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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
A Government Environmentalist Experiment in Brainwashing Parents Through Children in North Carolina
#C02Kult.
That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.
The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.
“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.
The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.
As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.
Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.
There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.
A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.
Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.
What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”
That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.
The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”
They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.
Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.
Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.
"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.
This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.
Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.
The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.
Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.
The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.
“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."
Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".
A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."
One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."
Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.
Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.
An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".
The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.
The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.
Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.
Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.
Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.
A child soldier.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
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Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Why Debt Won’t Spark Inflation
Missing Inflation
Debt Rubicon
Velocity Falling
The Complex Debt and Currency Dance
“Too High and Getting Wider”
They Shall Not Grow Old
Modern technology was supposed to make travel less necessary. We can meet by phone, video, and now in virtual reality. But we’re still traveling more than ever. I certainly am.
The reason is simple: Technology can’t yet replace face-to-face conversation, and especially group conversations. It is genetically hardwired in our species. We spend more time on the phone and Skype than ever but technology also makes information more complex and nuanced. Conveying it often requires a personal presence, so we fly around and talk in person.
I thought of that last week at the Strategic Investment Conference. I’ve been writing about “Japanification” of the developed world economy, explaining what I mean by that as best I can in these letters. But in talking to conference attendees, I found that I have not effectively communicated some of the nuances.
To be clear, I don’t want Japanification, nor do I think it will deliver the desired results. I believe that in the next recession…...............To Read More....
Quote of the Day
Trump Let the Dogs Out
Jed Babbin 27, 2019
The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.
The order is in two parts. First, it directs the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign and President Trump’s administration when it was new.
The second part of the order delegates to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him ................
Predictably, the people who are at greatest risk of exposure and danger of indictment erupted at Trump’s order.
For example, Obama’s CIA chief, John Brennan, told an interviewer,“I see it as a very, very serious and outrageous move on the part of Mr. Trump, once again, trampling on the statutory authorities of the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the independent intelligence agencies.”
Brennan continued: “And it’s unclear to me what Mr. Barr is actually going to do. Is he investigating a crime? Well, what’s the predication of that crime? Or he is just going to be looking for information… that Mr. Trump can just give to his defenders on the right and cherry-pick information that could be taken out of context?”...............To Read More.....
My Take - Does Brennan realize his argument is a clear demonstration of exactly what the Democrats in the House are actually doing versus what he claims the President and Barr may do? As for the President "trampling on the statutory authorities of the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the independent intelligence agencies”, that's a load of horsepucky.
The President of the United States is the nations chief executive, and those people work for him. Furthermore, the President of the United States has the authority to declassify anything he sees fit to declassify, and the hired help has no authority to override such a decision. They will comply or be fired. It's also clear these agencies are nothing more than cockroach nests of corruption. These vermin are hiding in the cracks and crevices of these agencies in order to escape the light of day, and are in need some serious "pest control" to flush them out in the open.
As for this investigation impacting the 2020 election - of course it will! Why wouldn't exposing the corruption of the Obama cabal of traitors not impact the 2020 election? The only real question is this? Who's going to start screaming - "let's make a deal" first, and who's going jail. As for Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Lynch, Rice, Hillary and Bill - I can't imagine how they're going to stay out of jail - unless of course they can squeal on Obama and throw him under the bus.
Is it any wonder why society despises government.
Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists
Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory. After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Russian “collusion”—thanks initially to efforts by Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to go after Michael Flynn and the successful attempts of the CIA and FBI to seed the bogus Steele dossier among the government elite—became a club to destroy the incoming Trump Administration..........To Read More....
Liz Cheney says Strzok-Page texts 'whole lot like a coup ... could well be treason'
As A.G. Barr and U.S. attorneys Durham and Huber investigate possible crimes committed by FBI and DOJ officials related to the 2016 election, Rep. Liz Cheney has joined President Trump in mentioning the T-word: treason. She did so on ABC Television's This Week program, speaking to a very unhappy-looking Martha Raddatz, who appeared to cry on air reporting Donald Trump's apparent victory Election Night 2016 (Raddatz disputes this).
