NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Beyond Scandal Does anything in modern American politics truly shock your average voter anymore? By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/06/beyond-scandal/

When everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal. No presidency personifies this idea better than that of Joe Biden, which at this point would put such political dramas as “House of Cards” to shame. Take your pick of any one scandalous revelation about Biden himself, the Biden family, or the Biden Administration—from the classified documents scandal to Hunter Biden’s numerous shady overseas business deals, involving several members of his family—and the subsequent explanation for an uninformed voter would most likely unfold with all of the same drama and depth as a scene from an Oliver Stone movie.

Two major scandals recently broke on the same day, involving two of the highest-ranking Cabinet officials in the Biden White House: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is staring down the barrel of sworn testimony that he orchestrated the bogus letter by former “intelligence officials” declaring that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” while Attorney General Merrick Garland has been accused by a whistleblower of lying to Congress about an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

And yet, while the going rate is at least one major scandal every month, it all has become less shocking. 

The fact that Biden’s approval ratings largely haven’t been affected by any of these ordeals makes us wonder: Does anything in modern American politics truly shock the average voter anymore? Do “scandals” even really matter? Or have we entered a political twilight zone where all conventional wisdom about corruption, criminality, and other once-shunned nefarious deeds are now just footnotes in our political discourse?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Follow the science — to where? By Robert Arvay

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/follow_the_science__to_where_.html

The dictum “follow the science” seems to make good sense until you actually follow it to a conclusion that is opposite to that which the “experts” intend you to reach.  We all saw that during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Entire cities were shut down.  Schools and churches were closed.  Enforcement was at times brutal.  In contrast, some states remained open, and the result was that, health-wise, they fared no worse than the states that gutted their economies and violated their citizens’ civil rights.  We are still waiting for apologies.

Another dictum makes a lot more sense: “follow the money.”  While small businesses were starved into ruin, large businesses were allowed to continue operation.  Churches were closed — even their parking lot services were forbidden — but casinos operated night and day.

While “Mister Science” led us astray in important policy decisions, there is another area of science that seems a lot less important, but which has subtle implications that have had pernicious effects for a long time.  It is called the Standard Model of Cosmology, which encompasses theories of how the universe was formed and how nature operates today.  For most of the population, this is Ivy League, ivory tower stuff.  It consists of incomprehensible squiggles on blackboards by (according to stereotype) bespectacled, bearded professors “vith” foreign accents.  They seem too smart to be wrong, but lately, new discoveries are challenging their authority and, by extension, opening criticism of the social policies that affect our daily lives and the future of our grandchildren.

There is a saying that disputes in academia are savage, not because the subject matter is important, but rather because it is trivial.  In that regard, we must ask, how important is the Standard Model of Cosmology?  If it collapses, what else will collapse with it?

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Nefarious — The most interestingly subversive anti-woke movie you haven’t seen or heard about By William Sullivan

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/emnefariousem__the_most_interestingly_subversive_antiwoke_movie_you_havent_seen_or_heard_about_.html

As a fan of horror films whose wife doesn’t share my affection for them, I’m encouraged to watch movies when I travel on business if I ever get a free evening.  Tuesday night was just such a night, and there were options.

First, there was a 7:40 showing of Evil Dead Rise.  I enjoy most things of the Evil Dead franchise, so I figured this would be the option.  But I also noticed there was another intriguing movie playing at this particular Southern California movie theater that I’d never heard about, called Nefarious, at 7:20. 

I checked out the trailer. 

Sean Patrick Flanery (of whom I’m a fan and grew up watching, of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Suicide Kings, and Boondock Saints fame) plays a death row inmate, found guilty of multiple murders, and who prison officials assume is acting so erratically and manipulatively that he must be seeking a stay of execution by means of insanity.  Specifically, he claims to be a demon possessing the body of the convict.  A psychiatrist, who harbors demons of his own, is tasked with determining the convict’s level of sanity or insanity, putting his life or death squarely in the psychiatrist’s hands.

It looked interesting enough, so I did this silly thing that I often like to do while weighing which movie I should go see and looked at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Evil Dead Rise is at a solid 84% critic rating.  Promising. 

Then I looked at Nefarious on Rotten Tomatoes.  A dismal 33% critic rating…but it somehow maintained a 97% audience rating. 

That piqued my interest.  What could possibly be going on with this movie that almost every non-critic who decided to weigh in on it says it’s great, but two thirds of critics hate it?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden Administration waging pointless war on our comfort in the name of climate By Eric Utter

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/biden_administration_waging_pointless_war_on_our_comfort_in_the_name_of_climate.html

Looking forward to using your air-conditioning this summer to keep you from misery and lack of sleep? Well, you might have some issues. You see, the Biden administration has declared war on comfort. It’s not just gas stoves, leaf blowers, and lawnmowers the Biden-ites are coming for.  No siree. They are also bound and determined to eventually make air-conditioning prohibitively expensive for all but their coastal elite friends and allies.

New Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations are limiting supplies of freon and other refrigerants, because they are allegedly contributors to “climate change.” The new production quotas have driven up the price of these refrigerants by about 300%, meaning that a recharge may cost $100 to $500 more than before these regulations took effect, depending on how much replacement refrigerant is needed. 

But wait, there’s more! The coolant quotas get even more stringent next year. Moreover, other new EPA rules are directed at those who service air conditioners. Some of these pertain to the types of containers in which refrigerants can be housed and transported. And all of which are going to impose additional costs that will need to be passed on to the consumer.

So, if you balk at the price of refilling or repairing your air-conditioning unit this summer, perhaps you could consider purchasing a new one. Unfortunately, Department of Energy (DOE) efficiency standards will be piled on to the EPA measures, and the combined effect of these excessively stringent requirements will be to raise the price of new A/C equipment, as well.

If infants and the elderly and infirm end up dying because they and their families can no longer afford air-conditioning to cool their living and sleeping quarters—due to government policies purportedly intended to fight “global warming” — that would be ironic as well as tragic.

It is one thing if the global average temperature rises by, say, 1.5 degrees by the year 2100. It is quite another if the temperature in one’s apartment jumps from, say, 72 to 92 in the course of one year.

That would be real climate change.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Georgetown, the Oldest Catholic University in the U.S., Opens a Big Mosque on Campus By Robert Spencer

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/05/05/georgetown-the-oldest-catholic-university-in-the-u-s-opens-a-big-mosque-on-campus-n1692878

Georgetown University, which was founded as Georgetown College in 1789 and is the oldest Catholic university in the United States, has earned yet another distinction: it is now the oldest Catholic university in the U.S. that has a large new mosque on campus. This is great news, right? This is just the sort of openness and good-heartedness that will erase misunderstandings, melt hostility and mutual suspicion, and usher in a new era of peace. Won’t it? Meanwhile, we eagerly await the announcement of which Islamic university anywhere in the world is planning to open a Christian chapel on campus.

The College Fix reported Friday that Georgetown “recently completed a major construction project erecting a large mosque on campus.” The university happily proclaimed that the Yarrow Mamout Masjid, which was named after a famous Muslim freed slave and entrepreneur who lived in the Georgetown area in the early nineteenth century, is “the first mosque with ablution stations, a spirituality and formation hall and a halal kitchen on a U.S. college campus.” How exciting! And really, what could possibly go wrong?

The Georgetown mosque has been happily welcomed at the highest levels. The College Fix stated that it has actually been operating since 2019 while construction continued, but finally the building “was completed earlier this year to much fanfare, with a dedication ceremony March 18 drawing Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who issued a proclamation recognizing the mosque.”

Yet even with a proclamation from the mayor and proud Catholic university administrators boasting about ablution stations and a halal kitchen, the university didn’t seem eager to talk about its grand new structure. The Fix noted that “Georgetown University’s media relations, as well as representatives of its Catholic Faith Communities, Catholic Ministry and alumni center, all ignored requests over the last week from The College Fix seeking comment on the mosque.” Now, that’s downright strange. Are they proud of their new mosque or not?

BOOKS Comments turned off

Writings: Commentary from Jack Engelhard the Voice of America’s Conscience   

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

A new book from Jack Engelhard, brilliant friend and fellow Zionist.rsk

Legendary American novelist Jack Engelhard is equally regarded for his high standard of journalism, which for many years appeared as Op-ed columns in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and also in such publications as The New York Times. Today he enjoys a large worldwide following for his columns that appear on the popular Israeli news/opinion website Arutz Sheva/Israelnationalnews, English edition. There he is recognized for his discerning eye on politics and culture in both the United States and Israel, where he has served as an American volunteer in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). In Writings Engelhard pulls no punches in this collection of columns about the political climate here and abroad that affects people worldwide. He is our conscience of today, pointing out distortions and corruption of our government and leaders. He is never afraid to tell us the truth no matter how difficult it is to face.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

An American’s View of the Coronation If the pageantry surrounding Charles III seemed quaintly anachronistic, it was also moving in an irreducibly pertinent way. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/06/an-americans-view-of-the-coronation/

The coronation of King Charles III was a stirring spectacle. I watched only a few of the more elaborate bits—some climactic moments in Westminster Abbey, some of the procession up the soldier-lined Mall in that nifty golden carriage, the King’s recognition of the troops assembled in the garden behind Buck House. 

As an Anglophile, I appreciated the pageantry. No one does it better than the Brits. They manage to make ostentation tasteful and regal display humane and welcoming. It’s impressive without being forbidding. I am an American democrat of Madisonian inclination, but I harbor fond feelings about the British monarchy. I enjoy the ceremony and heartily approve of this affirmation of “the rich tapestry of our island story.” 

