NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s state of malaise We have become cynical as Biden starts to blend with Jimmy Carter Peter Van Buren

Posted By on October 15th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/americas-current-malaise-biden/

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, is creeping into discussions. It’s a politically loaded word, following its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead.

Carter’s specific use of the term focused on the energy crisis, when OPEC monkeyed with America’s oil supply. But Carter saw that something much deeper was wrong. There wasn’t just an oil shortage to manage, but a recession of hope, a crisis of confidence that someone would have to lead America out of. He perceived that we were tired, worn down, unable to come together in common purpose and fix something.

It would be interesting to hear what Carter thinks about 2021, when things once again don’t work well. Flights don’t fly. Inflation has returned. Gas is expensive. Supply chain problems mean Americans for the first time since World War Two are rationing and getting used to hearing ‘we don’t have any and aren’t sure when we will’. Unemployment plagues us as COVID tore the wool off of many Americans’ eyes about how little meaningless jobs for sub-living wages contributed to their piggy banks or their sense of self-worth. Nurses who were last year’s heroes for working unvaccinated are fired today for being unvaccinated.

There appears no end to COVID. The promised conclusion, the vaccine, proved as rich a lie as two weeks to flatten the curve. Even fully vaccinated people are prisoners to restrictions and mandates that often make no sense, or at the very least vary so much from state to state as to challenge their usefulness. There is little faith that the economic devastation caused by mismanaged restrictions will ever be addressed; the poor will just get poorer. There is a declining sense that COVID is a problem that can be managed as it has been in much of the world (see Europe, especially Scandinavia). The conclusion is that no one is really in charge.

BOOKS, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Vandalized By Democrats, Big Tech, And The Media by John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on October 15th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/14/the-2020-election-wasnt-stolen-it-was-vandalized-by-democrats-big-tech-and-the-media/

Mollie Hemingway’s new book, ‘Rigged,’ explains how the 2020 election was corrupted by the concerted efforts of America’s most powerful institutions.

Hillary Clinton said Monday in an appearance on “The View” that we’re “in the midst of a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy.”

She’s half-right. There is indeed a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy, but it doesn’t come from Donald Trump, whom Clinton claims is responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and ongoing efforts to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election. (Clinton would know all about questioning the legitimacy of elections; as recently as 2019 she was still repeating the outrageous accusation that Trump was an “illegitimate president” who seized the office by colluding with Russia.)

The former secretary of state and 2016 Democrat presidential nominee is wrong that Trump and GOP leaders are undermining election integrity — they have nothing on her when it comes to that — but she’s right about efforts to seize elections and thwart the will of the voters. Those efforts aren’t coming from Trump but from her own Democratic Party, which colluded with corporate media and Big Tech to tip the scales in favor of Joe Biden and actually undermine the 2020 election.

That’s the subject of an important new book out this week by my colleague, Mollie Hemingway. “Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And The Democrats Seized Our Election,” which grew in part from reporting we did at The Federalist in the months before and after the November 2020 election, which chronicled unprecedented changes to election laws in key swing states, as well as appalling abuses of power by local election officials in the days and weeks after Election Day.

“Rigged” doesn’t argue or allege that the election was stolen, but that it was corrupted by corporate media, Big Tech censorship, the courts, and Democratic activists. Taken together, it all amounted to heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sex, the Jewish Agency and Israel’s clueless intelligence minister  Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/sex-the-jewish-agency-and-israels-clueless-intelligence-minister-opinion-682078  

Israeli politicians and pundits have been pretty preoccupied this week with the self-inflicted dashed hopes of Intelligence Minister Elazar Stern to become the next head of the Jewish Agency.

Stern, a member of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party, was the government’s candidate for the post, which means that he was also acceptable to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of Yamina. Stern was an example of one of those so-called compromises that the motley left-right coalition was able to reach with ease.

For one thing, Bennett keeps telling himself that he has to pick his battles, not stand on principle over the more minor issues. And though he’d be the last to admit it, the Jewish Agency isn’t a body that he or his peers consider to be as important as they purport it to be. Nor do they consider it particularly controversial.

For another, Stern himself is a kind of nonentity, despite his years in the military – as a commander of the IDF officers’ school, head of the Education and Youth Corps and chief of the Manpower Directorate – before becoming a member of Knesset in 2015.

It was kind of startling, then, when he caused a stir of his own making on Sunday, for what appeared to be no good reason – certainly not where his own career was concerned.
In an interview on Sunday morning with 103FM Radio, Stern announced that during his tenure as IDF Manpower Directorate, he had “shredded many anonymous complaints” from soldiers, including, perhaps, ones involving sexual harassment and/or assault – though he couldn’t exactly remember.

