NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Regime Apparatchiks and Sadists Inflict Their Punishments The government goose steppers responsible for systematically destroying the lives of Americans who dared to protest Joe Biden’s election appear sickeningly gratified by the exercise—as all good Marxis By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 26th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/25/regime-apparatchiks-and-sadists-inflict-their-punishments/

Matthew Graves wasted no time doing the political dirty work of the man who appointed him to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia: Joe Biden.

The Biden regime, Attorney General Merrick Garland in particular, faced heat in late 2021 for failing to bring harsher charges against Americans who protested Biden’s election on January 6. Garland was on the defensive for seeking mostly misdemeanor charges, giving the Right ammunition to mock the media’s description of the four-hour disturbance as an “insurrection.”

Enter Graves, the man responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case. 

Shortly after taking the reins of the powerful office, Graves charged 11 members or affiliates of the Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, with seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge brought by the Justice Department in the unprecedented criminal investigation. Created during the Civil War as an alternative to treason to punish supporters of the Confederacy, seditious conspiracy is tantamount to waging war against the United States government. 

Graves’ indictment not only broke new legal ground to criminalize political speech but lent credence to Biden’s claims made during his speech on the afternoon of January 6 that what was happening at the Capitol “border[ed] on sedition.” Garland’s office announced the indictment in a lengthy press release on January 13, 2022 to great fanfare. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin awarded Garland with her “distinguished pol of the week” prize for “dramatically ratchet[ing] up the investigation.”

Considering a federal judge tossed the exceedingly rare charge out of court in 2010, the last time the government attempted to prosecute Americans for seditious conspiracy, one might assume the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to make the indictments stick. In fact, prosecutors recently admitted that only a “handful” of individuals, all tied to Islamic terror cells including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy in the past several decades. For example, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others were charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that left six dead and more than 1,000 injured.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Jihad on Christians in Mozambique by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19674/jihad-christians-mozambique

A savage jihad — replete with massacres, beheadings, and sexual enslavement — has been raging in the Christian-majority nation of Mozambique since 2017.

Few in the West are aware of this, not least as the situation has been garbed in Marxist language that seeks to depict radical terrorists as “victims” and those resisting them, including the Mozambican government, as “oppressors.”

By May 2020, the massacres had reached the point that a “Genocide Warning” was issued. As of December 2021, the terrorists had slaughtered 3,340 people and displaced nearly a million more. The numbers of those killed and displaced has grown in the last year-and-a-half, though there appear to be no official statistics.

As in other African nations, the Muslim terrorists of ISM are deliberately targeting Christians.

“They say their goal is to set up a caliphate similar to ISIS in Iraq and Syria. And they are in some cases, literally going door to door. They ask, ‘Are you a Christian? Or are you a Muslim?’ If you’re a Christian, you’re killed [including by crucifixion]. If you’re a Muslim, then you get the opportunity to quote some Quranic verses. And if you can quote them sufficiently, you save your life. Otherwise, you also get killed [for being insufficiently Islamic].” — Todd Nettleton, The Voice of the Martyrs USA, June 28, 2021.

“Islamic militants turned a village soccer field in northern Mozambique into an execution ground when they beheaded more than 50 people during three days of savage violence between Friday, November 6, and Sunday, November 8….” — Barnabas Aid, November 10, 2020.

After decapitating a Christian pastor, ISM terrorists handed the pastor’s severed head to his widow and ordered her to deliver it to police.

Three years and countless more slaughters later, the world still has no idea what is happening, and the international community is nowhere to be seen.

Why? One reason is the media. They are committed to presenting the situation in purely economic terms, rarely if ever indicating that the terrorists are fueled by an expansionist, jihadist agenda to create an Islamic caliphate and subjugate if not slaughter Christians.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Kafka Comes to College Opposing the racist DEI agenda gets you thrown into a surreal judicial nightmare. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on May 26th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kafka-comes-to-college/

On Friday, April 14 2023, Ohio Northern University law professor Scott Gerber and his students were shocked and alarmed to see campus security officers, backed up by armed local police, unceremoniously enter the classroom, remove Gerber, and escort him to the Dean’s office. There the professor with 22 years experience, a history of excellent evaluations, and courses filled to capacity was immediately barred from teaching, banished from the ONU campus, and told that if he didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21st, the university would commence dismissal proceedings against him. On what grounds? Insufficient “collegiality.”