ABC News found it newsworthy enough to tweet out video of those remarks, part of a longer interview (complete video here):............. Read more
Justin Amash, a threat to Trump 2020?
By Peter Skurkiss May 28, 2019
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) made a news splash by being the only Republican in Congress to call for the impeachment of the president. This will not be the last we hear from him.
Amash says he's a libertarian as opposed to being a libertarian-leaning Republican. Contrast him to Rand Paul, who has principle and can still work with the president on a host of issues. Not Amash. He never supported President Trump, according to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Why would Amash jeopardize his political career by being a Republican outlier in a district that went heavily for Trump in 2016? Amash says it is a matter of principle. Maybe, but there are also political calculations involved.
There's the matter of redistricting. Michigan has 14 House seats and will likely lose one when new district maps are drawn after the 2020 census. Most observers think Amash's district will be redawn to make it hard for him to win reelection. And Amash has already drawn a Trump-supporting primary challenger for 2020. Finally, Amash's donor base is drying up. .............To Read More
The abortion debate: Ultrasound technology changed everything
For those of us of a certain age who were brought up in non-religious or nominally religious homes, abortion was, when we were young, something no one spoke about. By the 1960s, we may have heard about high school friends who went to Mexico for abortions that were illegal here. Such gossip was hushed, and few of us knew what an abortion entailed or had any sense of the gravity of the procedure. Our contemporaries who had been raised in religious homes never talked about such things, so if they had an opinion on the topic, they did not share it.
By the time we reached adulthood, we were "pro-choice" because that was the thing to be. Wasn't everyone pro-choice? What did that mean? It meant ending an unwanted pregnancy the moment it was realized. No one then ever considered the possibility or option of waiting many months to make such a decision. It never entered anyone's mind that what are now called late-term abortions were even possible.............
In short, from the first ultrasound, everything changed for us life-long pro-choicers. Embryos are human beings; fetuses are babies. The shock of this truth is undeniable to anyone who has seen a baby in utero...........Yet every member of the Democratic Party is committed to not just third-trimester abortion, but post-birth infanticide. Not one of them will admit to the glaring immorality of this policy. Not one..............
The Democrats' fervent dedication to the culture of unrestricted abortion is a sign of their abject amorality. That not one of the presidential candidates has the courage to buck the party's embrace of what amounts to a genocide is an ominous warning of who and what they have become. They may think they are winning the hearts and minds of the American people, but millions of parents and grandparents have now seen ultrasounds of their own children and grandchildren, from the embryonic stage to birth. They know that what they have seen is the hand of God.........Read more
Saturday, May 25, 2019
You Can’t Be a Christian and Support Abortion
I realize that Kirsten Gillibrand likely doesn’t read the Bible and doesn’t care what it says, but if we want to know what God’s will is, we must go to the Scriptures because that is where His will for man is expressed.
Google Widens War With China On the Future
Google this week moved to restrict Huawei’s access to its Android operating system and apps. The big-tech tiff is also a major escalation in a war to determine which form of government will dominate our future.
Here’s the big-picture question behind the current cyber battles: If innovation and superiority in smart industries define global economic prowess, can a country that limits its population’s access to the Internet win?
Under President Xi, Beijing has made an aggressive push to dominate cyber. China is no longer the manufacturer of cheap, cute gizmos. Nor is it any longer merely a technology copycat, either.
Amazon innovators often nervously glance at their Chinese competitor, Alibaba, and at times borrow marketing ideas from Jack Ma’s shop, just as his Alibaba, er, borrows tricks from them.
Huawei’s chief, Ren Zhengfei, tried to allay his customers’ fears about Google’s move. His “What, me worry?” act carries some weight. Sure, being cut off from the Android system will hurt Huawei, but Ren’s company didn’t become the world’s second largest manufacturer of smartphones by mere chance. A force to reckon with, Huawei is big, advanced, and innovative.........To Read More....
