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The road to mediocrity By J.A. Frascino

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/the_road_to_mediocrity.html

Woke progressivism seeks to strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

We are told that the MAGA cult, Trump voters, and Republicans in general are a threat to democracy, who, if not neutralized, will lead the nation into fascism.  In theory, a politically divided nation such as ours could evolve into fascism or socialism, should a political faction gain autocratic control.  In reality, however, we are confronted with the threat of evolving into a much more unique political structure – a Mediocracy.

A Mediocracy is a social structure in which mediocrity prevails.  Those who would change America pursue mediocrity under the banner of our moral obligation to elevate the status of the underachievers, marginalized, and minorities in our society.  The basic ploy is to lump such individuals into groups and to define them as victims of oppression.  They suffer solely from the oppressive social structure of patriarchal white supremacy, which must be dismantled.  

To entertain other reasons for the obstacles they might face is hateful, immoral, and racist.  White underachievers are dispensed with as irredeemable deplorables and deserve no further attention.  Our society, based in racism and xenophobia, is deemed illegitimate.  The fact that it has grown to become the most honored and respected on earth does not redeem it.  We must throw out the baby with the bath water and restructure society.

This message is delivered to the masses via mediocracy, the utilization of the media to control, mislead, and manipulate public thought through ambiguous and deceptive language, analogous to Orwellian newspeak.  Those not adhering to the mediocracy are debased as deniers, haters, or purveyors of disinformation, and need to be silenced.  

(Cancel culture is a natural extension of political correctness; from “you shouldn’t say that” to “you can’t say that”.)

To elevate the status of those defined as oppressed, we must embark upon a program of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  “Diversity is our strength!”  Is it?  The strength of our society lies in its ability to achieve its constitutional purpose, requiring it to align its forces with sufficient magnitude and direction so as to achieve its goals.  In physics, this thrust is referred to as a primary vector.  Diverse forces flying off in all directions only serve to weaken the vector forces.  

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A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance During World War II By Janet Levy

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/a_story_of_jewish_partisan_resistance_during_world_war_ii.html

When the Nazis were gunning down Jews of the Eastern Polish town of Lenin into trenches, an officer pulled 17-year-old Faye Schulman (then called Faigel Lazebnik) aside. He’d seen her working at a studio earlier. So, he ordered her to take vanity pictures of him and other Nazis; he also told her to develop the negatives of the photos the Nazis had taken of the massacre. Almost 2,000 Jews were shot dead in Lenin. Several others were beaten, stripped naked, and sent to “work” camps in boxcars. Despite being terrified, the teenager secretly made extra copies of the photos to document the war crimes for future testimony.

Camera in hand, she later escaped to the forests and joined a group of Russian resistance fighters to avenge the death of her parents and six brothers and sisters. The group made her the resident “nurse”, hoping she may have picked up some skills from a brother-in-law who was a doctor. She assisted the group’s ‘doctor,’ actually a veterinarian. They’d dress wounds with cloth sterilized by boiling. But she was also an unemotional fighter who learned to use a rifle and stalk the forests in her leopard-fur coat. During a raid for food and weapons, she urged fellow fighters to burn her childhood home so that the Nazis wouldn’t be able to use it.

Her focus, though, remained on building evidence. She was so resolute about documenting Nazi atrocities and the partisans’ activities that she learned to develop photographs under a blanket. “I want people to know there was resistance. Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” Schulman, who died last year in Toronto, aged 101, would say. Her more than 100 photographs of the massacre and her partisan years – and her life itself – are proof of that.

Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2, a documentary film written, produced, and directed by Julia Mintz, presents Schulman’s story, along with that of seven other teenaged fighters like her who lived in the forests of Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, waging guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. It took Mintz over a decade to track down these fighters – in their 80s and 90s – for interviews and gather photographs and film footage.