The real reason, as Gerber went on to explain in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published a few weeks later, titled “DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School,” was insufficient compliance with the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, to which he had objected publicly and in newspaper op-eds and television interviews.

The mission of DEI, of course, is the implementation of social justice revenge. It has metastasized throughout every institution of society: government agencies, the military, corporations, the legal and medical fields, law enforcement, the entertainment industry, literally every Human Resources department anywhere. But perhaps nowhere is it more deeply entrenched than in the field of higher education, where Critical Theory – the subversive ideology behind DEI – originated and was developed.

It is hardly news anymore that university administrations and faculties skew far left politically and are dominated by a totalitarian degree of wokeness. Lockstep conformity to political correctness is expected or persecution for your lack of “collegiality” will ensue: at best, being ostracized by one’s peers, and at worst, being exiled from a career you trained for, excelled in, and loved. “And more than anything else, I love teaching,” Gerber wrote.

As he details in his WSJ piece, in the week prior to being essentially frog-marched out of his classroom in the middle of a lecture – an outrageously unnecessary measure clearly intended to send an intimidating message to any other professor who might step out of line – he had published an op-ed at The Hill defending Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s “right to have friends – even rich ones,” referring to the Left’s recent attempt to manufacture a corruption scandal involving the black conservative Justice whom the Left considers a race traitor.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Dangerous Shortage Of Free Thinkers

Posted By on May 26th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/26/americas-dangerous-shortage-of-free-thinkers/

“A society without free thinkers, dissenters and contrarians is not only one that lacks color and vibrance, it is accelerating toward a wreck. Some might recognize that happening right in front of them.”

Our country has become a conformist society where free expression is rewarded with the swing of a truncheon. We’re on a road that leads to repression, and we are not far from the destination.

This nation owes its existence and its never-seen-before prosperity to free thinkers. The founders were men of the enlightenment. They stand in stark contrast to our ruling class of today, a corrupt and depraved cabal of politicians, state media, institutional leaders, militant activists and corporate executives that is hurtling us into an era of darkness. In the 2020s, the only “truth” is what the narrative, invariably fabricated by the worst people who have ever held power and influence in this country’s history, says it is.

We see those yard signs, the ones that proclaim their occupants’ unwavering grand tolerance and thirst for diversity. But we know that those who put up those signs are the most intolerant, limited thinkers among us. They don’t believe in diversity of thought. Their objective is to force conformity to their way of thinking while immodestly displaying their superior virtue.

“​​There is a new use for tolerance today, and, quite frankly, it is self-serving and hypocritical,” says Paul Chappell, a pastor and president of the West Coast Baptist College in Lancaster, California. “It doesn’t mean tolerance in the traditional sense of the word at all. It means, ‘You must condone and support my choices – even at the expense of your beliefs.’”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

U.S. Spent $13 Billion Sponsoring Unaccompanied Minor Children At The Border Since 2012 Adam Andrzejewki

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

Breaking news: Last year, the feds spent $2.7 billion – roughly $18,000 per unaccompanied child at the border. For context, the average cost of education in Texas K-12 schools was $9,800 per student.

The chaos on America’s southern border has had unintended consequence – a human catastrophe hurting tens of thousands of unaccompanied, defenseless children.

