How do you stop Canadian bacon from curling in your frying pan?
You take away their little brooms.
*.*
As my wife lay dying in the hospital bed, she looked at me and said, "My life is flashing before my eyes."
"That's great," I replied. "See if you can spot where you lost my car keys."
*.*
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
“Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
*.*
A man take his wife to the doctor for an annual checkup. When the doctor calls the woman in, she turns to her husband and says, “Let’s go Harold.”
The husband dutifully follows her into the doctor’s examination room. The doctor says, “Mrs. Sanders, I have been practicing medicine for 35 years and built a very honorable reputation. You can certainly trust me."
The wife replies, “Oh I trust you, doctor. It’s my husband I don’t trust with your pretty receptionist out there.”
*.*
What do you call a morning meal from a hotel which gives you diarrhea?
An incontinental breakfast.
Quote of the Times;
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.” - CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/12/07/reps-greene-and-gohmert-finally-met-the-j6-political-prisoners-what-they-saw-isnt-pretty-n1539714
Issue of the Times;
The Media’s Color-Coded Parenting Standard by Heather Mac Donald
On April 19, 2021, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested in a text to Chicago’s mayor that the parents of two children recently killed in Chicago’s gang activity had “failed those kids.” Kempczinski’s text became public in November 2021, prompting widespread accusations of racism and calls for his resignation. Kempczinski confessed to his white privilege and apologized profusely for holding parents responsible for the fate of their children.
On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.
The divergent reactions to the Kempczinski text message and the Crumbleys’ indictment illuminate the different standards to which minority parents and white parents are held. When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.
Kempczinski made his ill-fated suggestion of parental responsibility after seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams was gunned down by her father’s gang rivals. Jaslyn and her father Jontae Adams were parked in a McDonald’s drive-thru lane on Chicago’s West Side on April 18, 2021, when two gunmen jumped out of a car and unleashed at least 45 shots at their car. Jaslyn was struck six times and died; Jontae was seriously wounded. A convicted heroin dealer, Jontae knew that his gang’s enemies were out for his blood. The day before the shooting, he tweeted: “Opps probably downstairs waiting on me.”
A few weeks before Jaslyn Adams’s murder, 13-year-old Adam Toledo was out running the streets at 2:30 a.m. with a fellow gang member. Both Toledo and his associate Ruben Roman were armed. ShotSpotter technology picked up eight rounds of gunfire from the pair; two calls to 911 also reported the shots. Toledo and Roman fled from the responding officers; the officer who chased Toledo down an alley shouted at him to “stop it” or “drop it [i.e., the gun].” In an almost instantaneous succession of events, Toledo wheeled toward the officer with his gun in his hand, then dropped the weapon and put his hands up. A fraction of a second later, the officer shot him once, fatally. Opinion is divided on whether the cop was justified in firing his weapon.
A day after the Jaslyn Adams murder, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot paid an unrelated visit to McDonald’s headquarters. Kempczinski thanked Lightfoot via text message for her visit and added: regarding the “tragic shootings. . . , both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix.”
Kempczinski would pay the price for saying the unsayable. After activists obtained and released the text message in November, a coalition including Color of Change and Showing Up for Racial Justice released an open letter to the CEO: “Your text message was ignorant, racist and unacceptable coming from anyone,” the letter read, “let alone the CEO of McDonald’s, a company that spends big money to market to communities of color and purports to stand with Black Lives.” McDonald’s employees and race advocates protested outside the company’s headquarters and demanded reparations. U.S. representative Bobby Rush joined calls for Kempczinski to resign. A McDonald’s worker told a local TV station that Kempczinski was “putting the blame on parents for the violence in the streets. He can’t relate because he is wealthy.” Jaslyn Adams’s mother, heretofore a cipher, emerged from her obscurity to vent her anger: “How dare you judge me! . . . You come from privilege. You can’t speak about me.”
Lightfoot’s office joined the denunciations: “Victim shaming has no place in this conversation,” a press release read. (“Victim-shaming” is a euphemism for ascribing moral agency to a favored victim class.)
Kempczinski went into penance mode. He held “listening sessions” with franchise owners, employees, and corporate managers. He repeatedly accused himself of racial insensitivity. “Not taking the time to think about this from their viewpoint was wrong, and lacked the empathy and compassion I feel for these families,” Kempczinski said in one message. “This is a lesson that I will carry with me.” A few days later, Kempczinski announced: “My texts to the Mayor of Chicago were wrong—plain and simple. I am truly sorry and I know I have let you down. I also know this has conflicted with our values—values that you have all worked so hard to embody across the business.”
Kempczinski was right the first time around. Had 13-year-old Adam Toledo not been gangbanging at 2:30 a.m., had he been in bed or at the very least at home and out of trouble, he would be alive today. His parents (in this case, the usual single mother) were responsible for keeping him off the streets. Did Toledo’s mother know he had a gun? And if not, should she have known? Those questions may not be asked.
Jaslyn Adams’s father Jontae did come under fleeting criticism for his role in her death. In May 2021, Chicago radio host Leon Rogers asked Adams how, if he knew that he was a target of gang rivals, he could have made the decision to “move around with that baby girl, knowing there is possibly someone out there who wants to hurt you?” Adams danced around the question: “My daughter wanted McDonald’s. I tried to Uber McDonald’s,” he responded. “As far as my actions or my past, maybe it had something to do with it. But I was a father the day my daughter died. . . . I don’t remember gang-banging. I don’t remember what led to it.”
Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton issued an even more definitive accusation of parental negligence: “Gang-banging and parenting don’t mix. Those who engage in gang activity should have to make a choice—either give up gang life or forfeit the ability to be a good dad. . . . When a bullet meant for [the father] kills a child, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the murder.”
Glanton and Rogers are black, so their criticism of Jontae Adams flew under the radar, leaving just Kempczinski to bear the wrath of the race activists.
Contrast the response to Kempczinski with the public attitude toward Ethan Crumbley’s parents. Even if one agrees with the indictment holding them criminally responsible for their son’s murder rampage, one can still wonder why other parents are treated as nonexistent. The Crumbleys’ very presence in their son’s life and their responsiveness to the authorities made them available as a target of criminal liability. They both came to the school when officials summoned them but declined to pull Ethan from school on the day of the shooting, because they both worked and didn’t want to send him to an empty home. Had they been from the inner city and not shown up at all, no media figure would have objected. But because the Crumbleys responded to the school, the media can ask why they didn’t search Ethan’s backpack to see if he was carrying his gun. We could ask the same question of parents whose children are out on the streets every night, obviously up to no good.
Where, for example, did the following juveniles get their guns, and why didn’t their parents intervene?
On November 14, 2021, an 11-year-old boy in Chicago stole a woman’s car at gunpoint, the latest in a series of carjackings in which he was allegedly involved. On November 28, 2021, a 13-year-old boy led the police in Antioch, California, on a 2 a.m. chase in a car that had been stolen at gunpoint in nearby Oakland. That same day, a 13-year-old boy and a 12-year-old boy were arrested in connection with the armed carjacking of a pizza delivery man in San Leandro, California. The assailants had dragged the victim out of his car at gunpoint. In the Minneapolis suburb of Roseville, on November 4, two young teenagers held a gun to a woman’s head as she exited her gym at 10 p.m. and stole her SUV. A car chase and foot chase through downtown St. Paul ensued, with the police eventually arresting all the car’s illegal occupants: three boys, ages 13, 14, and 15, and two girls, ages 13 and 14. No one asked: why didn’t these children’s parents intercept their guns?
On October 14, 2021, a 13-year-old boy and four other juveniles, including three girls, smashed their way into an SUV parked in a Holiday Inn Express outside of Milwaukee. A 47-year-old deaf woman, Sunita Balogun-Olayiwola, interrupted the attempted car theft and drove off in her own car to apprehend the fleeing thieves herself. When she confronted them, they tried to steal her car as well, punching her in the face and slamming her car door in her face as she held on to it. Balogun-Olayiwola fell, and the 13-year-old boy ran over her several times, fatally crushing her skull and ribs. The thieves drove off and used Balogun-Olayiwola’s credit card at a local Walmart. Upon arrest, one of the females, age 14, let it be known that she wanted to keep the deceased’s stolen cell phone. No one asked: where were the parents?
One can maintain that Ethan Crumbley’s intercepted note—“The thoughts won’t stop. Help me”—provided clear warning of his homicidal intent and is sufficient evidence to deem his parents legally responsible for the four deaths. (Ethan’s school counsellors, however, who questioned him and observed his behavior for nearly two hours in their office while he did his science homework, also concluded that he posed no risk to himself or others.) If Ethan’s note is a basis for his parents’ criminal liability, other parents are also on notice that their children are toting around guns as part of a daily culture of street violence. Urban youth routinely post videos flaunting illegal firearms and other contraband. One such video, obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio, shows three young women dancing and laughing while pointing a semi-automatic weapon at the screen. Have their parents confiscated and locked up the gun by now, and if not, why not?
The Crumbleys bought the gun Ethan used legally. Juvenile gangbangers usually get their guns illegally. Complying with gun laws would thus seem to make a parent more susceptible to prosecution than a parent who ignores his child’s illegal acquisition.
There have been 29 shooting incidents on school property this year, including the Ethan Crumbley rampage. Eight students (including Ethan’s four victims) were killed; another 49 people were injured. Contrary to popular perception, the vast majority of those 29 shooting incidents had black perpetrators and black victims. Many involved gang activity. Those shootings were thus of no interest to the press. No one asked how the gunmen got access to their weapons or where their parents were. Contrast those eight student deaths nationally with the toll of urban street violence. In Chicago alone, at least 27 children aged 15 and younger have been killed in drive-by shootings this year, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. More than 100 children have been shot. The toll of drive-bys on children nationally is considerably higher and entirely off the media’s radar screen. On November 6, 2021, for example, 23-month-old Jasper Wu was killed sleeping in his car seat while his mother drove on Interstate 880 in the Bay Area. Neither the mother nor the baby was a target; the stray bullet that killed Jasper erupted from a shootout between the occupants of two nearby cars.