HIS INTERVIEW came on the heels of and in response to an investigation into an anonymous letter alleging some sort of misconduct on the part of “R,” the top pick to replace Nadav Argaman as the head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). By Monday, when the cabinet approved his nomination, he had been cleared and his name, Ronen Bar, was revealed.

Stern, on the other hand, was in the dog house, though mainly put there by members of the opposition. The men and women in his own camp were maneuvering the embarrassing mishap by reiterating their usually very loud #metoo stance: that all sexual accusations must be taken seriously, no matter when, where or how they are made.

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘John of Salisbury’: The Statesman’s Book and Its Contemporary Relevance By David Solway

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2021/10/13/john-of-salisbury-the-statesmans-book-and-its-contemporary-relevance-n1523801

There are many theories purporting to explain the “march of history,” as, for example, the hoary notion of “scientific socialism” with its dialectical certainties, the “great man” hypothesis that focuses on towering figures like Napoleon or Winston Churchill who determine the course of events, or the “from below” perspective treating of the lives and social movements of the lowly, marginal, oppressed or otherwise unacknowledged peoples, most famously espoused in Howard Zinn’s politically skewed and tendentious A People’s History of the United States.

One theory that receives little exposure we may call the idea of the “virtuous leader” as the indispensable factor that allows for the establishment of a decent, well-governed, and “happy” state. The concept of the “virtuous leader” is a classical trope, going back to Epictetus (Enchiridion), Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), and Cicero (On Obligations). The idea enjoys little traffic because there are so few such leaders and because virtue itself is a problematic concept. Indeed, whatever “virtue” might entail, we are all, as poet W.H. Auden wrote, “articled to error.” No human person, lay or elect, can be said to be unblemished, devoid of foibles, frailties, and defects of character, but so unfortunate a fact does not invalidate the approach to an elusive standard of virtue and exemplary leadership.

The subject was taken up by John of Salisbury, a 12th-century theologian, philosopher, and moralist who eventually became Bishop of Chartres and who is scarcely known today, but was an important figure in the late medieval Renaissance. An influential commenter on the affairs of the court of Louis VII, King of France (their dates are coterminous), with particular regard to Louis’ wife, the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine, he understood courts and royal goings-on and was intimately acquainted with the consequences of troubled statesmanship. The Policraticus, translated as The Stateman’s Book, is his most notable volume. As he writes, “This book concentrates in part on the frivolities of the courtiers…and busies itself with the footprints of philosophers”—a spectrum covering the terrain between foolishness and wisdom, the “yoke of vice” and the “rule of virtue.”

The themes he addresses are perennially relevant and particularly so in our current historical moment.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Useless Green Energy Hitting The Wall Francis Menton

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-13-useless-green-energy-hitting-the-wall

In the field of litigation settlements, people sometimes talk about a “win, win” scenario — a settlement structure where both sides can get some advantage and simultaneously claim victory. By that criterion, what is “green” energy (aka intermittent wind and solar power)? The public pays hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to get the things built, and in return it gets: sudden shortages and soaring prices for coal, oil, gas and electricity; and dramatically reduced reliability of the electrical grid, leading to periodic blackouts and risks of many more of same; and despite it all fossil fuel use doesn’t go down. It’s a “lose, lose, lose.”

As the world comes out of the pandemic and the international economy returns to attempting to fulfill normal consumer demand, you can see green energy hitting the wall pretty much everywhere you look. It’s just a question of which data points you want to collect for a day’s entertainment.

The current energy crisis in Europe and Asia is of course getting next to no coverage in the U.S. media. But over at Bloomberg News they have a big story on October 4. That’s Bloomberg News as in Mike Bloomberg — the man with four private jets and at least ten houses who devotes his public life to hectoring you to cut your “carbon footprint.” But now suddenly the Bloomberg News people seem to have figured out that periodic energy crises are an inevitable consequence of increasing reliance on the undependable wind and sun. The headline of the article is “Global Energy Crisis Is the First of Many in the Green Power Era.” The Bloomberg piece itself is behind paywall, but extensive excerpts can be found at Climate Depot here, where they call it a “moment of clarity”:

The next several decades could see more periods of energy-driven inflation, fuel shortages and lost economic growth as electricity supplies are left vulnerable to shocks.. . . . The world is living through the first major energy crisis of the clean-power transition. It won’t be the last. . . . Wind and solar power production have soared in the last decade. But both renewable sources are notoriously fickle — available at some times and not at others. And electricity, unlike gas or coal, is difficult to store in meaningful quantities. That’s a problem, because on the electrical grid, supply and demand must be constantly, perfectly balanced. Throw that balance out of whack, and blackouts result.