Despite generous taxpayer funding, the federal infrastructure to provide for these children and ensure their safety is woefully incompetent.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a part of the Administration for Children and Families, provides social services for unaccompanied children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Earlier this year the office came under fire for reports children were being placed with abusive “sponsors” and made to work full time in grueling conditions, violating child labor laws. An Inspector General report released in 2023 additionally criticized the agency for not conducting background checks on employees and contractors charged with caring for children.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Our Great Illegal Immigration Mythologies. Part Three Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/our-great-illegal-immigration-mythologies-part-three/

Myth #3: The Noble Illegal Immigrant

Somehow from all the photos of the thousands swarming into across the border, we have constructed the would-be illegal alien into a nobility of sorts. But well aside from the hypocrisy—we fired military personnel who chose not to be vaccinated, but welcomed in illegal aliens who have no proof of vaccination, or a negative Covid-19 test—what is noble about 1) deliberately breaking U.S. law to enter our country, 2) deliberately breaking U.S. law by residing in a country in which one has no legal authority to do so, 3) obtaining fraudulent IDs and documents to perpetuate 1) and 2)?

Moreover, what about the legal immigrant, the law-abiding individual who plays our fool by waiting years to enter our country lawfully, and is subject to all sort of intrusive audits and questioning? Is it such a noble thing to cut in front of the line and swarm the counter, while the law-abiding remains in line, assured that he will almost never be served?

So much of our media propaganda is perniciously false. We are told repeatedly aliens are starving and without food. But from photos of entrants, the chief medical worry is more likely obesity than starvation and too many cell phones rather than none at all. According to most surveys, Mexico has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. California hospitals discover that 3 out of 4 admittees are found upon admission, for any cause, to be pre-diabetic or actually suffering from diabetes. If one examines the explosion in Medicaid budgets in the border states or the inability to easily access public services, illegal immigration is often the unspoken culprit.

And is this surprising? In a post-modern society, when an entrant arrives 1) illegally, 2) without English fluency, 3) without a background check, 4) without a high-school diploma, 5) without valuable skill sets, 6) without capital, and 7) in non-diverse fashion—then what is he supposed to do for support other than crowd the entitlement offices and hope that the sympathetic staff (the greater the number of illegals the greater the budgets of these bureaucracies) of these various state and federal offices liberally dispense their largess?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“TIME” by SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Time is both precise and ambiguous. Computer scientists measure it in zeptoseconds, the time it takes a particle of light to cross a hydrogen molecule, which has an ionic radius (don’t ask) of 0.208 nanometers, one billionth of a meter. The longest measurement of time is a supereon, three billion years. For us, time is finite. In my 83rd year, I have lived just under 730,000 hours, barely a nanosecond for a paleontologist.

Stopwatches are used to measure the time it takes a runner, skier, race car, or horse to cross the finish line. But the word can be vague: ‘She won’t give me the time of day,’ ‘Will the doctor have time to see me?’ ‘My love for Caroline, my children and grandchildren is timeless.’ “And indeed there will be time,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and Do I dare?’” A Tale of Two Cities begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” While ambiguous, we know what Dickens meant. And then there is this quote from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which reflects his time in the trenches during the Great War: “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

While every hour has sixty minutes and each minute sixty seconds, hours and minutes spent in childhood seemed longer than those spent in adulthood, probably because each hour of childhood was a larger percent of our lives. And time continues to accelerate as we age. Nevertheless, we have more time than did our great grandparents. In 1860, life expectancy in the U.S. was 39.4 years. By 2020 it had doubled to 78.9 years. Will it double again for our great grandchildren? And time varies by species. An hour represents about 4% in the life of a Mayfly, while for Jonathan, a 190-year-old Seychelle giant tortoise, an hour represents only 1/1,664,400th% of his life. It is possible that future scientists might learn from the immortal Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, which, once it reproduces, reverts to a polyp stage and starts life all over again.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Chalk and Cheese: Education Then and Now Kevin Donnelly

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/05/chalk-and-cheese-education-then-and-now/

In chapter one of The Abolition of Man, published in 1944, C.S. Lewis criticises the way education, instead of teaching students to discriminate between what is true and false and what is good and bad, conditions them to rely on emotions and a subjective view of how individuals relate to one another and perceive and understand the world.

In opposition, drawing on Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Oriental teachings (what he describes as the Tao), Lewis writes “… what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect.  It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are”.