School shootings with white perpetrators and white victims are even rarer than school shootings generally, but they get all the attention. They are irrelevant to the U.S. homicide toll, which last year topped 20,000 victims. (More than half of those 20,000 homicide victims were black, though blacks are less than 13 percent of the population; their killers were overwhelmingly neither whites nor cops, but instead other black civilians.) White-on-white school shootings receive disproportionate attention partly because the media value white life more than black life (except in those vanishingly few instances involving a white shooter and black victim). But saturation coverage of the handful of white-on-white school shootings is also essential to establishing the myth that whites with legal guns, especially those from Trump-voting areas, are the biggest criminal and terror threat today. Never mind that black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit lethal gun violence at over ten times the rate of white and Hispanic teen males combined.
Parental inattention and irresponsibility account for a large percentage of urban youth victimization as well as of youth crime commission. On Labor Day weekend of this year, a 14-year-old boy in Chicago was shot while standing on a sidewalk at around 3 a.m. by someone who emerged from a car and fled the scene. That same weekend, a 17-year-old boy in Chicago was shot in the back while sitting in a car at about 2 a.m. During the weekend of September 25 in Chicago, a 17-year-old boy was shot in a mass shooting with four victims at 1:40 am. Like Adam Toledo, had they been at home rather than running the streets after midnight, they would likely be alive today. They were victims waiting to happen, and had they not been shot, they may have been in line to commit a similar drive-by themselves. No one called their parents to account.
On July 5, 2021, a six-year-old girl was standing with her mother among a group of people at about 1 a.m. on Chicago’s Far South Side. An SUV drove up and started shooting into the crowd, leaving the girl in critical condition. Perhaps the gathering was innocent, and the mother had no notice of risk. Still, one may rightly ask why a six-year-old is out after midnight.
Many daylight shootings are also predictable. On September 21, 2021, a 15-year-old boy was standing in a strip mall near his South Side high school in Chicago when two people fired at him; after he fell, the shooters continued to unload 20 shots into his body. That boy’s gangster-style death was all but inevitable; his father was killed in a drive-by in 2020. Neither parent kept the teen from gang life and away from guns.
In the afternoon of July 1, 2021, a nine-year-old Chicago girl was shot in the head riding in the back seat of a car with a gang outreach worker, a profession populated by alleged former gang members. Was she properly with the outreach worker, who was also shot? That same day, a one-month-old girl was shot in the head in a mass drive-by shooting on the South Side with six other victims at around 8:15 p.m. In this case, the baby’s presence at the scene may represent no dereliction of parental duty. Similarly outside the range of parental control may have been the Chicago Labor Day weekend shootings of a four-year-old boy who was shot twice in the head while sitting inside his home, a 13-year-old boy shot in the head inside a residence, and a 12-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl targeted in a drive-by while standing outside a business. While the victims’ parents may not share blame for these particular shootings, the consequences of family breakdown in the inner city are so pervasive that that breakdown plays at least some role in every such shooting. Yet no one with a public platform addresses parental responsibility to get married and stay married while raising children.
Youth disorder is on the rise. This past Saturday night, December 4, anarchic flash mobs swarmed downtown Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. A bus driver was lured out of his bus and savagely beaten by two teens; two officers were injured trying to control the crowds; and a 12-year-old girl was shot in the back. The bullet ruptured her kidney and spleen. A 15-year-old boy was shot less than three hours later. The girl’s mother claims she had no idea that her daughter was in downtown Chicago that night and that once the daughter arrived back home on Sunday night, neither she nor her daughter knew that the daughter had been shot.
The country turns its eyes away from this mayhem and the social dysfunction that it represents, terrified that both are beyond any solution. The media follow strict rules of concealment: the race of black perpetrators may not be mentioned, the race of white perpetrators is always relevant. On Thursday, December 2, a felon stabbed an Italian computer science student to death in Manhattan’s Riverside Park; minutes later, he stabbed an Italian tourist. The New York Times buried the story on page A16 and remained silent about the race of the suspect and his victim. Above the Times story was an article about jury selection in the manslaughter trial of a Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright in April 2021 after mistaking her gun for a taser. The Times carefully laid out the racial configuration: “Ms. Potter, who is white,” and “Mr. Wright, who was Black.” Likewise, the suspects in the murders of two Chinese graduate students at the University of Chicago this year have no race, as far as the media is concerned. Eighty-eight percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks is committed by blacks against whites, yet only in those rare instances of white-on-black crime will the race of the assailant be reported. Coverage of the killing of six holiday celebrants at a Wisconsin Christmas parade on November 21 by a man who plowed his car into the crowd faded out after the police released the suspect’s identity: Darrell Brooks is black (and on the record as anti-white). Had a white person (let alone one with such a trail of racial animosity) driven into a Martin Luther King Day celebration, the round-the-clock coverage would have lasted for weeks.
These double standards help no one. Society should have a colorblind norm of parental responsibility and of the duty to obey the law. If the Crumbley parents are found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, there are many more parents out there whose passivity in the face of likely lawlessness deserves equally strict scrutiny.
News of the Times;
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/manhattans-new-soros-funded-da-lays-foundation-next-crime-wave-will-no-longer-seek-prison
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/school-district-jab-mandate-overturned-by-judge/
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/01/04/data-nearly-half-of-america-believes-fbi-acts-as-joe-bidens-personal-gestapo/
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/01/03/the_united_states_should_avoid_waging_a_two-front_cold_war_810260.html
https://newspunch.com/cbc-journalist-quits-admits-network-is-deep-state-propaganda/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/why_are_caucasians_vanisihing_in_tv_commercials_.html
https://rairfoundation.com/soviet-canada-doctor-locked-in-psych-ward-who-exposed-stillbirths-explosion-in-vaccinated-moms-interview/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/niSgIb1GVqhv/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/01/05/for-the-first-time-ever-the-best-selling-carmaker-in-america-isnt-an-american-carmaker-n1547104
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/05/leaked-biden-plan-would-house-violent-men-in-womens-prison-cells/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/minnesota-doctor-says-mn-board-medical-practice-demands-records
https://thenationalpulse.com/2021/11/15/schiff-met-with-ccp-influence-group/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/india-wont-add-mercks-covid-19-pill-to-national-treatment-protocol-citing-safety-concerns_4196601.html
https://thecovidworld.com/a-list-of-people-who-had-their-leg-amputated-after-receiving-covid-19-vaccine/
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/how-to-tell-if-someone-famous-died
Standard?
Way?
I've decided that from January 1st on, I'm only going to watch things that are 1080p and above.
It's my new year's resolution.
*.*
My favorite exercise is a cross between a lunge and a crunch.
It’s called lunch.
*.*
Tourists unloading from the ferry onto Liberty Island in New York Harbor were met with disappointment this week, as the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty once stood was empty. Instead, a letter on stationery the size of a king sized bed lay on the pedestal with a message reading, “Fed up with New York, moving to Florida. - L. Liberty”
“I had just clocked into my shift this morning and looked up to see she was gone,” said security guard Feldman Baxter, while complying with the city’s mandates of wearing two masks outdoors, standing 20 feet from anyone else, rubbing his arm from his recent fifth booster jab, and ending each sentence with, “Praise Fauci.”
Reports flooded in of eyewitnesses seeing the fifteen-story symbol of freedom driving an oversized U-Haul down the Atlantic coastline, stopping only for gas and fish tacos.
“Wow, I love it here! I feel like I’m with my people,” said the Statue of Liberty while wading out to a small island off the coast of Miami to make herself comfortable in her new home. “I need to buy myself a bikini.”
At time of publishing, D.C. officials were investigating the now-empty marble chair of the Lincoln Memorial.
*.*
A fellow came into a bar and ordered a martini. Before drinking it, he removed the olive and carefully put it into a glass jar. Then he ordered another martini and did the same thing. After an hour, when he was full of martinis and the jar was full of olives, he staggered out.
"Well," said a customer, "I never saw anything as peculiar as that!"
"What's so peculiar about it?" the bartender said. "His wife sent him out for a jar of olives."
*.*
Remember back before the Internet, we thought that lack of information was responsible for stupidity.
Turns out it wasn't.
Quote of the Times;
“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” - Henry David Thoreau
Link of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/rand-paul-has-won-every-single-round-against-fauci/
Issue of the Times;
The Way Out by Larry P. Arnn President, Hillsdale College
Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study.
Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism
To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation. You might give it rule-making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more “independent” agencies—meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.
This much has been done. It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading. The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works. Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected. But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head? Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.
Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take—has taken—decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates. But once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.
What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world? There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time. They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable. But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody. This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved. The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest. This has not happened before. The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.
To set up a despotism capable of pulling this off you would need the media’s help. Those controlling the media today are trained in the same universities that invented the bureaucratic state, the same universities the senior bureaucrats attended. The media would need to be willing to suppress, for example, the fact that 50,000 doctors, scientists, and medical researchers signed the Great Barrington Declaration. That document reminds people that you cannot suppress a widely disseminated contagious virus through shutdowns and mass isolation, and that if you try, you will work immeasurable destruction of new kinds—unemployment, bankruptcy, depression, suicide, multiplying public debt, broken supply chains, and increases of other serious health problems. Some of the signatories to this Declaration come from the most distinguished universities in the world, but never mind: their views do not fit the narrative propagated by the powerful. They have been effectively cancelled, ignored by the media and suppressed by Big Tech.
You would need some help from business, too. As far as influence is concerned, “business” is dominated by large institutions—those comprising big business—whose leaders are also educated in the same universities that conceived bureaucratic government and trained the bureaucrats and media heads. This provides a ground of agreement between big business and the bureaucratic state. Anyway, agree or not, businesses are vulnerable to regulation, and to mitigate the risk of regulatory harm they play the game: they send lobbyists to Washington, make political contributions, hire armies of lawyers. If you are big enough to play the game, there are plenty of advantages to be won. If you are not big enough to play the game—well, in that case you are on your own.