The film intersperses photos of their youth with intimate present-day conversations about their exploits as resistance fighters. In the documentary, they speak of their transformation from innocents to ruthless partisans fighting the Nazis who murdered their families. Their singular focus was on seeing the Nazis defeated and staying alive. It’s a remarkable tale of the courage and diehard persistence of ad hoc resistance regiments that badgered the Nazi killing machine.

From 1941, when Germany violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invaded Poland, to the very end of the war, some 25,000 Jews escaped ghettos and death camps to fight the Nazis. Some joined non-Jewish resistance fighters, some joined or formed all-Jewish groups. They learned to shoot, survive in the woods, withstand constant hunger, and handle medical problems.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Western World’s Energy Folly in a New York Nutshell Why should Europe have all the fun? The Empire State tries to sabotage its grid with renewables.By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-worlds-energy-folly-in-a-new-york-nutshell-europe-renewables-grid-reliability-green-fossil-fuels-emissions-wind-solar-11666374183?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The latest report from New York state’s grid operator is a master class in everything wrong with the Western world’s approach to climate change.

That is: everything wrong with an approach that consists of throwing money at green business interests in defiance of any practical consideration. If you think something else is going on, such as abating climate change, think again.

To meet a legislated goal of emissions-free electricity by 2040, New York will need up to 45 gigawatts of what it delicately calls DEFRs, or dispatchable emissions-free resources. Not only is that more than the state’s total current generating capacity of 37 gigawatts, these DEFRs, which are carbon-free like wind and solar yet not interruptible like wind and solar, don’t exist and have no prospect of existing in the next decade. Starting very much sooner than 2040, New York’s real choice will be Third World electricity reliability vs. paying fossil-fuel operators large fees to keep their plants up and running in a highly inefficient part-time fashion.

Many involved in the state’s energy “transition” might question whether purging the last 10% or 5% of fossil fuels from the system is worth the exorbitant cost. Don’t expect anyone to admit the bigger problem: The transition won’t likely do much to reduce global emissions.

This is the great unmentionable. When New Yorkers use less coal, oil or gasoline because of environmental mandates, the market price transmits the benefit to other global users, who then use more. Even more unspeakable is the corollary: Emission-spewing activities simply relocate from one part of the world to another. China’s emissions growth, from half the U.S.’s to almost 300% of the U.S.’s in 30 years, is partly the product of a transplant of emissions from the U.S. and Europe.

If pressed, Biden officials will privately revert to gobbledygook about carbon taxes that appear immaculately without anyone having to advocate them. The media fill the gap with wishful thinking and Soviet econometrics, confusing inputs with outputs. Yes, world-wide investment in renewables in the past two years has exceeded investment in fossil fuels. Supposedly this proves fossil fuels are on their way out. No, it proves fossil fuels are a better deal, consuming less investment to meet their share of the world’s growing power needs.

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The West Turns Back on Persecuted Christians, Embraces Radical Muslims by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19010/persecuted-christians-radical-muslims

Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it took in only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, with whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies and does not attack.

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you…. [saying] ‘You shouldn’t have converted. You’re an idiot for converting. You get what you get,’ words to that effect.” — Paul Diamond, British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019.

[The UK Home Office] ridiculed an Iranian female asylum seeker in her rejection letter by writing, “You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that he would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted.”

She later said… her Home Office interviewer, “was either chuckling or maybe just kind of mocking when he was talking to me…. [H]e asked me why Jesus didn’t help you from the Iranian regime or Iranian authorities.”

Meanwhile, as the few Christians who seek asylum are highly scrutinized and presented with obstacles, millions of Muslim asylum seekers are taken into the West without any difficulties, and most without even being vetted.

Once Pakistanis in Britain learned that the UK was going to offer asylum to Asia Bibi, they rioted en masse. As a result, then-Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application, “despite UK playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline.

Meanwhile, as usual, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician because he had defended Bibi — a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan — to enter and lecture in British mosques.

