after all, four years of Trump proved him to be a “dangerous…provocateur”) — “a TV talk-show star who rails against Muslims, immigration, feminism, crime and the supposed decline of France.” Like Trump, Zemmour “has focused on topics that attract intense interest from voters — especially immigration and crime — and packaged them in ways that favour the viral spread of his message.” Thus do the corporate media frame truth-telling as cynical vote-mongering.

In the Guardian you can read that Zemmour “claims foreigners have taken over whole neighbourhoods in France.” As if the banlieues that are no-go zones for non-Muslims weren’t an established fact! The other day France’s Chief Rabbi, Haim Korsia, who is known for his “commitment to interfaith dialogue,” called Zemmour – a Jew who goes to shul with his Jewish wife – an anti-Semite. Thus do the members of the establishment conspire to draw a cordon sanitaire around those who refuse to parrot the elite orthodoxy. Then there’s Hans-Georg Betz, a professor at the University of Zurich who studies “right-wing populism.” He accuses Zemmour of being “obsessed with Islam.” Yes, just like German Jews in the 1930s were obsessed with Nazism. For Betz, Zemmour

regurgitates ad nauseam all the familiar anti-Islamic tropes that have made the political fortunes of radical right-wing entrepreneurs in recent memory….These tropes posit that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political ideology, and as such totalitarian; that the basic principles of Western culture and civilization, such as democracy, freedom of religion and opinion, the equality of men and women, or the separation of church and state, are fundamentally at odds with Islam; and that Islam is all about submission and therefore incompatible with liberal democracy.

Funny how even now, as the writing on the wall (scrawled in Arabic with the blood of infidels) becomes easier and easier to read, academics like Betz still smile on Islam and depict people like Zemmour as “regurgitat[ing]…tropes” to make their “political fortunes.” Yes, the same tropes that made the political fortunes of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. Everything Betz says in his mocking representation of Zemmour’s opinions is objectively true: Islam is totalitarian; it is irreconcilable with Western principles; it is about submission. Most Frenchmen agree: as Robert Spencer reported here the other day, two-thirds of them believe that their nation will “definitely” or “probably” experience the process of total Islamization that Zemmour and others call “the Great Replacement” – a concept that academic elites dismiss as an extremist fantasy.  

NY Times’ latest, wrongheaded bid to double down on rewriting US history By Dan McLaughlin

https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/ny-times-latest-bid-to-double-down-on-rewriting-us-history/

Some people just don’t take correction well. The New York Times Magazine was rebuked two summers ago for the 1619 Project, an essay collection that proposed, as the Times itself announced, “to reframe American history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Now the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, has doubled down on that in a new piece this week.

From the outset, the idea was not simply to broaden our understanding of America’s founding and history, but to replace it.

That was always wrong. America was not unique because of slavery, which predates recorded history and existed all around the world well after 1776. Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Turks, Arabs and many African societies had slaves. The word “slave” derives from “Slav.” In the century after Columbus, more Russian slaves were carried across the Black Sea to the Ottoman Empire than African slaves across the Atlantic.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was around half of the slave trade out of Africa, and at least 90 percent of that trade went to places outside the United States. The Spanish brought African slaves to Georgia and Florida nearly a century before 1619, and into the 1640s, there were more British slaves held in Africa than African slaves held in British colonies.

What made America unique was its democratic system of limited government and its ideals of individual rights — both of which started in Virginia in 1619 with the first elected legislature in the Western Hemisphere. From the beginning, America struggled with the fact that slavery did not conform with the ideals of the Bill of Rights, and ultimately fought a Civil War over it in which hundreds of thousands died to free 4 million black Americans.

The 1619 Project had more specific problems. Its organizer and lead essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, claimed without evidence that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” She waved off warnings from the historian reviewing this claim before publication. Under a barrage of criticism from a Who’s Who of leading academic historians, the Times first wrote a lengthy defense and later grudgingly reworded this, but both Hannah-Jones and Silverstein refuse to call this a “correction.” They also quietly deleted the reference to “1619 as our true founding.”

Time To Pin A Medal On Larry Summers For His Bidenflation Prediction

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/11/time-to-pin-a-medal-on-larry-summers-for-his-bidenflation-prediction/

We’re not big fans of economist Larry Summers, but in this case, he should be in line for a Nobel Prize for predicting exactly what is happening with inflation today … and who is to blame for it.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation climbed at an annual rate of 6.2%, the biggest such jump in three decades.

And that’s despite repeated predictions from other “experts” that the spike in prices earlier this year was “transitory.” Even now, they are flummoxed. As the Washington Post put it Wednesday, inflation is “lasting longer than policymakers at the Fed and White House anticipated.”

But no one, we repeat, no one, should be surprised by the latest turn of events.

Go back and listen to what Summers was saying at the start of the year, and it’s eerily prescient.

Summers publicly and repeatedly warned that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan —which was Biden’s first big “achievement” that passed without a single Republican vote — would spark an inflationary spiral.