Amidst the unprecedented lockdowns, imagine there comes an election, a time for the people to say if they approve of the new way of governing and of this vast, unprecedented intrusion into their lives. Then let us say that in several states the election rules and practices are altered by their executive branches—the people in charge of enforcing the law—on their own, without approval by their legislatures. Say this brazen violation of the separation of powers takes place in the name of the pandemic. One does not need to know what percentage of votes in the final tally were affected to see that this is fishy. No sensible person would place control of the election process in one party—any party—or in one branch—any branch—of the government, alone. In some crucial states, that was done.
Finally, to sustain this new kind of government, you would need to work on education. You might build a system of centralized influence, if not control, over every classroom in the land. You might require certification of the teachers with a bias toward the schools of education that train them in the approved way. These schools, poor but obedient cousins of the elite universities, are always up on the latest methods of “delivery” of instruction (we do not call it teaching anymore). These new methods do not require much actual knowledge, which can be supplied from above.
As far as content, you might set up a system of textbook adoption that guarantees to publishers a massive and captive market but requires them to submit proposed books to committees of “experts,” subject of course to political pressures. You might build a standard approved curriculum on the assumption that everything changes—even history, even principles. You might use this curriculum to lay the ground for holding everything old, everything previously thought high and noble, in contempt.
Doing this, incidentally, deprives the student of the motive to learn anything out of fashion today. It is a preparation not for a life of knowing and thinking, but for a life of compliance and conformity.
This is by no means an exhaustive account of what it would take to build a thoroughgoing tyranny—for further instruction, read Book Five of Aristotle’s Politics or George Orwell’s 1984. But it gives an idea of a mighty system, a system that seems unassailable, a system combining the powers of government and commerce, of education and communication. Money and power in such a system would accrue to the same hands. The people who benefit from the system would be the ruling class. Others would be frustrated. And such a system would tend to get worse, because the exercise of unchecked power does not bring out the best in people.
Any elaborate system of government must have a justification, and the justification of this one cannot simply be that those in the ruling class are entitled on the basis of their superiority. That argument went away with the divine right of kings. No, for the current ruling class, the justification is science. The claim of bureaucratic rule is a claim of expertise—of technical or scientific knowledge about everything. Listen to Fauci on Face the Nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries. When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901. Churchill wrote:
Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialized character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse? . . . If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible.
Churchill goes on to argue that practical judgment is the capacity necessary to making decisions. And practical judgment, he writes in many places, is something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees. Everyone, then, is equipped to guide his own life in the things that concern mainly himself.
Another thing about the experts is that they are not really engaged in the search for truth. Instead, the powerful among them suppress the obvious fact that there is wide disagreement among the experts. There always is.
God save us from falling completely into the hands of experts. But God has given us the wherewithal to save ourselves from that. So let us move to the second question posed above.
How to Defeat a Rising Despotism
In answering the second question, I will tell two stories that are suggestive.
The first took place in the small town of Jonesville, Michigan, five miles north of Hillsdale College. In our state, as in most places where the lockdowns were enforced, businesses were crippled or destroyed en masse. Restaurants were chief among them. One of our local restaurants is a 30-year-old diner called Spanglers Family Restaurant. Mitch Spangler is the proprietor. The business was founded by his late father, and Mitch was purchasing the business from his mother. The payments to his mother depended upon the revenues of the business, and his mother’s retirement depended upon the payments. The life’s work of two generations was at stake. Mitch was also helping to support a daughter in college.
This is not to mention the more than 20 employees whose livelihoods are dependent on Spanglers. “Our employees are moms who have kids,” Spangler told the local paper. “One of our employees is pregnant; another is a 19-year-old kid. This is his first job, and he just bought a car.” Our leaders in Washington treat it as a small thing when trillions are being thrown about. To the Spanglers and people like them, their relatively small revenue streams are everything.
Mr. Spangler was not prepared to surrender all this. When a second lockdown was ordered by Michigan’s governor a year ago last month, he kept his restaurant open. He put a sign on the door and posted on Facebook to make clear, among other things, that he was acting out of necessity for the sake of his business and the livelihoods of all those dependent on it; that precautions would be taken, including the installation of an electrostatic fogger that would disinfect the air; that he understood the thinking of those who would choose to stay away from his restaurant, but that he hoped they would understand his own thinking. “If you cannot support us, we understand,” he wrote, “but please allow us to have the freedom to do what we have to do.”
The wheels of bureaucracy began to grind. Spanglers was visited repeatedly by the health department, by the licensing authorities, and even by the agriculture department (one wonders what they had to do with it). Spangler was fined and threatened with forcible closure. But he persevered, never backing down, and his business did well. On a typical weekend, not only locals but supporters from the neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio lined up outside to show their support.
Mitch Spangler is our kind of fellow, and the College gave him some help organizing his legal representation. We did not wish to be in the newspaper about this because we were facing our own pressures, and we too were determined to resist them. But Spangler was no good at keeping a secret: he wore a Hillsdale College t-shirt on FOX News and thanked us for our help. And when he had a little ceremony in his parking lot in the spring to thank his staff and his customers, I was honored to say a few words.
This may not seem on its face a big story, but it is a most important story. It is important because it is a story about the nature of human beings and of citizens and of our rights. The nature of a thing is the essence of a thing. One aspect of the nature of a human being is that he must eat to live. In condemnation of slavery, Abraham Lincoln loved to say that every man was created with a head, hands, and mouth, the implication being that the head should guide the hands in the feeding of the mouth. Because we are made to live this way, we are also determined to live this way. The alternative is dependence, which does not make us happy.
It should not therefore be surprising that, if you try to destroy the business of a man whose family has spent over 30 years building it, he will resist. Trying to strongarm people like Mitch Spangler is not a good idea. There are millions of them, and they have always made up the core of this greatest of free republics.
The second story is more famous, but it too is about nature—indeed, about that word’s most basic meaning. The word nature, as I said, refers to a thing’s essence, but it comes from the Latin word for birth. Our nature begins with how we are born and how we grow. Just as we are attached by nature to the way we get our livings, so we are attached by nature to our parents, and still more to our children. And this second story, set in Loudoun County, Virginia, is about parents and children.
In schools throughout Virginia, including in Loudoun County, children are being subjected to critical race theory (CRT). This involves lecturing children, especially those belonging to the non-preferred races, about the “structural evils” of which they are told they are part. Being taught alongside CRT is a distorted view of the history of our country, which true enough has its warts, but which surely has its glories as well—including glories about equal rights regardless of race. Between fighting the armies of the English monarch, the Confederacy, the Nazis, the communists, and Islamic terrorists, something nearing a million Americans have died for the cause of equal rights. These Americans have come in all colors.
Amidst statewide controversy over the teaching of CRT, the Loudoun County School Board also adopted a broad policy of recognizing “transgender” students in preference to their “biological sex” (excuse the redundancy). Even before this, boys were permitted to use girls’ bathrooms, in one of which there was an assault and rape of a female student by a “gender-fluid boy.” The boy in question was then allowed to attend another school in Loudoun County, where he assaulted another girl. This first girl’s parents were understandably outraged and, at the risk of being called narrow-minded, went so far as to complain to the school board.
Groups of parents who had already been protesting CRT and policies promoting transgenderism joined in the complaint. There was no violence at the school board meetings with one exception: law enforcement was summoned, and the outraged father of the assaulted and raped girl was bloodied and dragged out of one meeting. It is true, however, that voices were raised.
The National School Board Administration called upon the Biden administration to investigate these protesting parents as potential perpetrators of “domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” Remember, these parents were citizens attending a meeting of an elected body to tell their representatives what they think. The rights of petition and assembly are protected in the First Amendment. Except for certain preferred groups, these rights today appear to have been repealed.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland intervened, instructing the FBI to investigate these parents and others around the country. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division has reportedly deployed tools and resources normally reserved for terrorist threats against parents who are angry at school boards for what is occurring in their children’s schools. All this provoked massive support, across Virginia and around the nation, for the parents of Loudoun County.
This support is not surprising. By nature, parents love their children and feel responsibility for them. Citizens, especially one hopes American citizens, feel entitled to state their grievances. The Declaration of Independence itself contains a list of grievances against the King. The Biden administration reacted to these protests just as King George III reacted against the American colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution: he called in law enforcement. And the people of Virginia reacted in a way reminiscent of the American colonists: they defeated the candidate for governor who took the position that parents should have nothing to do with their children’s education.
What do these two stories—one of them taking place in Hillsdale County, Michigan, a deep red county, and the other in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is deeply blue—have in common? In both stories we see reactions against violations of our rights, rights that we have by nature as human beings.
The story about Mitch Spangler is about our right to work and to store up the product of our labor so that we and our families can eat and thrive. The American Founders put this in terms of our natural right to property. The story about the parents of Loudoun County is about the natural right of mothers and fathers to raise their children. To interfere with these rights is to interfere with the nature of the human being.
These facts about nature were well known during the American Revolution, the very Revolution that is besmirched by the members of our ruling class today, just as it was besmirched by the ruling class at the time of the Revolution. It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by that former ruling class that led to the American Revolution. These recent stories from Michigan and Virginia show that we Americans do not seem to like that interference any better today.
In addition to the right to make a living and the right to raise our children, we have the right to participate in our government, even if we are not experts, and the right to look to the heavens and not to our ruling class for guidance. We have these rights because we—every single one of us—were born with them sewn by God into our nature, and we cannot find our earthly fulfillment without them.
If we put these facts together as a people, we will have recovered the understanding that produced the American Revolution. We will stop these current predations upon our rights. We will bring this overwhelming government back where it belongs, under the control of the people.
The signs of such a movement are emerging. Pray they are enough.
Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977 to 1980, he also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 until his appointment as president of Hillsdale College in 2000, he was president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. From October 2020 to January 2021, he served as co-chair of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. He is the author of several books, including The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.