No kidding.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The silver lining in the Democrats’ assault on kids in the public schools By Peter Skurkiss

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_silver_lining_in_the_democrats_assault_on_kids_in_the_public_schools.html

A dark cloud is hovering over America’s K–12 public schools.  Look at the landscape.  Some school districts still mandate that kids wear face masks throughout the school day.  Not only don’t the masks prevent viral spread, but they’re unhealthy both a physical and a psychological standpoint.  Plus, the masks severely retard the learning process. This is the last thing the U.S. public schools need. They are academically low performing as it is.  Then there’s the Los Angeles School District.  It’s requiring its students to be vaccinated with the inadequately tested COVID vaccine.

Then there’s the Democrat war on parents and parental authority. 

Former Virginia governor and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe says parents should have no say in what their children are taught.  To top it off, the Department of Justice is threatening to label parents who complain at school board meetings about what’s going on in their schools as domestic terrorists and to sic the FBI on them.  As George Neumayr of the American Spectator puts it: “The Orwellian memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland in defense of public school boards stems from the view that public schools should have the right to miseducate children with impunity, free of any parental oversight.”  That nicely sums up the Democrat view. 

This is not America.  It’s a grotesque version of the country brought about by the actions of Democrats from the lowest level to the very top.  But like with every storm cloud, even this one has a silver lining.  In two ways, actually. 

One is that a record number of parents are abandoning the public school.  They are opting for private schools for their children or going the homeschooling route.  Either one is a better choice than public education.  Hopefully, this abandonment of the public schools will turn into a tidal wave.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Thanks to Biden’s policies, prepare for a cold, expensive winter By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/thanks_to_bidens_policies_prepare_for_a_cold_expensive_winter.html

One of the wonders of the modern age is that fossil fuel allows us to avoid freezing in the winter or overheating in the summer. Climate change fanatics, however, who ignore that the Earth’s climate has cycled endlessly between hot and cold for billions of years, desperately want to return us to a pre-modern state. Their efforts are paying off, for the U.S. government is warning of a 54% increase in winter heating bills.

Upon entering the Oval Office, Biden immediately shut down the Keystone Pipeline and ended news drilling on federal lands. While Trump had brought America to energy independence and affordable energy, Biden reduced America to a vassal of oil-producing countries.

Thanks to this policy, gasoline prices keep climbing. In my neighborhood, they’ve increased by almost 78% in just nine months. The same is true everywhere.

Like all Biden policies, this is devastating for the middle and working classes for it doesn’t just make commuting more expensive, it increases the price of every single item in America. Fuel is needed for farming, manufacturing, shipping, wholesaling, and retailing. Every aspect of life becomes more expensive when fuel prices rise, with the middle and working classes bearing the ultimate burden.

All of this is in the name of fighting alleged climate change. That, of course, is a faith, not a science. We humans can pollute, and I believe we have a moral obligation to keep our environment clean and healthy, but the whole climate change theory is a joke and a bad one at that.

But around the world, not just in America, energy production has been collapsing thanks to various governments’ misguided anti-fossil-fuel policy. Smart governments would have invested in making fossil fuel cleaner. Stupid governments, which means all of them, decided to focus on renewables that will never be able to replace fossil fuels. (Only nuclear power will but lefties make sure nobody has that either.)

With winter coming, the price we’re paying for this mass stupidity is going to be high. Very high:

With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New Gender Religion Tricks Liberals into Betraying Children Without a divine revelation or even a grounding in the liberal tradition, the new gender religion can claim only linguistic astrology as evidence for its astounding claims.  By Sean Ross Callaghan

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/13/the-new-gender-religion-tricks-liberals-into-betraying-children/

Since sexual reproduction first appeared on planet Earth some 1.2 billion years ago, sex has been determined—not assigned—based on compatibility for reproduction. That 1.2-billion year streak will soon end at a school-board meeting near you. If you attend, bow in silence: you’ll be entering the temple of a new religion—albeit a temple with fluorescent lights and folding chairs, where establishment shamans hand down the new laws of nature with absolutely no consultation with nature. The calendar on the wall will display the year zero.

The new gospel requires school staff to say “she” even when they mean “he.” It lets boys play on girls’ sports teams and compete against other girls. It lets boys into girls’ locker rooms to change for swim class. Gender may be “reassigned.” Biological sex dissolves. Everything that once reflected sex is now said to reflect gender. “Transitioning” is this religion’s central sacrament.

How do gender priests transform the bread and wine of contradiction into undeniable truths? How do they claim to know that your children should be bound by their shocking new laws? Is it biology? Liberal ideals? Divine revelation?

No. Gender priests claim to find their new religion in the mysteries of language itself. In other words, word games. We should no sooner listen to a gender priest inspired by word games than to a medicine man inspired by astrology.