Minnesota Students Assigned to Color Reverential Photos of Rep. Ilhan Omar
May 24, 2019 Sara Dogan
In her short time in Congress, freshman U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar has made a name for herself as a vehement anti-Semite. She infamously invoked age-old anti-Semitic tropes when she tweeted “It’s all about the Benjamins [$100 bills], baby,” accusing the pro-Israel organization AIPAC of donating to politicians in order to secure favorable treatment of the Jewish state.
Omar is also an ardent supporter of the Hamas-funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Now it appears that despite her highly controversial record and short career in public service, schoolchildren in Minnesota are being taught to venerate the fledgling politician.
John Hinderaker the President of the Center of the American Experiment located in Omar’s home state of Minnesota, reports on Powerline’s blog that a public elementary school in the state assigned its students to color in reverential pictures of Omar and also to write a report on the Congresswoman...........To Read More.....
California Health Care Heist
Fresh off his visit to constituents in El Salvador last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to spend $98 million on health care for illegal immigrants ages 19-26 through the state’s Medi-Cal program. Assembly Democrats want to spend $3.4 billion to cover all illegals over the age of 19, and Senate Democrats want to cover illegals 19-26, plus those beyond the age of 65. Costs are not a factor, Democrats say, because the state has a projected surplus of more than $21 billion.
Los Angeles Democrat Maria Elena Durazo, who supports the senate bill, told reporters the illegals she wants taxpayers to support “work in our hotels, they work picking the fruit and vegetables, they work as landscapers, they work in hospitals. I don’t think they should be treated differently from other Californians.” It was classic stuff the Democrats never bother to unpack........To Read More.....
What Part of ‘Leave’ Don’t They Understand?
To prove one’s progressive credentials, one could do worse than to purchase a milkshake from an ostensibly detested fast-food corporation, douse a politician deemed a threat to the cause, and applaud oneself via the gleeful approval of Burger King. This week, British progressives have underlined their helpless vacuity by doing just that.
Paul Crowther, 32, whose internet history I suspect would wilt steel, drenched Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage in milkshake because he doesn’t quite agree with Farage’s views...........
One kindred spirit, however, expressed her dismay at the act of milkshaking. Ruth Townsley, of Happy City UK, a charity which campaigns to bolster happiness and wellbeing, wasn’t too pleased with Crowther’s assault. “I prefer acid, but, milkshakes will do, for now,” she tweeted........... To Read More...
Loretta Lynch Deals Another Blow to FBI’s Cover-Up Story
The implausible justification for why James Comey’s FBI opened an investigation into the Trump campaign—a drunken encounter between a low-level campaign aide and an Australian diplomat in the spring of 2016, we’ve been told—is falling apart quickly.
And the newly-released testimony of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch just gave Comey’s cover-up story another blow.
As congressional investigators in 2017 closed in on the political origins of the unprecedented counterintelligence probe into four U.S. citizens associated with the Trump campaign, the New York Times threw the perpetrators a lifeline.
It was not the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, who in 2016 indirectly was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, that alerted Comey’s cops to the potential for chicanery between Team Trump and the Kremlin to rig the election...........The Papadopoulos trope has been regurgitated for 18 months by the press, Democrats, and NeverTrumpers as a way to cover for the fact that opposition research cultivated by Trump’s political enemies was the likely basis for the Russian election collusion probe.
But that isn’t true, according to Lynch, Comey’s boss at the time............To Read More.....
Political ‘Payback’? Try Justice
In a recent Fox News column, “New probe of the FBI: Long overdue or Trump’s payback?” Howard Kurtz remarks “…what makes me uneasy is that this carries the whiff of payback.”
Really? Kurtz has been a fairly balanced reporter admitting and even pointing out bias in the legacy media, but this piece seems like something that the neither fair nor balanced Chris Wallace would say; something like, “Well what do you expect? This is just partisan politics as usual.”
