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“A Cockeyed Optimist” Sydney Williams

Posted By on April 25th, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

It is easy to be pessimistic:

Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.

Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom. 

Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.

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Liz Peek: Europe backs off climate push as voters rebel — will Biden take note?

Posted By on April 25th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3961719-europe-backs-off-climate-push-as-voters-rebel-will-biden-take-note/

Europe is beginning to back off its aggressive carbon-zero policies. Why? Because consumers are balking. European Union administrators have gone too far, too fast, and the citizens of France, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, have had enough.

There is a lesson here for Joe Biden. Unfortunately, he and his White House climate zealots are unlikely to learn from what is going on across the Atlantic.

Ironically, it is the French Green Party that most recently tried to block plans pushed by the European Parliament to put a carbon tax on fuel used in heating and transport. Its members fear that the measure will reignite the protests of the Gilets Jaunes, the yellow vest group that emerged overnight to oppose a proposed carbon tax on diesel fuel and whose protests all but shut down France. It is not that the Greens have gotten realistic about the need for oil and gas as a bridge fuel, or have suddenly recognized the economic risks of betting on unreliable renewable fuels; rather, they worry that, as one legislator put it, “in a few years’ time, people will hate climate policies. People will go to the far-right parties.”

The proposal to force businesses to buy emissions allowances on fuel and heating would increase household costs by an estimated 50 percent — too much to be politically acceptable. Nonetheless, the EU Parliament approved the measure, which will not go into effect until 2027 and could be postponed if energy prices increase.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Christians Continue to be Purged: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19593/armenian-genocide-remembrance

The evidence is overwhelming.

“Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands…” — Aurora Mardiganian, Ravished Armenia.

Often overlooked… is that this was less a genocide of Armenians and more a genocide of Christians. Thus the opening sentence of U.S. House Resolution 296, which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide (2019), correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it — not nationality, ethnicity, territory, or grievances — was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

“Christians were considered infidels (kafir). The call to Jihad… was part of the plan.” — Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide

An eyewitness recalled that… “outrages” [were] committed against “even children”….

“The opportunity [World War I] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.” — Winston Churchill.

“Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention…. The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.” — Talaat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire during the genocide, June 1915.

Turkey, in 2020, sent sharia-enforcing “jihadist groups,” from Syria and Libya…. These Muslim groups committed numerous atrocities. These included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts. — Greek City Times, September 25, 2020.

Not only has it gone unpunished; NATO ally Turkey has resumed the genocide against the very descendants of those whom the Turks nearly exterminated over a century ago — namely Armenians and Assyrians.

More recently, in late 2022, Turkey launched thousands of attacks — air, mortar, drone, artillery, etc.—several miles deep into Syria’s northern border. This is, of course, where most of the religious minorities live — Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds, who a few years earlier experienced a genocide at the hands of the Islamic State (“ISIS”).

“These military attacks by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime are part of a wider Turkish policy of annihilation of the Kurdish and Assyrian [Christian] people in northern Syria and Iraq. Turkey has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including bombing, shelling, abduction, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The attacks are part of Turkey’s genocidal policies towards Kurds, Christians, and Ezidis.” — Genocide Watch, December 7, 2022.

“This genocide is a pattern we see, and it’s certainly nothing new…. For those who say ‘Not on our watch!’ or ‘Never again!’— here it is, happening again!” — Charmaine Hedding, president of the US-based Shai Fund, webinar on Turkey’s genocidal assault on Christians in Syria, rumble.com, December 15, 2022.

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Two School Employees are Charged with Blasphemy for Desecrating the Holy Quran by Nasir Saeed

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19592/pakistan-school-blasphemy

They had both been asked to clean a store room. During the cleaning they gathered all the rubbish (Paper etc) and later burnt them.

Since they are both illiterate therefore they didn’t know what kind of paper they were burning, and there were some Qurans page in that rubbish.

After taking a statement from the witnesses, the police have registered a case under section 295- B of blasphemy law against Musarrat Bibi and Mohammad Sarmad and taken them into custody at Police Station Sadar Arifwala Park Pandan [Punjab].

