https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/u-s-marine-dragged-through-mogadishu/
The photos taken by Canadian photographer Paul Watson, of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu spelled the beginning of the end for U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force. Domestic opinion turned hostile as horrified TV viewers watched images of the bloodshed—-including this Pulitzer-prize winning footage of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed’s supporters dragging the body of U.S. Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, cheering.
http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/18/fbi-shouldnt-prosecuting-college-fraud-rooting-corruption/
As we watch the FBI investigate and help bring criminal charges against scores of wealthy individuals for fraud because they paid some middleman to alter their kids’ college entrance exams or bribe college officials to claim their kids were recruited athletes, I can only think: What chutzpah!
The FBI may have committed the grossest fraud in the history of our country by trying to throw a presidential election through a fraudulent counterintelligence investigation of “Trump-Russia collusion,” using the massive legal and technological authorities at their disposal. And we’re supposed to get worked up by The Greatest College Admissions Fraud Scandal of All Time.
Now, let me be clear (to channel my inner Barack Obama). I am not condoning the payment of enormous sums of money by some rich, pompous parents so some guy can pay some obviously ethically challenged university employees to lie about those parents’ kids having athletic talent so they can be admitted to overpriced, overrated colleges. Or paying a guy to have some minions alter answers on college entrance exams.
Ethically, that is clearly wrong. But should it be criminal? I highly doubt it. Very wealthy parents routinely donate huge sums of money to colleges to fund an endowed chair or to construct a new building, often with the expectation that it will improve the chances of their academically mediocre children being admitted to that university. That’s what the alleged scammer-in-chief in this tale, Rick Singer, called the “back door” to admission to elite universities.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/17/when-presidential-character-once-mattered/
Here’s why I did not vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan—despite their records.
1944: Sorry, I am not voting for a fourth term for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s a vindictive character and has brought disrepute into the White House. When he didn’t get his way, he pouted and tried to pack the Supreme Court. When critics went after him, he threatened them with targeted regulations and taxes to silence them. He signed the order putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps—another one of his “executive orders” that he so often has abused.
Then there are those rumors. Have we ever had a president who used his own daughter as a conduit to conduct an affair while in the White House? And who knows what Eleanor was doing at the time? Why hide the truth about his health? Anybody who sees or hears the president, knows his army of conspiratorial aides are lying about his ailments as they always do. We’ve known all along that he was paralyzed—and not simply partially disabled, when his braces and aides staged his standing up to make us believe he could almost walk.
The president is now wasting away. Rumors are that his blood pressure is dangerously high and won’t go down. It’s Woodrow Wilson all over again, when they lied that his stroke was never serious, even as the guy was near comatose as his wife ran the country. FDR’s advisors know that he won’t make it six months if elected a fourth time. (What president before has even run for a third term?) They are hiding that fact to make sure the Democrats keep control of the presidency once he dies in office. There should be a constitutional amendment or something to remove an incapacitated president.
I cannot vote for a candidate who flat out deceives the American people. Character is destiny, and without it policy means nothing. Storming Normandy was a brilliant success, but it should not come at cost of endorsing an adulterous president. Even if FDR is leading us to global victory, his record is stained by his mendacity.
https://quillette.com/2019/03/14/the-sudden-unpopularity-of-neoliberal-
EXCERPT:…..” This is especially relevant with the mainstreaming of intersectionality as an analytical framework. Here, people are represented as being intersected by a number of oppressive systems, including capitalism. Now, some people have argued that intersectionality with all its many different systems of oppression, especially those related to race, gender, and sexuality, shift the focus away from class. (And thus from wealthy individuals and corporations.) This is true, but probably only for the short term. In the long term, it seems apparent that capitalism will become more and more central.
Ultimately, there’s a good argument that corporations and wealthy individuals who engage in modern social progressivism with its basis in critical theory are sawing the branch they’re sitting on. While they might themselves see no conflict between laissez-faire capitalism and social progressivism, they’re contributing to the build-up of a mainstream worldview that sees society as consisting of oppressive systems to be dismantled, and capitalism naturally fits at the top of the intersectional matrix.
Add to this a culture where attacks on privilege have become quite common and where people are fearful of being associated with it, and where anything that can be construed as a defence of privilege is considered unacceptable, and now imagine that this shifts from racial- and gender privilege to class privilege, even to a modest degree. I suspect we’re going to see more instances like this, where people like Schultz all of a sudden find themselves under attack by progressives and are blindsided by it.
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22455/mohammed-favorite-color
America has been sleeping while the long term globalist plan of one world government is quietly being implemented through United Nation’s policies promoting population control in America and then mass immigration to replace the declining population. The objective is to build a permanent progressive majority Democrat ruling class that will eventually impose the final solution of one world government at the voting booths.
The radical “progressive” faction that has overrun the Democrat party in the United States has been referred to as the Red-Green axis. Investigative reporter James Simpson details the progressive movement’s objective in his 2015 report “Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration, and the Agenda to Erase America.”
The open borders agenda is not new. It was framed in the Vancouver Plan of Action at the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. The UN envisioned redistributed wealth and redistributed populations as the great equalizer that would bring sameness to the world – their final solution. One merged global population, one merged global language, one merged global currency, and one ruling global government to control the infantilized global population.