The problem, on the contrary, is precisely that it is not politics as usual.
As the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court abuses are investigated, the facts seem to show that our FBI, Justice Department, and maybe the CIA as well were weaponized by the departing Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Committee in a brazen and callous attempt to sway the 2016 presidential election.
While that may effort failed, the two long years of “Russia, Russia, Russia!” orchestrated by Democrats and the corporate leftist media may well have added to Republican losses in the 2018 midterms.............Exposing the abuse is not just “payback.”
In the coming weeks we will see much more of Democrats desperately trying to rewrite history and conceal the truth from voters. Count on the the corporate leftist media to go all in on that effort. You can trust that they will do their very best to continue avoiding their own responsibility of being a free and fair press...........To Read More.....
Friday, May 24, 2019
Democrats Toss Women Athletes Under the Bus
Democrats love to portray themselves as the party of women. The Democrats.org website proclaims proudly, “We are committed to ensuring full equality for women.”
Yet this past week, House Democrats voted unanimously to, appropriating a phrase from Joe Biden, put women back in chains. Not as slaves, but in competitive sports, giving them second class stature by tilting the playing field so far askew that most women will fall off the field and be unable to compete fairly in sports.
The US House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, “which would require schools to include male athletes who identify as transgender girls on female sports teams”, throwing biological women competing as such under the bus.
This bill amends the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect “sexual orientation and gender identity” under federal anti-discrimination law. It all sounds fine and compassionate until one looks at the practical implications.
At a humorous level in the workplace, it will allow guys who look like John Candy or John Belushi to claim they are a woman and demand to work as a Hooters server or a Playboy bunny. I’m sure that’s not the intent of the bill............Read more
My Take - This isn't about equality, it's about destroying the foundational morality of a nation, the destruction of the American identity, the destruction of the American culture, overturning the Constitution and the destruction of the United States. This groups who are "favored' my the left are nothing more than pawn to be used and discarded as they see fit.
Obama Appointees in the Communist Orbit
This week Rush Limbaugh repeated a quote from James Comey in a New York Magazine interview:
“I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”It’s hard to pin too much on that quote. Perhaps Comey was joking by calling his vote for Jimmy Carter a vote for a Communist, in mockery of his supposedly fellow Republicans.
Joking about support for Communism is not all that funny in the Obama administration. Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan actually did vote for a Communist presidential candidate. Brennan and Comey are two of the central players in the Russia Collusion Hoax.
Obama choose Communists and Marxists for the highest, most powerful positions in our land, including his closest political advisors, and his head of the CIA. These facts are not in dispute. Most are openly admitted by the people in question, as necessary damage control. Our press chooses not to report them...........Is it any surprise that collusion with Russia, according to Victor David Hanson, was a feature of the Obama presidency? ....... Read more
Racism Disguised as Altruism – The College Board Adversity Score
White liberals think black people are incapable. Controversial and politically incorrect statement, right? But it must be true if they’re proposing the insanity which is the new College Board SAT ‘Adversity Score’, a metric based not on merit, achievement and excellence, but zip codes, illegitimacy and poverty. And when I say poverty and illegitimacy I’m not denouncing those who grow up in those situations, but rather the idea of giving them an elevated status as the basis for evaluating a test score. A test crucial in determining whether they gain entrance into colleges and universities.
Socialism, as Cuba and Venezuela societies demonstrate, is unaffordable. It’s all a scam!
Everything Democrats propose or do, is a cheap scam for power, to convince Americans we should accept socialism, under the leadership of the really stupid, who believe ‘enlightened’ society will better prosper under their guidance. They propose that Marxism should trump the rule of law once set in the concert of the Constitution now, all but challenged as out of date.
The Democrats newest scam, the “Equality Act” aka: the Defend Sodom and Gomorrah act, is just another sneak attack on Christianity, the basis of our moral existence.