News of the Times;
https://noqreport.com/2022/01/01/google-and-duckduckgo-handle-dr-robert-malones-claims-about-mass-formation-psychosis-very-differently/
https://rightsfreedoms.wordpress.com/2022/01/01/mass-formation-psychosis/
https://summit.news/2022/01/03/mass-formation-psychosis-admittedly-used-by-governments-as-tool-of-population-control/
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/01/report-china-mass-harvesting-americans-facebook-twitter-data-to-bolster-spying-propaganda/
https://t.me/RealMarjorieGreene/1451
https://vdare.com/posts/his-name-is-william-evans-remembering-the-white-us-capitol-police-officer-murdered-in-april-2021-by-a-black-nationalist
https://national-justice.com/fbi-agents-steal-86-million-dollars-800-random-people-private-vault-heist
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/02/illegal-alien-charged-with-killing-missouri-man-weeks-before-christmas/
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cia-torturous-experiments-children-orphan-psychology/
https://vdare.com/posts/philadelphia-naacp-headquarters-riddled-with-bullets-including-don-t-shoot-sign
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/video/2022/01/desantis-is-on-a-roll-destroys-biden-aoc-lockdown-politicians-vacations-in-about-a-minute/
https://newspunch.com/8-las-vegas-witnesses-dead/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-01-04-robert-malone-fda-barda-blocked-hcq-covid.html
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/01/05/as-teacher-unions-close-schools-where-did-billions-go-n2601434
It's my new year's resolution.
*.*
My favorite exercise is a cross between a lunge and a crunch.
It’s called lunch.
*.*
Tourists unloading from the ferry onto Liberty Island in New York Harbor were met with disappointment this week, as the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty once stood was empty. Instead, a letter on stationery the size of a king sized bed lay on the pedestal with a message reading, “Fed up with New York, moving to Florida. - L. Liberty”
“I had just clocked into my shift this morning and looked up to see she was gone,” said security guard Feldman Baxter, while complying with the city’s mandates of wearing two masks outdoors, standing 20 feet from anyone else, rubbing his arm from his recent fifth booster jab, and ending each sentence with, “Praise Fauci.”
Reports flooded in of eyewitnesses seeing the fifteen-story symbol of freedom driving an oversized U-Haul down the Atlantic coastline, stopping only for gas and fish tacos.
“Wow, I love it here! I feel like I’m with my people,” said the Statue of Liberty while wading out to a small island off the coast of Miami to make herself comfortable in her new home. “I need to buy myself a bikini.”
At time of publishing, D.C. officials were investigating the now-empty marble chair of the Lincoln Memorial.
*.*
A fellow came into a bar and ordered a martini. Before drinking it, he removed the olive and carefully put it into a glass jar. Then he ordered another martini and did the same thing. After an hour, when he was full of martinis and the jar was full of olives, he staggered out.
"Well," said a customer, "I never saw anything as peculiar as that!"
"What's so peculiar about it?" the bartender said. "His wife sent him out for a jar of olives."
*.*
Remember back before the Internet, we thought that lack of information was responsible for stupidity.
Turns out it wasn't.
Quote of the Times;
“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” - Henry David Thoreau
Link of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/rand-paul-has-won-every-single-round-against-fauci/
Issue of the Times;
The Way Out by Larry P. Arnn President, Hillsdale College
Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study.
Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism
To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation. You might give it rule-making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more “independent” agencies—meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.
This much has been done. It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading. The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works. Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected. But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head? Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.
Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take—has taken—decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates. But once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.
What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world? There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time. They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable. But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody. This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved. The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest. This has not happened before. The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.
To set up a despotism capable of pulling this off you would need the media’s help. Those controlling the media today are trained in the same universities that invented the bureaucratic state, the same universities the senior bureaucrats attended. The media would need to be willing to suppress, for example, the fact that 50,000 doctors, scientists, and medical researchers signed the Great Barrington Declaration. That document reminds people that you cannot suppress a widely disseminated contagious virus through shutdowns and mass isolation, and that if you try, you will work immeasurable destruction of new kinds—unemployment, bankruptcy, depression, suicide, multiplying public debt, broken supply chains, and increases of other serious health problems. Some of the signatories to this Declaration come from the most distinguished universities in the world, but never mind: their views do not fit the narrative propagated by the powerful. They have been effectively cancelled, ignored by the media and suppressed by Big Tech.
You would need some help from business, too. As far as influence is concerned, “business” is dominated by large institutions—those comprising big business—whose leaders are also educated in the same universities that conceived bureaucratic government and trained the bureaucrats and media heads. This provides a ground of agreement between big business and the bureaucratic state. Anyway, agree or not, businesses are vulnerable to regulation, and to mitigate the risk of regulatory harm they play the game: they send lobbyists to Washington, make political contributions, hire armies of lawyers. If you are big enough to play the game, there are plenty of advantages to be won. If you are not big enough to play the game—well, in that case you are on your own.
Amidst the unprecedented lockdowns, imagine there comes an election, a time for the people to say if they approve of the new way of governing and of this vast, unprecedented intrusion into their lives. Then let us say that in several states the election rules and practices are altered by their executive branches—the people in charge of enforcing the law—on their own, without approval by their legislatures. Say this brazen violation of the separation of powers takes place in the name of the pandemic. One does not need to know what percentage of votes in the final tally were affected to see that this is fishy. No sensible person would place control of the election process in one party—any party—or in one branch—any branch—of the government, alone. In some crucial states, that was done.
Finally, to sustain this new kind of government, you would need to work on education. You might build a system of centralized influence, if not control, over every classroom in the land. You might require certification of the teachers with a bias toward the schools of education that train them in the approved way. These schools, poor but obedient cousins of the elite universities, are always up on the latest methods of “delivery” of instruction (we do not call it teaching anymore). These new methods do not require much actual knowledge, which can be supplied from above.
As far as content, you might set up a system of textbook adoption that guarantees to publishers a massive and captive market but requires them to submit proposed books to committees of “experts,” subject of course to political pressures. You might build a standard approved curriculum on the assumption that everything changes—even history, even principles. You might use this curriculum to lay the ground for holding everything old, everything previously thought high and noble, in contempt.
Doing this, incidentally, deprives the student of the motive to learn anything out of fashion today. It is a preparation not for a life of knowing and thinking, but for a life of compliance and conformity.
This is by no means an exhaustive account of what it would take to build a thoroughgoing tyranny—for further instruction, read Book Five of Aristotle’s Politics or George Orwell’s 1984. But it gives an idea of a mighty system, a system that seems unassailable, a system combining the powers of government and commerce, of education and communication. Money and power in such a system would accrue to the same hands. The people who benefit from the system would be the ruling class. Others would be frustrated. And such a system would tend to get worse, because the exercise of unchecked power does not bring out the best in people.
Any elaborate system of government must have a justification, and the justification of this one cannot simply be that those in the ruling class are entitled on the basis of their superiority. That argument went away with the divine right of kings. No, for the current ruling class, the justification is science. The claim of bureaucratic rule is a claim of expertise—of technical or scientific knowledge about everything. Listen to Fauci on Face the Nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries. When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”
The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901. Churchill wrote:
Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialized character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse? . . . If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible.
Churchill goes on to argue that practical judgment is the capacity necessary to making decisions. And practical judgment, he writes in many places, is something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees. Everyone, then, is equipped to guide his own life in the things that concern mainly himself.
Another thing about the experts is that they are not really engaged in the search for truth. Instead, the powerful among them suppress the obvious fact that there is wide disagreement among the experts. There always is.
God save us from falling completely into the hands of experts. But God has given us the wherewithal to save ourselves from that. So let us move to the second question posed above.
How to Defeat a Rising Despotism
In answering the second question, I will tell two stories that are suggestive.
The first took place in the small town of Jonesville, Michigan, five miles north of Hillsdale College. In our state, as in most places where the lockdowns were enforced, businesses were crippled or destroyed en masse. Restaurants were chief among them. One of our local restaurants is a 30-year-old diner called Spanglers Family Restaurant. Mitch Spangler is the proprietor. The business was founded by his late father, and Mitch was purchasing the business from his mother. The payments to his mother depended upon the revenues of the business, and his mother’s retirement depended upon the payments. The life’s work of two generations was at stake. Mitch was also helping to support a daughter in college.
This is not to mention the more than 20 employees whose livelihoods are dependent on Spanglers. “Our employees are moms who have kids,” Spangler told the local paper. “One of our employees is pregnant; another is a 19-year-old kid. This is his first job, and he just bought a car.” Our leaders in Washington treat it as a small thing when trillions are being thrown about. To the Spanglers and people like them, their relatively small revenue streams are everything.
Mr. Spangler was not prepared to surrender all this. When a second lockdown was ordered by Michigan’s governor a year ago last month, he kept his restaurant open. He put a sign on the door and posted on Facebook to make clear, among other things, that he was acting out of necessity for the sake of his business and the livelihoods of all those dependent on it; that precautions would be taken, including the installation of an electrostatic fogger that would disinfect the air; that he understood the thinking of those who would choose to stay away from his restaurant, but that he hoped they would understand his own thinking. “If you cannot support us, we understand,” he wrote, “but please allow us to have the freedom to do what we have to do.”
The wheels of bureaucracy began to grind. Spanglers was visited repeatedly by the health department, by the licensing authorities, and even by the agriculture department (one wonders what they had to do with it). Spangler was fined and threatened with forcible closure. But he persevered, never backing down, and his business did well. On a typical weekend, not only locals but supporters from the neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio lined up outside to show their support.
Mitch Spangler is our kind of fellow, and the College gave him some help organizing his legal representation. We did not wish to be in the newspaper about this because we were facing our own pressures, and we too were determined to resist them. But Spangler was no good at keeping a secret: he wore a Hillsdale College t-shirt on FOX News and thanked us for our help. And when he had a little ceremony in his parking lot in the spring to thank his staff and his customers, I was honored to say a few words.