Nasir Saeed, Director CLAAS-UK thar, [said] it is very sad that two illiterate people are charged with blasphemy. They are completely innocent as both didn’t know what they were doing, they were just doing the work they were asked….

“The case against Bibi and Sarmad should be dismissed and those people who asked them to clean the store and didn’t supervise them should be investigated and should be punished for their carelessness…. This is completely unfair and unjust. Such people who don’t how to read and write are given such a job and then they are charged with blasphemy. It is misuse of the blasphemy law and it has to be stopped.” — Nasir Saeed, Director CLAAS-UK, April 22, 2023.

On 15 April, 2023, a First Information Report (FIR) was registered against two people working in Government girls’ higher secondary school, EB 66, Arifwala, Punjab.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Dangerous Fad of Transgenderism The gender dysphoria fad shows no signs of abating. By Larry Sand

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/23/the-dangerous-fad-of-transgenderism/

Fads aren’t always harmful things. Hula hoops, goldfish swallowing, and flagpole sitting have come and gone and generally were not toxic. In the 1970s, various eating disorders were the rage. But they were treated as physical disorders and serious mental health problems. Writing in Psychology Today, Dr. Emily Deans observed, “Eating disorders in adolescents are strongly predicted by the earlier presence of depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety.” Her treatment recommendations included, “A personalized approach, based on treating underlying depression, anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, and teaching that our bodies deserve to be nourished with proper, whole foods can be surprisingly effective.”

But today, bulimia and anorexia are passé and have been replaced by gender dysphoria, which is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda. In fact, the organized nature of the movement has left many parents in a horrible position. For example, in Washington State, SB 5599 was just passed, which allows the state to legally take children away from their parents if they don’t consent to their child’s gender transition surgeries. Washington State Senator Marko Liias issued a statement that summed up the new law. “Under current law, if a child who has run away from home goes to a licensed shelter, that shelter is required to notify the parents unless a compelling reason applies. The bill allows certified shelters to contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) in lieu of parents in certain additional instances, such as when a youth is seeking reproductive health services or gender-affirming care.”

But what is the depth of the problem?

A staggering 99.4 percent of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6 percent of the adult population who are gender dysphoric—a condition that causes extreme distress—certainly deserve empathy and respect.

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Do We Even Know We Are All Socialists Now? In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.” By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/23/do-we-even-know-we-are-all-socialists-now/

Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it. 

I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind. 

Socialism With a Whimper

So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.

Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is “the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money, or the political systems based on these beliefs.”

The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative. 

But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like “the doctrine of enforced ‘equity’ by government redistribution of money and power from one ‘oppressive’ group to another ‘oppressed,’ with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology.”

We have been drifting into such a socialist system for decades, but it was accelerated by the eight years of the Obama Administration and has arrived at near fruition with the Biden Administration. Note first that the more socialist we become, the greater the resistance grows, and the more desperate and cruel the socialists become to force down the throats of the public something they otherwise would vomit up.

Under the woke socialist model there are no longer any absolutes, laws, or customs. We are left instead with mere constructs deemed illegitimate and arbitrary, in need of systematic dismantling in the interest of the proverbial people. 

Such redistributionist, compensatory and reparative efforts to make us equal on the backside have in common a war against all meritocracy and indeed any accomplishment deemed singular and beyond the abilities of the masses. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel is Fighting the World’s War Memorial Day in Israel has important lessons for all of us. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-is-fighting-the-worlds-war/

Editor’s note: The piece below is to mark Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, and Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day – a somber day followed by a day of great celebration held every year in late April or early May on the day (in the Hebrew calendar) which, in 1948, Israel declared its independence. This year, Yom Hazikaron will be commemorated from the evening of Monday, April 24th, and Yom Haatzmaut will be celebrated from the evening of Tuesday, April 25 to the evening of Wednesday, April 26.]

None of the 18 people murdered in Israel by Islamic terrorists so far this year were soldiers.

The dead included a 6-year-old boy and his 8-year-old brother killed in a car ramming attack in Jerusalem, a British mother and daughters gunned down on the road, a 27-year-old from Connecticut traveling to a wedding, and an Italian tourist run over on the beach.