What is wrong with this comprehensive global merger promoted in spiritual terms as the great humanitarian solution to the world’s instability and rapidly depleting resources?
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13
The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.
In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.
In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad.
The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.
In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves—154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states.
There is also a renewed crusade to erase the memory of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Los Angeles removed a Columbus statue in November based on the premise that his 1492 discovery of the Americas began a disastrous genocide in the Western Hemisphere.
https://canadafreepress.com/members/1/JoanSwirsky/130
”…the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.” —President Donald J. Trump”…the chickens of the Democratic Party are coming home to roost…maybe then they will also realize that anti-Semitism, like most cancers, is fatal unless it’s removed.” —Michael Goodwin, NY Post
Most people thought antisemitism had been relegated to the trash bin of history after Hitler and millions of his willing German-Polish-Austrian-French-Swiss-Belgium executioners—with savage premeditation—murdered six-million Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s, and the world—significantly after the fact—seemed to wake up to the psychotic, irrational, obsessed nature of Jew hatred.
But today, less than 75 years after the founding of Israel, Jew hatred has emerged from the cesspool in which it festers. The maniacal obsession with Jews is on the rise, not only throughout the Middle East and Europe—France, England, Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Belgium, et al—but it is also contaminating America the Beautiful!
https://www.asiatimes.com/
I didn’t say that Boeing is arrogant. I said they have their noses in the air.Jokes aside, l’Affaire Boeing is a watershed. President Trump is under pressure to circle the wagons around one of America’s flagship industrial companies, among other reasons because China will exploit the crisis to promote its new entry into the civil aircraft market. He should ignore the legions of industry lobbyists and their Hallelujah chorus at the Pentagon, and take the opportunity to clean out the swamp in America’s military industry.By now the whole world knows what pilots and aerospace engineers have known all along: Boeing stuck big modern engines on a 1950s airframe design, which made the 737 Max inherently unstable, with a tendency to go nose up and stall. It used a software kluge to compensate but didn’t retrain pilots in the new aircraft in order to speed sales.
What culpability the company bears is a matter for the lawyers to sort out. Norwegian Air won’t be the last airline to demand compensation from Boeing for lost revenues while the 737 Max fleet is grounded.The 737 Max scandal is a disaster for the United States, and it couldn’t have happened at a more delicate moment. China’s aircraft manufacturer COMAC already has nearly 1,000 orders for its C919 twin-engine passenger jet, designed to compete with the 737 Max as well as the Airbus 320. Not only has the prestige of American industry been tarnished, but the credibility of its air safety regulators, the Federal Aviation Authority and the National Transportation Safety Board, is compromised.President Trump should remember Winston Churchill’s advice never to waste a crisis, and use the full power of his office to hold Boeing accountable for cutting corners and withholding key information. That’s the right thing to do as a matter of sheer political expediency – Americans want their leaders to stand up to industry corruption – but it’s also a strategic opportunity.
http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
“Those who would give up essential liberty, to obtain a little safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“There is nothing which I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two great parties,each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This,in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” John Adams (1735-1826)
If one were to draw a spectrum of our politics, it would have, on the far right, Libertarians who believe in minimal government and, on the far left, a Social Welfare State comprised of those who believe that government’s primary responsibility is to care for all the needs of all its people. Most of us reside somewhere between those two poles. If we go beyond both extremes, the spectrum becomes circular, as both end in autocracies.
The natural tendency for any organism is to grow, which it does until it stops and dies. That is true for elephants, sparrows, snails, man and Maple trees. It is also true for businesses, non-profits, partnerships and, unfortunately, governments. Growth in government should be tethered to increases in population and reasonable services, without letting it expand to the point it destroys the society it was created to serve. For a government bureaucrat running a department, aspiration is natural. They request new funds, find new things to do and hire new people. They are not held to the profit and loss demands of for-profit businesses. Compounding the problem has been the expansion of the “deep state,” which is defined as networks of power within the bureaucracies and agencies of government, people not accountable to voters. There are an estimated three million federal non-elected, non-military, civil service workers in the U.S. It is not in the career interests of department managers to eliminate or even reduce their number of employees. And government salaries are among the nation’s strongest, so that the three richest counties in the U.S. – Loudon (VA), Howard (MD) and Fairfax (VA) – are Washington suburbs. The trick is how do we get government to reduce costs and slow its growth, while keeping alive its promise of liberty and prosperity?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/is
Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism — crude and polished, K.K.K. and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.
And so the story of the Jews in post-World War II America is the story, not just of anti-Semitism’s marginalization, but of philo-Semitism’s triumph. Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn’t just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case. The outsize success of Jewish intellectuals and scientists and artists and businessmen and activists was an especially good thing, a unique proof of American exceptionalism — because ours was the one country where a people so long persecuted could not only survive but triumph. And attacks on Jewish success and influence, like attacks on the state of Israel, were treated as particularly dangerous, particularly un-American, because they threatened to undo this great achievement, and return the Jews to their historic state of constant threat and peril.
This history supplies one way to understand the stakes in the controversy over Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman who keeps using anti-Semitic clichés in her criticisms of the American-Israeli relationship. The part of the American left that’s defending her, or at least mitigating her offense and accusing her conservative critics of bad faith, doesn’t see itself as defending Jew-hatred, and since many of those defenders are Jewish — including the arguable front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders — it’s reasonable to take them at their word.