Nevertheless, I came away with an impression of something bittersweet, not to say melancholy. As a performance, the coronation was thrilling. As a reality? I am not so sure. I fear there was something posthumous about the production. 

To date, Charles has acted with greater dignity and discretion than I would have predicted. His Christmas address to the nation was pitch-perfect. And he seems to be soft-pedaling some of his woke enthusiasms about “climate change” and the like. All that augurs well for the future of his reign—if “reign” is the correct word for the ceremonial bureaucracy of a man who assumed the throne at the end of his 73rd year. 

The Crown’s real estate is intact. So are the family jewels and haberdashery (the ermine fringed robes that he and Queen Camilla modeled were especially striking). 

But that may be the extent of his domain. Perhaps one should resist the temptation to peek behind the curtain. The English essayist Walter Bagehot, writing in the 1870s, was right. “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced,” Bagehot wrote, “and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it. . . . Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

American Maoism Daniel J. Mahoney

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/american-maoism-2/

Rage meets self-pity as the permanently offended root out false thought.

Those of us who care about the survival of ordered liberty are daily faced with a conundrum: Do we painstakingly chronicle the constant assaults on the life of the mind and civilized norms and risk the charge of being one-note Johnnies? Or do we turn to other, more noble concerns and preoccupations, doing the right and the good? The latter path might seem more high-minded, rooted in a refusal to have our intellectual and political agendas determined by the rage of others. Why should our concerns be determined by the transparently false agendas of those who tear down and repudiate, and who offer nothing constructive in place of our civic and civilized inheritance? Let them pursue the thankless path of total critique, while we teach, build, construct, and sustain a civilized order worthy of human beings.

In truth, however, we must be attentive to both tasks, the positive work of high-minded thought and action that makes reasonable choice and civic comity possible, and the defense of the city without which nothing noble and choice-worthy can be sustained. And there is much to be learned by confronting the deep pathologies at the heart of the ideological deformation of reality. In any case, to stand aside while ideologues and fanatics seize the commanding heights of the academy and civil society entails nothing less moral and civil abdication, a choice for passivity over our non-negotiable duty to pass on the precious inheritance that is civilized liberty as a trust to our children and grandchildren. Surely Leo Strauss was right when he wrote in the 1940s that the greatest practical task of political philosophy is to defend “sound practice” against “bad theory.”

And bad theory abounds today. We daily witness displays of political rage informed by what David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith call in their indispensable 2022 book, The Strategy of Maoism in the West, “permanent offence taking.” Righteous indignation and the search for new and newer victims (and oppressors) are on constant display. DEI offices in colleges, universities, and corporations (and the news media, too) look to penalize, marginalize, and humiliate “oppressors” and “exploiters” as much as to “privilege” the oppressed, who must remain victims in perpetuity for the new system of ideological control to sustain itself. Merit, progress, opportunity, and civic reconciliation are all passé notions, deemed at once racist, offensive, and intolerable. What used to be called “Americanism,” equality under God and the law, must be castigated in a pathological display of collective self-loathing.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again Ross Douthat, New York Times

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/06/its-beginning-to-feel-a-lot-like-2016-again/

The post It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again appeared first on New York Times.

Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.

This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.

Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.

But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.

Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Militarization Of The IRS – The Facts On The Purchase Of Guns, Ammunition, And Military-Style Equipment Since 2006 And why does the IRS need guns? Adam Andrzejewskie

Posted By on May 7th, 2023

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-militarization-of-the-irs-the

Big Spend: Since 2006, 103 rank-and-file agencies outside of the Department of Defense (DOD) spent $3.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment (inflation adjusted to CPI). 27 of those agencies are traditional law enforcement under the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

However, 76 agencies are pencil-pushing, regulatory agencies, i.e. Environment Protection Agency (EPA), Social Security Administration (SSA), Veterans Affairs (VA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and many others.

Headcounts: There are now more federal agents with arrest and firearm authority (200,000) than U.S. Marines (186,000).

CASE STUDY: IRS
All numbers updated through March 31, 2023

Since 2006, the IRS spent $35.2 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment (CPI adjusted). The years 2020 and 2021 were peak years at the IRS for purchasing weaponry and gear. Just since the pandemic started, the IRS has purchased $10 million in weaponry and gear. (See chart below.)

Special agent head counts: nearly 2,100 special agents. Recently, the IRS chief testified that they are adding 600 new positions (20,000 new hires with 3% ratio of special agents this year). Based on headcount, the IRS ranks in the equivalent of the top 50 largest of 12,261 police departments across the country.

Uproar over the IRS Special Agent job posting: In August 2022, IRS posted a job description for Special Agent and a position requirement was the willingness to use “deadly force.” The description went viral on the internet and the “deadly force” language was edited out. However, today, that language is back in the online job posting.