“It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the UK is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.” — Dr. Martin Parsons, human rights activist, The Express, December 4, 2016.

Western authorities appear committed to discriminating against Christian asylum seekers, while welcoming Muslims ones.

MEDIA, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

What has happened to journalism, volume one zillion I just provided hard evidence that a board member at a drug company that has made $70 billion selling vaccines tried to censor me; NO major non-conservative media outlet has reported this news Alex Berenson

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/what-has-happened-to-journalism-volume

Before Covid hysteria and hatred for Donald Trump broke his brain, Adam Feuerstein was a pretty good reporter.

Feuerstein has covered Big Pharma for many years, since 2017 for an pharmaceutical and healthcare-focused Website called STAT. Among biotechnology investors, he’s widely read and sometimes feared. He has a long memory for the hyperbole (if not outright scams) that many biotech executives engage in as they struggle to develop new drugs.

So when Pfizer announced Dr. Scott Gottlieb – who had resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration just months earlier – would be joining its board, Feuerstein’s salty take was not surprising:—

These days, though, Feuerstein has a somewhat different attitude towards Gottlieb, as a reverential interview from September 2021 reveals. It’s full of hardball questions like:

You have this unique position now – you were in government, you’re no longer in government. You sit on many different seats of power and access. Do you ever think about going back in?

(However do you do it all, Dr. G? And how do you look so good in that suit?)—

The irony here could not be thicker, as you have probably already realized. Because Feuerstein’s joking prediction of three years ago has turned out to be right. In August the FDA approved the bivalent boosters from Pfizer based on data from eight mice.

Can’t make it up.

One might think the fact the federal government has essentially become a promotional partner of the mRNA vaccine companies would encourage drug industry and investigative reporters like Feuerstein to ask hard questions about the vaccines.

One would be wrong.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Yes, Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Schools A new survey of young Americans vindicates the fears of CRT’s critics. Zach Goldberg Eric Kaufmann

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools

To what extent, if at all, are critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology being taught or promoted in America’s schools? With little data available, and no agreement about what constitutes the teaching of critical social justice (CSJ) ideas, the answer up to now has remained open to political interpretation.

Motivated by the work of Manhattan Institute senior fellow and City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo, many on the right allege that CRT-related concepts—such as systemic racism and white privilege—are infiltrating the curricula of public schools around the country. Educators following these curricula are said to be teaching students that racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes are fundamentally the result of racism, and that white people are the privileged beneficiaries of a social system that oppresses blacks and other “people of color.” On gender, they are being taught that gender identity is a choice, regardless of biological sex. But are the cases Rufo and others point to representative of American public schools at large—or are they merely outliers amplified by right-wing media?

The response to these charges from many on the left has been to deny or downplay them. CRT, they contend, is a legal theory taught only in university law programs. Therefore, what conservatives are up in arms about is not the teaching of CRT, but the teaching of America’s uncomfortable racial history.

But strong connections exist between the cultural radicalism of CRT and the one-sided, decontextualized portrayal of American history and society that Democratic activists endorse. And these ideas have also influenced many Democratic voters. Indeed, according to a 2021 YouGov survey, large majorities of Democratic respondents support public schools’ teaching many of the morally and empirically contentious ideas to which opponents of CRT object. These include the notions that racism is systemic in America (85 percent support), that all disparities between blacks and whites are caused by discrimination (72 percent), that white people enjoy certain privileges based on their race (85 percent), and that they have a responsibility to address racial inequality (87 percent).

Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they are hardly “settled facts” on the same epistemic plane as heliocentrism, natural selection, or even climate change. To the contrary, they are a moral-ideological just-so theory of group differences, an all-encompassing worldview akin to a secular religion, whose claims can’t be measured, tested, or falsified. They treat an observed phenomenon (disparate group outcomes) as evidence of its cause (racism), while specifying causal mechanisms that are nebulous, if not magical. Their advocates have not refuted counterarguments; they’ve merely asserted empirically unverified statements about the nature of group differences.