In some countries, the soldiers fight wars, in Israel, they fight to stop a genocide.

Islamic massacres are often defended with some variation of “the occupied have the right to resist”. The Muslim occupiers keep resisting the indigenous Jewish population by killing women and children, and random foreigners whose only crime is being non-Muslim in a land that the terrorists want to reclaim for Islam.

Ever since the “throw the Jews into the sea” era, the agenda has never changed.

After the shooting of two brothers driving through the occupied village of Huwara, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll asking the Arab Muslim settlers if they approved of the terrorist attack. 71% of them supported the killings.

When Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, arrives on Monday evening, it finds a nation at war against a genocidal enemy that has half the world under siege.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Advanced Placement US History books defame Trump and conservatives By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/advanced_placement_us_history_books_defame_trump_and_conservatives.html

Whether you have children or remember your high school days, you remember that Advanced Placement (“AP”) classes attracted the strivers in any schools, the ones who wanted to take an ostensibly college-level class in a given subject, whether to have a more interesting class, to gain college credits or (nowadays) to get extra grade points. These are the kids who pay attention, and who will soon be voting, so it matters tremendously that many of today’s AP U.S. History books defame Donald Trump, a treatment they do not give any other president, including Bill Clinton.

Greg Price took the time to “review five of the most commonly used AP U.S. History textbooks that cover all the way through the presidency.” It was an eye-opening experience and a very disturbing one. Without exception, they repeat as true defamatory claims about Trump, including the disproven Russia collusion hoax, and Clarence Thomas, as well as giving the leftist version of Trayvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s deaths. One even implies that Trump supporters murdered Brian Sicknick on January 6. Some generally disparage conservatives.

Here’s Price’s summary of the books but I urge you to read beyond the summary. Price backs up his claims with screen grabs from the books:

Nearly all of the textbooks claim “Russian meddling” was responsible for the 2016 election of Donald Trump, despite that narrative being debunked through multiple studies and news reports. A New York University Center for Social Media and Politics study found that Russian Twitter accounts had no measurable impact on the 2016 election. Facebook’s internal investigation also found that 56% of the $100K worth of Facebook ads purchased by Russians in 2016 were viewed on the platform after the election was over.

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Dems Propose Giving Automatic Entry To Illegal Immigrants Who Claim To Be LGBTQ

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.offthepress.com/free-pass-for-gays/

Democrats in the House and Senate this week introduced the Dignity for Detained Immigrants, which proposes the repeal of mandatory detention, the prohibition of family detention, the barring of the use of private detention facilities, and making it easier to release immigrants who qualify as a “vulnerable person.”
To be classified as a “vulnerable person,” there are 11 qualifications, including someone who is under 21 years of age, pregnant, identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex, has a serious mental or physical illness or disability, has limited English language proficiency, or is a survivor of torture or gender-based violence.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) this week.

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams says ‘migrant crisis’ under Biden administration has ‘destroyed’ city Eric Adams even took a hit at New York City politicians by Adam Sabes

Posted By on April 24th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-says-migrant-crisis-under-biden-administration-has-destroyed-city?intcmp=tw_fnc

Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Friday the migrant crisis the country is facing under the Biden administration has “destroyed” his city.

Adams made the comments during a panel discussion with the African American Mayors Association in Washington, D.C.

“[The] city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” Adams said during the discussion. 

Adams even appeared to take a hit at politicians from his own city, suggesting they aren’t doing much to fix the issue at hand.

“None of my folks came to Washington, D.C., to fight for the resources, that’s going to undermine every agency in our city,” Adams said.

Adams made similar comments Wednesday, when he said that the “national government has turned its back on New York City,” adding that “every service in this city is going to be impacted by the asylum seeker crisis.”

In a memo from the New York City Office of Management, reported by the New York Post, the city will spend an estimated $4.2 billion on costs related to migrants and asylum seekers that would be spent through June 30, 2023, and the end of fiscal year 2024.

According to the internal city memo, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan would reimburse the city for up to $1 billion in migrant aid, which only covers 29% of expected shelter costs.