This may not seem on its face a big story, but it is a most important story. It is important because it is a story about the nature of human beings and of citizens and of our rights. The nature of a thing is the essence of a thing. One aspect of the nature of a human being is that he must eat to live. In condemnation of slavery, Abraham Lincoln loved to say that every man was created with a head, hands, and mouth, the implication being that the head should guide the hands in the feeding of the mouth. Because we are made to live this way, we are also determined to live this way. The alternative is dependence, which does not make us happy.
It should not therefore be surprising that, if you try to destroy the business of a man whose family has spent over 30 years building it, he will resist. Trying to strongarm people like Mitch Spangler is not a good idea. There are millions of them, and they have always made up the core of this greatest of free republics.
The second story is more famous, but it too is about nature—indeed, about that word’s most basic meaning. The word nature, as I said, refers to a thing’s essence, but it comes from the Latin word for birth. Our nature begins with how we are born and how we grow. Just as we are attached by nature to the way we get our livings, so we are attached by nature to our parents, and still more to our children. And this second story, set in Loudoun County, Virginia, is about parents and children.
In schools throughout Virginia, including in Loudoun County, children are being subjected to critical race theory (CRT). This involves lecturing children, especially those belonging to the non-preferred races, about the “structural evils” of which they are told they are part. Being taught alongside CRT is a distorted view of the history of our country, which true enough has its warts, but which surely has its glories as well—including glories about equal rights regardless of race. Between fighting the armies of the English monarch, the Confederacy, the Nazis, the communists, and Islamic terrorists, something nearing a million Americans have died for the cause of equal rights. These Americans have come in all colors.
Amidst statewide controversy over the teaching of CRT, the Loudoun County School Board also adopted a broad policy of recognizing “transgender” students in preference to their “biological sex” (excuse the redundancy). Even before this, boys were permitted to use girls’ bathrooms, in one of which there was an assault and rape of a female student by a “gender-fluid boy.” The boy in question was then allowed to attend another school in Loudoun County, where he assaulted another girl. This first girl’s parents were understandably outraged and, at the risk of being called narrow-minded, went so far as to complain to the school board.
Groups of parents who had already been protesting CRT and policies promoting transgenderism joined in the complaint. There was no violence at the school board meetings with one exception: law enforcement was summoned, and the outraged father of the assaulted and raped girl was bloodied and dragged out of one meeting. It is true, however, that voices were raised.
The National School Board Administration called upon the Biden administration to investigate these protesting parents as potential perpetrators of “domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” Remember, these parents were citizens attending a meeting of an elected body to tell their representatives what they think. The rights of petition and assembly are protected in the First Amendment. Except for certain preferred groups, these rights today appear to have been repealed.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland intervened, instructing the FBI to investigate these parents and others around the country. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division has reportedly deployed tools and resources normally reserved for terrorist threats against parents who are angry at school boards for what is occurring in their children’s schools. All this provoked massive support, across Virginia and around the nation, for the parents of Loudoun County.
This support is not surprising. By nature, parents love their children and feel responsibility for them. Citizens, especially one hopes American citizens, feel entitled to state their grievances. The Declaration of Independence itself contains a list of grievances against the King. The Biden administration reacted to these protests just as King George III reacted against the American colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution: he called in law enforcement. And the people of Virginia reacted in a way reminiscent of the American colonists: they defeated the candidate for governor who took the position that parents should have nothing to do with their children’s education.
What do these two stories—one of them taking place in Hillsdale County, Michigan, a deep red county, and the other in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is deeply blue—have in common? In both stories we see reactions against violations of our rights, rights that we have by nature as human beings.
The story about Mitch Spangler is about our right to work and to store up the product of our labor so that we and our families can eat and thrive. The American Founders put this in terms of our natural right to property. The story about the parents of Loudoun County is about the natural right of mothers and fathers to raise their children. To interfere with these rights is to interfere with the nature of the human being.
These facts about nature were well known during the American Revolution, the very Revolution that is besmirched by the members of our ruling class today, just as it was besmirched by the ruling class at the time of the Revolution. It was the interference with the colonists’ natural rights by that former ruling class that led to the American Revolution. These recent stories from Michigan and Virginia show that we Americans do not seem to like that interference any better today.
In addition to the right to make a living and the right to raise our children, we have the right to participate in our government, even if we are not experts, and the right to look to the heavens and not to our ruling class for guidance. We have these rights because we—every single one of us—were born with them sewn by God into our nature, and we cannot find our earthly fulfillment without them.
If we put these facts together as a people, we will have recovered the understanding that produced the American Revolution. We will stop these current predations upon our rights. We will bring this overwhelming government back where it belongs, under the control of the people.
The signs of such a movement are emerging. Pray they are enough.
Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977 to 1980, he also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 until his appointment as president of Hillsdale College in 2000, he was president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. From October 2020 to January 2021, he served as co-chair of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. He is the author of several books, including The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.
News of the Times;
https://noqreport.com/2022/01/01/google-and-duckduckgo-handle-dr-robert-malones-claims-about-mass-formation-psychosis-very-differently/
https://rightsfreedoms.wordpress.com/2022/01/01/mass-formation-psychosis/
https://summit.news/2022/01/03/mass-formation-psychosis-admittedly-used-by-governments-as-tool-of-population-control/
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/01/report-china-mass-harvesting-americans-facebook-twitter-data-to-bolster-spying-propaganda/
https://t.me/RealMarjorieGreene/1451
https://vdare.com/posts/his-name-is-william-evans-remembering-the-white-us-capitol-police-officer-murdered-in-april-2021-by-a-black-nationalist
https://national-justice.com/fbi-agents-steal-86-million-dollars-800-random-people-private-vault-heist
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/02/illegal-alien-charged-with-killing-missouri-man-weeks-before-christmas/
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/cia-torturous-experiments-children-orphan-psychology/
https://vdare.com/posts/philadelphia-naacp-headquarters-riddled-with-bullets-including-don-t-shoot-sign
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/video/2022/01/desantis-is-on-a-roll-destroys-biden-aoc-lockdown-politicians-vacations-in-about-a-minute/
https://newspunch.com/8-las-vegas-witnesses-dead/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-01-04-robert-malone-fda-barda-blocked-hcq-covid.html
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/01/05/as-teacher-unions-close-schools-where-did-billions-go-n2601434
Musk?
I ordered a book called "How to scam people online" two months ago.
Still hasn't arrived.
*.*
You ever hear about the bulletproof Irishman?
Rick O'Shay.
*.*
Oneliners:
Sir Isaac Newton developed calculus during the plague; how bored are you that you would invent calculus?
Don't argue with people on social media, every classroom had that kid who ate paste, that's them.
Just a heads up that "Soylent Green" took place in 2022.
It's perfectly OK to talk to yourself and to respond to yourself, however it's not OK to repeat what you said because you weren't listening.
Remember, prosthetic legs make great stocking stuffers.
"Just cleared out some space in the freezer" sounds much more productive than, "I just polished off another pint of ice cream."
The FDA has approved eye drops that would replace the need for readers, however this will increase use of the question, "Has anyone seen my eye drops
We're pretty sure COVID came from China. But then again, so did ketchup so, I guess it's a wash.
The average American won't finish paying off holiday debt until July, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
70% of people say their dog helps them stay fit especially if you have one of those cross-fit breeds.
*.*
Every sign of the zodiac has a unique hairstyle.
Except Cancer.
*.*
How do you follow Will Smith in the snow?
You follow the fresh prints.
Quote of the Times;
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot. – Twain
Link of the Times;
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-top-nine-worst-media-moments-of-2021
Issue of the Times;
Dear Conservatives, Elon Musk is Not Your Friend by Bode Land
Conservatives have enjoyed Elon Musk's behavior in recent weeks, blasting Elizabeth Warren, opposing lockdowns, and insulting CNN, but the giddiness spewing from conservatives about Musk is foolish.
To those embracing Elon Musk's political conversion, remember that Musk has been one of the most prominent advocates of the continuous scam known as climate change. Like Bill Gates and Al Gore, Musk is an extremely wealthy man who fattens his own pockets through propagating climate change. And like those other rich guys, Musk doesn't refrain from using private jets to fly around the world to save it.
In 2018, Elon Musk reportedly donated $6 Million to the Sierra Club while writing, "Thank you for fighting climate change. This affects every living creature on earth." Once merely an environmental advocacy group, the Sierra Club has since evolved to promote other left-wing issues from pushing for mass immigration and abortion.
Musk also has no reservations about whispering sweet-nothings to communists by praising China as "more responsible" than the U.S. and said that Chinese government officials could "possibly" be "more responsible" for their citizen's happiness than America is.
In May, Musk tweeted a call for a Carbon Tax and spoke with the Biden administration about implementing it. Musk demanding the government to take money from taxpayers should come as no surprise because Musk's companies received at least $4.9 billion in government subsidies – as of 2015! Therein lies perhaps Musk's most incredible skill: enriching himself with the government's help.
While government subsidies are not exclusive to one industry, what sets Elon Musk apart is not only his ability to exploit taxpayers but to use government guns to extort his competitors through "regulatory credits." The state and federal governments give regulatory credits for contributing zero pollution to the environment. In the name of fighting climate change, Musk successfully got the state of California and nine other states to set emission standards that only Tesla could meet. Suppose other automakers cannot produce zero-emissions vehicles. In that case, they will either pay hefty fines, have their business licenses revoked, or buy imaginary credits from automakers who do produce zero emissions, like Tesla.
It's important to understand these credits are not real – they are a made-up tax imposed by the government on automakers to reinforce the leftist religion of environmentalism. These credits are free cash with a 100% margin and no overhead. Musk essentially colluded with the government to extort other automakers and pay him off under the guise of fighting climate change. And the returns are enormous.