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The Unmentionable, Unspeakable, and Unutterable. Part Two Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/the-unmentionable-unspeakable-and-unutterable-part-two/

Crime Everywhere

Now we come to the current crime wave.

We see weekly YouTube videos of the knock-out game, of Saturday night Al Capone-gangland massacring, of vulnerable joggers raped and killed, of a mother and her daughter carjacked, of a woman at a rail crossing murdered, of a petite woman pushed to death under a subway car, of an innocent young man simply executed on the streets, of an ax-wielding-nut terrorizing the helpless, of subway monsters assaulting with impunity all whom they please. Walking up to a stranger, slugging him in the temple, inflicting brain damage, all that is now a sort of blood sport.

Drug stores and food minimarkets in big cities are either of two sorts: one, they have been looted and ransacked; or, two, in fear of that fate, they have put almost all their goods behind protective wire or glass, cut back their nocturnal and morning hours, multiplied their security cameras, and hired guards.

There is also a growing, but again muted sense that inner-city, black-on-black gangland killing is now moving to the suburbs. Such violence is beginning more to target random strangers, often solitary drivers, pedestrians, and joggers.

And the reaction?

Zilch, except for a periodic rant from Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, the Obamas, or the Biden racialists about “racism,” as if a projectionist, unsubstantiated, Mark Milley/Lloyd Austin-like charge of “white rage” will preempt any American from saying out loud what millions of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and whites know to be true: that about four percent of the population (black males from ages 12-30) are committing over 50 percent of the violent assaults, rapes, and murders—that are reported.

Second, the additional truth that we dare not speak is that this two-year-long, post-George Floyd rampage is entirely predicated on three simple subtexts:

One, the black leadership—an Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Louis Farrakhan, the Obamas, Oprah, LeBron James—who are so eager to talk of collectives, such as “whites” and “white people” as 230 million indistinguishable citizens who act as mindless racial automatons (as if George Soros, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Tucker Carlson by reason of their similar hue, can be predictably stereotyped) will never address this asymmetry. And if others do, they will seek to mute anyone by charges of racism! Do they have a duty to?

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Biden, Democrats use midterm mass-distraction strategy to hide counterculture revolution from angry voters

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/biden-democrats-use-midterm-mass-distraction-strategy-to-hide-counterculture-revolution-from-angry-voters/

The contours of the upcoming November midterms seem clear. President Joe Biden scarcely polls above 40% approval. His disastrous energy, economic, crime, immigration, and foreign policies proved even more unpopular.

In reaction, frightened Democratic candidates on script are resorting to strategies of diversion. They avoid mention of their prior lockstep support for Biden agendas that induced current high gas prices, spiraling inflation, deflated 401(k) retirement plans, out-of-control violent crime, 3 million illegal aliens pouring across the southern border, and the disaster in Afghanistan and its aftermath.

Most Democrats are quietly relieved that a 79-year-old, cognitively challenged Biden does not appear with them on the campaign trail, preferring he continue his frequent down time at his Delaware retreat.

Democrats also increasingly rely on a series of ginned up Trump-MAGA psychodramas. That way they hope to make the midterms a referendum on a supposedly demonic Donald Trump—with help from the media, the January 6th House Committee hearings, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and now periodic Biden rants about “semi-fascist” Trump supporters.

These efforts of mass distraction will not work.

Aside from Democrats’ inability to mask their prior support for the disastrous Biden record, most presidents lose dozens of congressional seats in their first midterm election. And when a president’s approval rating stays stuck at about 40 percent, down-ticket party candidates do poorly.

But even more importantly, in the last month of the election, there is a growing consensus that our very civilization itself is imploding and America’s current trajectory is unsustainable.