Lewis goes on to suggest, for those immersed in the Tao, calling children delightful and old men venerable is not “to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognise a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not”. Central to Lewis’ argument is that children must be taught to appreciate the true nature of things as opposed to the progressive, romanticised view that children grow naturally to discernment and knowledge (now rebadged as ‘self-agency’ and ‘personalised learning’ where teachers are guides by the side).

Lewis writes children “must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust and hatred of those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful”.  For teachers to do otherwise is to impoverish children with a barren, soulless and ego-centred education more akin to what he describes as “merely propaganda”.

Pierre Ryckmans, in his 1996 Boyer Lectures, also stresses the danger of subjectivism.  After recounting an episode where an academic attacks Chinese literati painting as bourgeois, Ryckmans writes “From his perspective, value judgments were necessarily a form of cultural arrogance… a vain and subjective expression of social prejudice”.  Ryckmans goes on to argue, given the lack of objective values, universities are now dead, but nobody has noticed.

The way literature is taught in schools provides a striking example of how destructive and impoverished education has become.  Since the mid-to-late 1960’s the definition of literature has been exploded to include multi-media texts, graffiti, SMS texting, posters and student’s own writing. No longer are students introduced to classic myths, fables, legends and fairy tales and those enduring works that have stood the test of time, have something profound and insightful to say about human nature and the circumambient universe and that are exemplary examples of their craft.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Ethical Inferiority of Renewables Chris Leithner

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/05/the-ethical-inferiority-of-renewables/

Imagine for a moment that you’re a “believer in climate change action”, perhaps even a Teal candidate recently elected to Parliament on the strength of your concern, and that of your electorate, about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. You fly (on a fossil-fuelled aircraft) to one of the world’s most impoverished countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, let us say—and then drive (almost certainly not in an electric vehicle) carefully and slowly over rough, muddy, unsealed roads to an impoverished shanty town.

Alighting from the air-conditioned car into the tropical heat, you look a destitute couple in the eye and, through a Congolese interpreter, tell them: “I’m sorry, but you and your children—as well as billions of other impoverished people—cannot have what I’ve taken for granted since the day I was born: fossil-fuelled development and its immeasurable benefits such as clean drinking water, an effective sewerage system, decent accommodation, sufficient nourishing food, modern medical attention, local, national and global transport and communications and much else besides. You cannot have these essentials because they’re fossil-fuelled; I advocate the rapid elimination of fossil fuels, and my influential friends and I mean to get our way.” You then return to the airport, fly home and demand “climate action now!”

If that remains your position, you’re not alone: among the most despicable moral failings of the zealots of decarbonisation, environmental, social and governance principles (so-called ESG, which one astute critic has defined as “Economic Suicide Guaranteed”), “net zero” and the like, is an indifference to the point of callousness that elevates a “first world” ideology above all else—including the welfare of the world’s poorest people. Bluntly, climate activists are at best shallow, parochial and self-centred, and at worst, greedy narcissists.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Another Green Energy Assault on the West By Jonathan Lesser

Posted By on May 25th, 2023

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/05/24/another_green_energy_assault_on_the_west_901421.html

In March, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation, called the SITE Act, which will allow thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines to be sited over state and local objections, and allow developers to take privately owned lands through eminent domain.  The stated goal is to enable the development of vast quantities of heavily subsidized wind and solar power in rural areas and transmit it to cities where the electricity is needed to meet unrealistic and costly electrification mandates, such as those in California and New York.

The New York Times, for one, is celebrating.  Forcing rural states, which many Times readers deride as “flyover country,” to supply the electricity needs of coastal urban ones is seen by the Times as rural states’ obligation.  In a May 4, 2023, editorial, the Times wrote, “To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work.”  Authority for siting new transmission lines would be under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which already has authority over siting of new natural gas pipelines.  

That same editorial also stated, “The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.”  Given the actions taken in the past by the Bureau of Land Management, which has prevented ranchers from grazing on millions of acres of federally owned lands; the Forest Service, which last year began a prescribed burn on a windy day, despite please not to, and caused the largest wild fire in New Mexico’s history; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers every stream, pond, and arroyo to be a regulated wetland, many in rural states would likely disagree.