In 2020, Tesla reported a regulatory credit revenue of $1.58 billion. Tesla's regulatory credits revenue project to be $2.2 billion in 2021, $3.1 billion in 2022, and $4.34 billion in 2023. By 2024, the government will have successfully extorted over $13 billion from automakers like Ford and GMC to fund Tesla. Without the help of this government-sponsored extortion, fiscal 2Q 2021 would have been the first quarter Tesla would have ever turned a profit.
But Tesla isn't the only Musk business that leverages the government to do his bidding. SolarCity received a $750 million investment from New York State for its plans to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo, just a tiny part of the $2.5 billion in government subsidies Uncle Sam has given SolarCity. Despite all the free cash, Tesla purchased SolarCity for $2.6 billion in Tesla stock because SolarCity;
"has floundered despite significant taxpayer support through a bevy of state and federal tax credits and subsidies. Nevertheless, the solar energy company's stock has been in long-term decline as the company struggles to develop a profitable market not reliant on generous helpings of taxpayer support."
Another Musk business, SpaceX, has received $5.5 billion in government contracts from NASA and the Air Force. Of course, NASA and the Air Force get their funding from American taxpayers, which flows into Musk's pocket. A California hedge fund manager told the LA Times: "Government support is a theme of all three of these companies, and without it, none of them would be around."
Another Musk business venture, the Boring Company, constructs underground tunnels as a means of public transportation. Yes, we already have Subway systems, but Musk promises these are faster and only cost $10 million per mile to dig – paid for by taxpayers. The good news for Musk is that he hedged his bets through The Boring Company, so if electric cars flop, then he can still own the mass transit market.
The common thread running through Musk's business ventures is that the government is always his biggest client, and he knows how to sell them. Being the cunning salesman that he is, when Musk needs cash, he opens new locations or moves the business – receiving hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds to do so. When his businesses flounder, he shifts the conversation to one of his other ventures. To his credit, Musk might be the greatest salesman of a generation. How else can someone fund an empire through government coercion and taxpayer money while retaining universal respect and adoration?
Elon Musk is a climate change radical who partners with the government at every turn to enrich himself. Conservatives like Texas governor Greg Abbot shouldn't celebrate the arrival of Tesla and Musk to Texas because he will be coming for the pocketbooks of Texans in no time.
My suggestion is to refrain from gushing over Musk's recent political conversion. Musk is opportunist, and opportunism is a hallmark of the left. He seized the opportunity to make a fortune off climate change, and he's successfully done that. When the COVID insanity ends, climate change is on deck as the weapon of choice that the government will leverage to hijack your freedom. When that happens, Elon Musk will not be on your side.
It is more likely that Musk’s political shift stems from his recognition that a red wave is coming, and the devious salesman inside him is searching for more fertile ground to exploit after exhausting the resources of Democrats. Every con artist needs new investors to keep the scheme going.
Conservatives beware.
News of the Times;
https://reason.com/2021/12/28/harry-potter-fake-news-media-enemy-of-the-people-anniversary/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/12/person-year-poll-dropped-j-k-rowling-took-lead/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/covid-vaccines-part-plan-deal-climate-change-reducing-population-growth/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marjorie-taylor-green-permanently-banned-twitter-spreading-covid-misinformation
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/nonprofit-research-team-says-more-than-100000-georgia-dropbox-ballots-from-2020-have-no-proper-chain-of-custody-forms/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/31/can-you-spot-whats-wrong-with-this-picture-of-joe-biden-n1545662
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/12/wealthy-leftists-demand-poor-white-kids.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/parent-finds-numerous-grammatical-errors-letter-virginia-teachers-union-president/
https://genesiustimes.com/australians-shocked-to-wake-up-in-concentration-camps-after-giving-up-their-guns/
https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2022/01/01/mass-formation-psychosis-its-real-and-it-was-purposely-caused-by-biden-and-the-democrat-party-n500110
https://conejoguardian.org/2021/12/14/more-vc-nurses-blow-whistle-on-overwhelming-numbers-of-heart-attacks-clotting-strokes/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-at-11-months-one-of-the-worst-years-ever
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/court-blocks-body-cam-of-cops-beating-veteran-and-his-service-dog-as-it-may-harm-cops-reputation/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/bidens-trojan-horse-afghanistan-across-southern-border-biden-bringing-unvetted-military-age-men-around-globe-us/
https://national-justice.com/uk-conservative-mp-stabbed-death-somali-was-strong-supporter-black-lives-matter
Still hasn't arrived.
*.*
You ever hear about the bulletproof Irishman?
Rick O'Shay.
*.*
Oneliners:
Sir Isaac Newton developed calculus during the plague; how bored are you that you would invent calculus?
Don't argue with people on social media, every classroom had that kid who ate paste, that's them.
Just a heads up that "Soylent Green" took place in 2022.
It's perfectly OK to talk to yourself and to respond to yourself, however it's not OK to repeat what you said because you weren't listening.
Remember, prosthetic legs make great stocking stuffers.
"Just cleared out some space in the freezer" sounds much more productive than, "I just polished off another pint of ice cream."
The FDA has approved eye drops that would replace the need for readers, however this will increase use of the question, "Has anyone seen my eye drops
We're pretty sure COVID came from China. But then again, so did ketchup so, I guess it's a wash.
The average American won't finish paying off holiday debt until July, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
70% of people say their dog helps them stay fit especially if you have one of those cross-fit breeds.
*.*
Every sign of the zodiac has a unique hairstyle.
Except Cancer.
*.*
How do you follow Will Smith in the snow?
You follow the fresh prints.
Quote of the Times;
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot. – Twain
Link of the Times;
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-top-nine-worst-media-moments-of-2021
Issue of the Times;
Dear Conservatives, Elon Musk is Not Your Friend by Bode Land
Conservatives have enjoyed Elon Musk's behavior in recent weeks, blasting Elizabeth Warren, opposing lockdowns, and insulting CNN, but the giddiness spewing from conservatives about Musk is foolish.
To those embracing Elon Musk's political conversion, remember that Musk has been one of the most prominent advocates of the continuous scam known as climate change. Like Bill Gates and Al Gore, Musk is an extremely wealthy man who fattens his own pockets through propagating climate change. And like those other rich guys, Musk doesn't refrain from using private jets to fly around the world to save it.
In 2018, Elon Musk reportedly donated $6 Million to the Sierra Club while writing, "Thank you for fighting climate change. This affects every living creature on earth." Once merely an environmental advocacy group, the Sierra Club has since evolved to promote other left-wing issues from pushing for mass immigration and abortion.
Musk also has no reservations about whispering sweet-nothings to communists by praising China as "more responsible" than the U.S. and said that Chinese government officials could "possibly" be "more responsible" for their citizen's happiness than America is.
In May, Musk tweeted a call for a Carbon Tax and spoke with the Biden administration about implementing it. Musk demanding the government to take money from taxpayers should come as no surprise because Musk's companies received at least $4.9 billion in government subsidies – as of 2015! Therein lies perhaps Musk's most incredible skill: enriching himself with the government's help.
While government subsidies are not exclusive to one industry, what sets Elon Musk apart is not only his ability to exploit taxpayers but to use government guns to extort his competitors through "regulatory credits." The state and federal governments give regulatory credits for contributing zero pollution to the environment. In the name of fighting climate change, Musk successfully got the state of California and nine other states to set emission standards that only Tesla could meet. Suppose other automakers cannot produce zero-emissions vehicles. In that case, they will either pay hefty fines, have their business licenses revoked, or buy imaginary credits from automakers who do produce zero emissions, like Tesla.
It's important to understand these credits are not real – they are a made-up tax imposed by the government on automakers to reinforce the leftist religion of environmentalism. These credits are free cash with a 100% margin and no overhead. Musk essentially colluded with the government to extort other automakers and pay him off under the guise of fighting climate change. And the returns are enormous.
In 2020, Tesla reported a regulatory credit revenue of $1.58 billion. Tesla's regulatory credits revenue project to be $2.2 billion in 2021, $3.1 billion in 2022, and $4.34 billion in 2023. By 2024, the government will have successfully extorted over $13 billion from automakers like Ford and GMC to fund Tesla. Without the help of this government-sponsored extortion, fiscal 2Q 2021 would have been the first quarter Tesla would have ever turned a profit.
But Tesla isn't the only Musk business that leverages the government to do his bidding. SolarCity received a $750 million investment from New York State for its plans to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo, just a tiny part of the $2.5 billion in government subsidies Uncle Sam has given SolarCity. Despite all the free cash, Tesla purchased SolarCity for $2.6 billion in Tesla stock because SolarCity;
"has floundered despite significant taxpayer support through a bevy of state and federal tax credits and subsidies. Nevertheless, the solar energy company's stock has been in long-term decline as the company struggles to develop a profitable market not reliant on generous helpings of taxpayer support."
Another Musk business, SpaceX, has received $5.5 billion in government contracts from NASA and the Air Force. Of course, NASA and the Air Force get their funding from American taxpayers, which flows into Musk's pocket. A California hedge fund manager told the LA Times: "Government support is a theme of all three of these companies, and without it, none of them would be around."
Another Musk business venture, the Boring Company, constructs underground tunnels as a means of public transportation. Yes, we already have Subway systems, but Musk promises these are faster and only cost $10 million per mile to dig – paid for by taxpayers. The good news for Musk is that he hedged his bets through The Boring Company, so if electric cars flop, then he can still own the mass transit market.
The common thread running through Musk's business ventures is that the government is always his biggest client, and he knows how to sell them. Being the cunning salesman that he is, when Musk needs cash, he opens new locations or moves the business – receiving hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds to do so. When his businesses flounder, he shifts the conversation to one of his other ventures. To his credit, Musk might be the greatest salesman of a generation. How else can someone fund an empire through government coercion and taxpayer money while retaining universal respect and adoration?
Elon Musk is a climate change radical who partners with the government at every turn to enrich himself. Conservatives like Texas governor Greg Abbot shouldn't celebrate the arrival of Tesla and Musk to Texas because he will be coming for the pocketbooks of Texans in no time.