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What Now Exactly Are Impeachable Offenses? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/what-now-exactly-are-impeachable-offenses-part-one/

We know that Donald Trump was once impeached for calling up his Ukrainian counterpart and complaining that the Ukrainian government had been too involved with the corrupt Biden family. Trump then warned that if Ukraine did not clean up its quid-pro-quo act, he would delay approved military aid.

And while Trump eventually sent offensive weapons to Ukraine that the Obama-Biden administration had vetoed, he was still impeached. Apparently, his sin was that he had anticipated Biden as a future 2020 Democratic rival candidate for president, and thus was intermingling politics and foreign policy to his own benefit and the nation’s detriment.

As such, it did not matter that his phone call did not affect U.S. policy because Ukraine got its weapons, and better ones than those approved by the prior administration.

Nor did it apparently matter that Trump was correct, as we know from the later Hunter Biden laptop revelations, that the entire Biden family syndicate was corrupt. Indeed, Joe Biden himself—known to the family as the “Big Guy” and “Mr. Ten-percent” and “pedo”—cannot explain his sudden wealth, lavish pre-presidential lifestyle, or various estates without some source of extra (non-taxed?) income.

Nor does it matter apparently that Trump’s call was listened to by partisan Ukrainian American Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman who relayed it—although initially denied doing so—to the technically still “anonymous” whistleblower. The latter filed a complaint with the congressional intelligence committees, based on hearsay (from Vindman no doubt), and then coordinated with Adam Schiff to set the stage for impeachment proceedings. That fact was denied by the prevaricating Schiff, who also lied about several elements of the impeachment proceedings.

So, what then is the new bar for impeachment for warping U.S. policy for perceived political advantage?

Why was not Barack Obama impeached for his hot-mic revelations in Seoul, South Korea in early election year 2012?

After all, Obama was caught:

a) trying to alter U.S. policy to the nation’s disadvantage (by cancelling preapproved missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic) in exchange for advancing his own political interests in getting reelected (asking Vladimir for “space” so that Obama would not be embarrassed by Russian adventurism during his “last” election).

b) And unlike Trump, who did send aid to Ukraine, Obama did not go forward with missile defense. And, unlike Trump’s call that did not affect events on the ground, Putin did, as promised, not invade Ukraine until 2014 after Obama was reelected.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Race-Baiting Celebrity J6 Cop Once Involved in Race-Related Lawsuit It’s long past time for a mainstream journalist or cable news talking head—those responsible for elevating Michael Fanone to hero/martyr status—to ask him about Michael Maddox. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 22nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/21/race-baiting-celebrity-j6-cop-once-involved-in-race-related-lawsuit/

Michael Fanone, the former D.C. Metropolitan police officer using his presence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 as a pathway to fame and fortune, is on a major publicity blitz. Along with his Pulitzer-prize finalist co-author, Fanone managed to turn his 30-minute struggle that afternoon into a 256-page book: Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul is an “urgent warning about the growing threat to our democracy from a twenty-year police veteran and former Trump supporter who nearly lost his life during the insurrection of January 6th.

Never mind that Fanone was well enough on the evening of January 6 to call CNN and complain about its news coverage or that he sat for a lengthy interview with a Washington Post reporter a few days later. Fanone is part of a quartet of celebrity cops juicing every second of their involvement in the four-hour disturbance nearly two years ago, earning lucrative book deals, congressional awards, and cable news gigs in the process.

Fanone has lots to say in his memoir—heavily sprinkled with obscenities—while ranting about Donald Trump and his supporters. (Fanone begins with a brazen lie that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died of “wounds” sustained on January 6.)

He condemns Republican lawmakers for refusing to go along with the “insurrection” narrative and he names names: A secretly recorded meeting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is described in the book. “While you were on the phone with [Trump], I was getting the shit kicked out of me, almost losing my life,” Fanone told McCarthy in 2021. “The way that he, you know, saying this is what happens when you steal an election. Go home. I love you. What the fuck is that!?”

But one name is missing from Fanone’s profane screed: Michael A. Maddox.