A sick establishment uses word games to force society to accept contradictions. That isn’t the theory of some Christian zealot or Reaganite culture warrior. It’s the theory of Herbert Marcuse, the late founder of the New Left. His 1964 classic One Dimensional Man inaugurated a critical theory still used by Marxists today—and gender religion would be far too much, even for a liberal like him. 

The new gender religion is, in fact, a triumph of what Marcuse most despised—a bad kind of thinking he ironically called “positive thought.” Positive thought leads to a kind of word gaming called “positive language.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is America Becoming Rome Versus Byzantium? Our Byzantine interior and Roman coasts are quite differently interpreting their shared American heritage as they increasingly plot radically divergent courses to survive in scary times.  By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/13/is-america-becoming-rome-versus-byzantium/

In A.D. 286 the Roman emperor Diocletian split in half the huge Roman Empire administratively—and peacefully—under the control of two emperors. 

A Western empire included much of modern-day Western Europe and northwest Africa. The Eastern half controlled Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia, and northeastern Africa. 

By 330 the Emperor Constantine institutionalized that split by moving the empire’s capital from Rome to his new imperial city of Constantinople, founded on the site of the old Greek polis of Byzantium. 

The two administrative halves of the once huge empire continued to drift apart. Soon there arose two increasingly different, though still kindred versions of a once unified Romanity. 

The Western empire eventually collapsed into chaos by the latter 5th century A.D..

Yet the Roman eastern half survived for nearly a thousand years. It was soon known as the Byzantine Empire, until overwhelmed by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 A.D..  

Historians still disagree over why the East endured while the West crumbled. And they cite the various roles of differing geography, border challenges, tribal enemies, and internal challenges. 

We moderns certainly have developed unfair stereotypes of a supposedly decadent late imperial Rome of Hollywood sensationalism that deserved its end. And we likewise mistakenly typecast a rigid, ultra-orthodox bureaucratic “Byzantine” alternative that supposedly grew more reactionary to survive in a rough neighborhood. 

Yet in both cases, separate geography multiplied the growing differences between a Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, and older civilization in the east, versus a more or less polyglot and often fractious Christianity in the Latin West. 

Byzantium held firm against ancient neighboring Persian, Middle Eastern, and Egyptian rivals. But the West disintegrated into a tribal amalgam of its own former peoples.  

Unlike the West, the glue that held the East together against centuries of foreign enemies, was the revered idea of an ancient and uncompromising Hellenism—the preservation of a common, holistic Greek language, religion, culture, and history.   

By A.D. 600, at a time when the West had long ago fragmented into tribes and proto-European kingdoms, the jewel at Constantinople was the nerve center of the most impressive civilization in the world, stretching from the Eastern Asia Minor to southern Italy. 

There is now much talk of a new American red state/blue state split—and even wild threats of another Civil War. Certainly, millions of Americans yearly self-select, disengage from their political opposites, and make moves based on diverging ideology, culture, politics, religiosity or lack of it, and differing views of the American past. 

More conservative traditionalists head for the interior between the coasts, where there is usually smaller government, fewer taxes, more religiosity, and unapologetic traditionalists. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: Cologne Mosques to Begin Outdoor Broadcasting of Muslim Call to Prayer by Soeren Kern

Posted By on October 14th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17858/germany-mosques-call-to-prayer

The city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.

Critics say that comparing Islamic prayer calls to church bells is a false equivalence because the muezzin proclaims religious slogans such as “there is no god but Allah” and “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”).

“The Muslim call to prayer is not like the ringing of church bells, which are a reminder of a scheduled worship service. Instead, it is a creed and a statement of political Islam, which has unfortunately been abused in many ways in recent years. The call ‘Allahu Akbar’ is not only a call to prayer, but it has also become the battle cry of jihad by Islamist terrorists.” — Necla Kelek, Turkish-born German Islam expert.

“It’s not about ‘religious freedom’ or ‘diversity,’ as Mayor Reker claims. The mosque operators want visibility. They celebrate the muezzin as a show of power over their neighborhoods.” —Ahmad Mansour, Israeli-Arab and German Islam expert.

“The Muslim call to prayer, the muezzin call, is now permitted in Cologne. Cologne’s Lord Mayor Henriette Reker calls this a ‘symbol of diversity.’ For me it is the opposite — a sign of discrimination…. In 2015, I had to flee from Bangladeshi Islamists because I publicly criticized Islamism. When I hear ‘Allahu Akbar’ from loudspeakers in Germany, I think of a lot, just not diversity…. The muezzin call reminds me of the killing of my six blogger friends by Islamists and the brutal repression of minorities…. This call from the speakers of conservative mosques is above all a show of power. The fact that the city of Cologne now allows the muezzin call with reference to tolerance is a sign of false tolerance for me.” — Shammi Haque, a Bangladeshi-born journalist in exile in Germany.

Acceding to demands from Islamic organizations sponsored by the Turkish government, the city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.