My suggestion is to refrain from gushing over Musk's recent political conversion. Musk is opportunist, and opportunism is a hallmark of the left. He seized the opportunity to make a fortune off climate change, and he's successfully done that. When the COVID insanity ends, climate change is on deck as the weapon of choice that the government will leverage to hijack your freedom. When that happens, Elon Musk will not be on your side.
It is more likely that Musk’s political shift stems from his recognition that a red wave is coming, and the devious salesman inside him is searching for more fertile ground to exploit after exhausting the resources of Democrats. Every con artist needs new investors to keep the scheme going.
Conservatives beware.
News of the Times;
https://reason.com/2021/12/28/harry-potter-fake-news-media-enemy-of-the-people-anniversary/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/12/person-year-poll-dropped-j-k-rowling-took-lead/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/covid-vaccines-part-plan-deal-climate-change-reducing-population-growth/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marjorie-taylor-green-permanently-banned-twitter-spreading-covid-misinformation
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/nonprofit-research-team-says-more-than-100000-georgia-dropbox-ballots-from-2020-have-no-proper-chain-of-custody-forms/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/12/31/can-you-spot-whats-wrong-with-this-picture-of-joe-biden-n1545662
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/12/wealthy-leftists-demand-poor-white-kids.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/parent-finds-numerous-grammatical-errors-letter-virginia-teachers-union-president/
https://genesiustimes.com/australians-shocked-to-wake-up-in-concentration-camps-after-giving-up-their-guns/
https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2022/01/01/mass-formation-psychosis-its-real-and-it-was-purposely-caused-by-biden-and-the-democrat-party-n500110
https://conejoguardian.org/2021/12/14/more-vc-nurses-blow-whistle-on-overwhelming-numbers-of-heart-attacks-clotting-strokes/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-at-11-months-one-of-the-worst-years-ever
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/court-blocks-body-cam-of-cops-beating-veteran-and-his-service-dog-as-it-may-harm-cops-reputation/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/bidens-trojan-horse-afghanistan-across-southern-border-biden-bringing-unvetted-military-age-men-around-globe-us/
https://national-justice.com/uk-conservative-mp-stabbed-death-somali-was-strong-supporter-black-lives-matter
Efforts?
My wife just called me pretentious.
I was so surprised my monocle fell out.
*.*
Just spent $100 on a belt that doesn’t fit!
Huge waist.
*.*
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has directed all branches of the military to step up diversity efforts when it comes to working dogs in canine units. For the first time, the military - which has always favored German Shepherds in the past - will admit other breeds such as Chihuahuas and Pomeranians.
"We've always had this narrow-minded view that the German Shepherd is the best dog for chasing down dangerous terrorists and sniffing out improvised explosive devices," said Austin. "But why not Chihuahuas? Why not poodles? Bringing in more dog breeds will increase our diversity - which is the greatest strength any military can have."
So far, there have been no Chihuahuas capable of taking down a 250-pound man by the arm, so the military has elected to eliminate testing altogether.
Military leaders confirmed the current plan is just to invite every breed of dog and hang out, eat doggy treats, and have a good time while taking diversity courses.
"We're proud of this beautiful mosaic we have created here," said one Staff Sergeant while knitting a cute sweater for Squeaker, his working dog. "This is what our military is all about!"
*.*
I gotta go to the dentist again today.
I'd rather do a lot of other things.
It just gets so boring once you know the drill.
*.*
Please take note: due to inflationary pressures...
The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off till further notice!
Quote of the Times;
If you are not capable of cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is. – Peterson
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/chinas_disastrous_onechild_policy_is_finally_starting_to_kick_in.html
Issue of the Times;
Biden State Dept “Actively Impeding” Rescue Efforts of US Citizens Stranded in Afghanistan – Including Group of Catholic Nuns by Jim Hoft
Back in August white House Spokesperson Jen Psaki lied and told Peter Doocy and the American public the administration was in contact with every American in Afghanistan.
The Biden regime spokesperson also told reporters numerous times there were “only” 100 Americans left stranded inside the country.
“It’s right around 100, and we’re working every single day to help those who want to leave, get out,” WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki says on Americans in Afghanistan who want to leave. https://t.co/3jjfYWjn5D
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 9, 2021
But that was all a lie. And they knew it was a lie.
We now know that there are THOUSANDS of Americans stranded in Afghanistan and as many as 14,000.
Since the fall the Americans left stranded in Afghanistan have been out of the news. But Americans and our allies are still trapped inside the failed Taliban-led state.
A new report at National Review published today revealed that the Biden State Department is “actively impeding” rescue attempts of Americans from the country. Thousands of Americans and as many as 100,000 American allies are left stranded inside the country. Even a group of Catholic nuns are still trapped in Afghanistan.
Via National Review.
The Project Dynamo rescue came four months after the fall of Kabul, as winter is setting in, and as Afghanistan is on the brink of mass starvation. It also came as successful rescues of Americans and American allies have become increasingly hard to come by.
Stern has focused his most recent efforts on rescuing American citizens and green-card holders, people who can fly commercially to the United States. But efforts by dozens of private rescue groups who have focused their energy on saving other American allies in the 20-year war — people who typically don’t have the paperwork for a direct path into the U.S. — have slowed to a crawl.
Leaders of some of those groups who spoke to National Review are pointing fingers at the U.S. Department of State. They say the State Department is doing little to help them rescue American allies, and in some cases it is actively blocking their efforts. They’re calling on President Joe Biden’s administration to do more to help them save the people they once served with…
…Owen estimated there are easily over 100,000 American allies still trapped in the country. He noted that former Afghan national army commandos don’t qualify for SIV status.
“They get nothing. The U.S. government doesn’t see any duty to evacuate these guys. And they are dead. They are dead. They are dead if they get caught. I’ve had three executed in the last two weeks, one in front of his wife and children,” Owen said. “None of us are going to quit until we find a way to get them out. These guys, they fought like hell.”…
…Iowa state senator Zach Nunn, the other cofounder of Task Force Argo, said they shared their manifest with the State Department in October. “The flight manifest is still being reviewed by State,” Nunn said in a prepared statement. Among the people they are ready to fly out are dozens of at-risk Catholic nuns, he said.
Owen also acknowledged that the lack of recent media attention has made it harder to raise money that organizations like Flanders Fields rely on. He said he and his wife recently pulled $23,000 out of their personal savings to keep the operation afloat and their safehouses open.
The Biden State Department will not even move to rescue Catholic nuns trapped inside the country. They truly are evil people.
Read the entire report: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/state-department-actively-impeding-rescue-efforts-as-afghanistan-fades-from-spotlight-vets-say/
News of the Times;
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-wisconsin-purchase/
https://goldswitzerland.com/distraction-as-policy-while-our-economic-rome-burns/
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/china-panic-hoards-half-worlds-grain-supply-amid-threats-global-collapse
https://summit.news/2021/12/23/70-per-cent-of-londons-covid-hospitalisations-diagnosed-after-being-admitted-for-other-ailments/
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/abp-vigano-the-catholic-church-has-a-duty-to-resist-deadly-covid-jab-agenda-of-the-globalist-elite/
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-large-study-by-jones-bellet-and.html
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/27/kamala-harris-touts-seven-principles-marxist-rooted-kwanzaa/
https://rumble.com/vn7adx-robin-williams-perfectly-roasts-joe-biden-in-resurfaced-video.html
https://www.lawofficer.com/new-rifle-design-gilboa-snake-doubles-fire-power/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/back-june-18-gateway-pundit-first-report-deep-state-plant-ray-epps-j-6-protests-today-ray-epps-story-finally-made-mainstream-daily-mail/
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/louisiana-nurse-we-have-had-more-children-die-from-the-covid-vaccine-than-of-covid-itself-the-madness-has-to-stop/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/new_york_surrenders_to_the_woke_revolution.html
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-12-29-nurses-overwhelming-heart-attacks-clots-covid-vaccines.html
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/florida-surgeon-general-exposes-biden-regime-for-restricting-monoclonal-antibody-treatment-for-covid-19/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2021/12/29/yet-another-hate-crime-hoax-this-time-in-maryland-n1545300
I was so surprised my monocle fell out.
*.*
Just spent $100 on a belt that doesn’t fit!
Huge waist.
*.*
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has directed all branches of the military to step up diversity efforts when it comes to working dogs in canine units. For the first time, the military - which has always favored German Shepherds in the past - will admit other breeds such as Chihuahuas and Pomeranians.
"We've always had this narrow-minded view that the German Shepherd is the best dog for chasing down dangerous terrorists and sniffing out improvised explosive devices," said Austin. "But why not Chihuahuas? Why not poodles? Bringing in more dog breeds will increase our diversity - which is the greatest strength any military can have."
So far, there have been no Chihuahuas capable of taking down a 250-pound man by the arm, so the military has elected to eliminate testing altogether.
Military leaders confirmed the current plan is just to invite every breed of dog and hang out, eat doggy treats, and have a good time while taking diversity courses.
"We're proud of this beautiful mosaic we have created here," said one Staff Sergeant while knitting a cute sweater for Squeaker, his working dog. "This is what our military is all about!"
*.*
I gotta go to the dentist again today.
I'd rather do a lot of other things.
It just gets so boring once you know the drill.
*.*
Please take note: due to inflationary pressures...
The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off till further notice!
Quote of the Times;
If you are not capable of cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is. – Peterson
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/chinas_disastrous_onechild_policy_is_finally_starting_to_kick_in.html
Issue of the Times;
Biden State Dept “Actively Impeding” Rescue Efforts of US Citizens Stranded in Afghanistan – Including Group of Catholic Nuns by Jim Hoft
Back in August white House Spokesperson Jen Psaki lied and told Peter Doocy and the American public the administration was in contact with every American in Afghanistan.
The Biden regime spokesperson also told reporters numerous times there were “only” 100 Americans left stranded inside the country.
“It’s right around 100, and we’re working every single day to help those who want to leave, get out,” WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki says on Americans in Afghanistan who want to leave. https://t.co/3jjfYWjn5D
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 9, 2021
But that was all a lie. And they knew it was a lie.
We now know that there are THOUSANDS of Americans stranded in Afghanistan and as many as 14,000.
Since the fall the Americans left stranded in Afghanistan have been out of the news. But Americans and our allies are still trapped inside the failed Taliban-led state.
A new report at National Review published today revealed that the Biden State Department is “actively impeding” rescue attempts of Americans from the country. Thousands of Americans and as many as 100,000 American allies are left stranded inside the country. Even a group of Catholic nuns are still trapped in Afghanistan.
Via National Review.
The Project Dynamo rescue came four months after the fall of Kabul, as winter is setting in, and as Afghanistan is on the brink of mass starvation. It also came as successful rescues of Americans and American allies have become increasingly hard to come by.
Stern has focused his most recent efforts on rescuing American citizens and green-card holders, people who can fly commercially to the United States. But efforts by dozens of private rescue groups who have focused their energy on saving other American allies in the 20-year war — people who typically don’t have the paperwork for a direct path into the U.S. — have slowed to a crawl.
Leaders of some of those groups who spoke to National Review are pointing fingers at the U.S. Department of State. They say the State Department is doing little to help them rescue American allies, and in some cases it is actively blocking their efforts. They’re calling on President Joe Biden’s administration to do more to help them save the people they once served with…
…Owen estimated there are easily over 100,000 American allies still trapped in the country. He noted that former Afghan national army commandos don’t qualify for SIV status.
“They get nothing. The U.S. government doesn’t see any duty to evacuate these guys. And they are dead. They are dead. They are dead if they get caught. I’ve had three executed in the last two weeks, one in front of his wife and children,” Owen said. “None of us are going to quit until we find a way to get them out. These guys, they fought like hell.”…
…Iowa state senator Zach Nunn, the other cofounder of Task Force Argo, said they shared their manifest with the State Department in October. “The flight manifest is still being reviewed by State,” Nunn said in a prepared statement. Among the people they are ready to fly out are dozens of at-risk Catholic nuns, he said.
Owen also acknowledged that the lack of recent media attention has made it harder to raise money that organizations like Flanders Fields rely on. He said he and his wife recently pulled $23,000 out of their personal savings to keep the operation afloat and their safehouses open.
The Biden State Department will not even move to rescue Catholic nuns trapped inside the country. They truly are evil people.
Read the entire report: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/state-department-actively-impeding-rescue-efforts-as-afghanistan-fades-from-spotlight-vets-say/
News of the Times;
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-wisconsin-purchase/
https://goldswitzerland.com/distraction-as-policy-while-our-economic-rome-burns/
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/china-panic-hoards-half-worlds-grain-supply-amid-threats-global-collapse
https://summit.news/2021/12/23/70-per-cent-of-londons-covid-hospitalisations-diagnosed-after-being-admitted-for-other-ailments/
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/abp-vigano-the-catholic-church-has-a-duty-to-resist-deadly-covid-jab-agenda-of-the-globalist-elite/
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-large-study-by-jones-bellet-and.html
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/27/kamala-harris-touts-seven-principles-marxist-rooted-kwanzaa/
https://rumble.com/vn7adx-robin-williams-perfectly-roasts-joe-biden-in-resurfaced-video.html
https://www.lawofficer.com/new-rifle-design-gilboa-snake-doubles-fire-power/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/back-june-18-gateway-pundit-first-report-deep-state-plant-ray-epps-j-6-protests-today-ray-epps-story-finally-made-mainstream-daily-mail/
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/louisiana-nurse-we-have-had-more-children-die-from-the-covid-vaccine-than-of-covid-itself-the-madness-has-to-stop/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/new_york_surrenders_to_the_woke_revolution.html
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-12-29-nurses-overwhelming-heart-attacks-clots-covid-vaccines.html
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/florida-surgeon-general-exposes-biden-regime-for-restricting-monoclonal-antibody-treatment-for-covid-19/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2021/12/29/yet-another-hate-crime-hoax-this-time-in-maryland-n1545300
Ideology?
Christmas is a day where you go to church to see God.
Then you go to your in-law's to see the devil.
*.*
What do you get when you cross a sheep, a warship, and a father?
A fleece navy dad.
*.*
Upon returning rather late from an annual physical my wife was wondering how it went. I replied, ”Very routine. He asked if I am continuing to exercise regularly. I replied, ‘yes.’ And am I watching my diet and eating healthy foods to which I replied, ‘of course.’ And are you limiting your alcohol consumption to 1-2 drinks per week I responded ‘absolutely.‘"
My wife then asked, “Then why are you so late?”
“I had to stop at church and go to confession.”
*.*
My son asked me, "What was the big deal about George Washington crossing the Delaware?"
I said, "It was revolutionary."
*.*
My wife and I let astrology come between us.
It Taurus apart.
Quote of the Times;
"They make up their own rules as they go, they change them when they want to; Tony Fauci does not mind going on TV in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera" – Dr. Kary Mullis (Inventor of the PCR test)
Link of the Times;
https://citizenfreepress.com/
Issue of the Times;
My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.
Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,
I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view. Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.
At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?
Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public.
I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.
I began networking with student groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.
The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced.
Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation. (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.
With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”
Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.
I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.
So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.
Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.
I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.
Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.
Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.
For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.
I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.
This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty.
Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas.
This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?
Sincerely,
Peter Boghossian
News of the Times;
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/12/mr-t-they-have-taken-christ-out-of-christmas/
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/12/22/commentary-january-6-is-looking-like-a-fedsurrection/
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/hertz-530-million-lawsuit-customers-arrested-bankruptcy-court.html
https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/foreperson-3-jurors-unwilling-to-convict-resiles-based-on-race-leading-to-mistrial/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/hoax-alert-no-video-evidence-for-alleged-assault-against-female-muslim-in-student-center/
https://thebeltwayreport.com/2021/12/jury-awards-white-male-executive-10m-holding-employer-responsible-for-discrimination/
https://www.brown-watch.com/brownwatch-news/2019/7/5/un-world-population-study-shows-the-white-race-is-less-than-10-of-the-worlds-77-billion-population-amp-declining-causing-racists-to-act-genocidally-in-a-perceived-survival-game-wnon-whites
https://www.kolotv.com/2021/12/25/uber-driver-charged-with-raping-passenger-during-vegas-ride/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10343851/PICTURED-Girlfriend-29-killed-NFLs-Deshazor-Everetts-200mph-car-crash.html
https://brownstone.org/articles/uk-does-not-advise-vaccines-for-5-11-year-olds-while-the-us-starts-to-mandate-them/
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/arizona-seizes-record-amount-fentanyl-now-cited-leading-cause-death-americans-between
https://www.rt.com/russia/544165-putin-beijing-moscow-number/
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=244572
https://www.wnd.com/2021/12/shock-doctors-given-bonus-euthanize-severely-hospitalized-covid-patients/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/25/mccarthy-all-but-one-house-dem-voted-for-more-irs-agents-to-spy-on-americans-opening-border-with-spending-bill/
Then you go to your in-law's to see the devil.
*.*
What do you get when you cross a sheep, a warship, and a father?
A fleece navy dad.
*.*
Upon returning rather late from an annual physical my wife was wondering how it went. I replied, ”Very routine. He asked if I am continuing to exercise regularly. I replied, ‘yes.’ And am I watching my diet and eating healthy foods to which I replied, ‘of course.’ And are you limiting your alcohol consumption to 1-2 drinks per week I responded ‘absolutely.‘"
My wife then asked, “Then why are you so late?”
“I had to stop at church and go to confession.”
*.*
My son asked me, "What was the big deal about George Washington crossing the Delaware?"
I said, "It was revolutionary."
*.*
My wife and I let astrology come between us.
It Taurus apart.
Quote of the Times;
"They make up their own rules as they go, they change them when they want to; Tony Fauci does not mind going on TV in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera" – Dr. Kary Mullis (Inventor of the PCR test)
Link of the Times;
https://citizenfreepress.com/
Issue of the Times;
My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.
Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,
I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view. Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.
At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?
Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public.
I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.
I began networking with student groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.
The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced.
Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation. (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.
With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”
Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.
I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.
So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.
Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.
I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.
Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.
Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined.
For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.
I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.
This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty.
Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas.
This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?
Sincerely,
Peter Boghossian
News of the Times;
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/12/mr-t-they-have-taken-christ-out-of-christmas/
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/12/22/commentary-january-6-is-looking-like-a-fedsurrection/
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/hertz-530-million-lawsuit-customers-arrested-bankruptcy-court.html
https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/foreperson-3-jurors-unwilling-to-convict-resiles-based-on-race-leading-to-mistrial/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/hoax-alert-no-video-evidence-for-alleged-assault-against-female-muslim-in-student-center/
https://thebeltwayreport.com/2021/12/jury-awards-white-male-executive-10m-holding-employer-responsible-for-discrimination/
https://www.brown-watch.com/brownwatch-news/2019/7/5/un-world-population-study-shows-the-white-race-is-less-than-10-of-the-worlds-77-billion-population-amp-declining-causing-racists-to-act-genocidally-in-a-perceived-survival-game-wnon-whites
https://www.kolotv.com/2021/12/25/uber-driver-charged-with-raping-passenger-during-vegas-ride/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10343851/PICTURED-Girlfriend-29-killed-NFLs-Deshazor-Everetts-200mph-car-crash.html
https://brownstone.org/articles/uk-does-not-advise-vaccines-for-5-11-year-olds-while-the-us-starts-to-mandate-them/
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/arizona-seizes-record-amount-fentanyl-now-cited-leading-cause-death-americans-between
https://www.rt.com/russia/544165-putin-beijing-moscow-number/
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=244572
https://www.wnd.com/2021/12/shock-doctors-given-bonus-euthanize-severely-hospitalized-covid-patients/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/25/mccarthy-all-but-one-house-dem-voted-for-more-irs-agents-to-spy-on-americans-opening-border-with-spending-bill/
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.