Anatomy of Corruption
Evidence Now Indicates FBI Spying on Trump was in fact Politically Motivated
May 13, 2019 Posted by Col Jim Waurishuk, USAF (Ret.), National Security Analyst
The Nuclear Fusion Delusion (Part Two)
If you read part one of this two-part series at America Out Loud last week, you are fully prepared to have any previous faith in the near-term future of nuclear fusion energy placed in jeopardy. Of course, nuclear fission is, and will continue to be, an important part of our energy mix. But, generating electricity via nuclear fusion has been a poorly thought out dream from the start.
Until we try new things, we can never be sure whether they will work or not. For that reason, we support the fusion experimentation that has gone on for nearly 70 years. But it is clearly time to wind it down in favor of research with better odds of a positive outcome.
“obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that [is the] size of [a] shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.”But to get a patent one does not have to prove something works, just that it has not been done before. If they go public for funding, we would invest in the down side even though we are both major league optimists.
“a lithium containing blanket must be placed around the reacting medium—an extremely hot, fully ionized gas called plasma. The neutrons produced by the fusion reaction will irradiate the lithium, breeding tritium.”
“to have any chance of economic operation that must repay capital and operational costs, the fusion power must be raised to thousands of megawatts so that total parasitic power drain is relatively small.”
“Fusion doesn’t emit harmful toxins like carbon dioxide…”
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Obsessive Democrats like Nadler and Schiff are a plague upon this nation
It began on the upper floors of the FBI, the DOJ, and the CIA, where it festered and oozed. There were a few outbreaks overseas as well — in the U.K. and perhaps a case or two in Australia. The conspirators invented a narrative and fabricated a document to support their cock-and-bull story to poison the United States.
After the 2016 election, the disease broke out throughout the Democratic Party, infecting millions of progressives who had confidently assumed that Hillary Clinton would be their president. Unable to accept their loss, they descended into a depression of their own making. Those first afflicted, James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, et al., rather than do their due diligence to stop the epidemic they had begun, doubled down and did everything they could to exacerbate the plague.
For nearly three years now, this truth-resistant cancer has eaten away at our body politic. So blighted are the Democrats in Congress that they have been unable to perform any of their duties as representatives of their constituents. The effects on the neurological health of those suffering from the malady have reached nearly catastrophic levels. These Democrats have been rendered senseless, unable to recall what they once knew, if they ever knew, of the Constitution. They refuse to show the respect for the office of the president once honored by both parties. Now this tragic illness has brought the nation to a standstill...............To Read More
Democrats Are Painted Into a Corner
By Conrad Black,
Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the offense of obstruction of justice in his four-page summary of the Mueller report: a corrupt act for corrupt purposes in contemplation of a legal proceeding.
The attorney general, William Barr, the then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and the Justice Department counsel concurred that none of the elements was present in the conduct of the president as recounted by Mr. Mueller. The dream died, except in the febrile imagination of the Democrats, who launched an unfounded attack on the attorney general’s integrity.............
But in their desperation and denial after the unimaginable victory of someone pledged to clean out the entire political class that has ruled America since the Reagan years, the Democrats paid $10 million for a false dossier on Mr. Trump, corrupted and politicized the intelligence services and the FBI, set up an echo chamber of self-verification with the national media Trump had already reviled as dishonest, and provoked the creation of a special counsel to look into Trump–Russian collusion.
The Republican congressional leaders sat on their hands to see if the leader none of them had supported would be impeached, and the Democrats and their scripted press choristers smugly carped and waited like noisy crocodiles for their victim to be reduced to inert helplessness. Guess what.
Mr. Mueller did his best, with a character assassination of the president from selected Star Chamber testimony of no legal relevance and an attempt to pull the pin on a damp grenade by citing a series of legally innocuous facts and declaring an inability to exonerate for obstruction, though collusion with Russia was hopeless....................
The Democrats are left at a crossroads: keep swinging like punch-drunk prizefighters lashing out when they hear the bell of a passing streetcar, or abandon the impeachment ship while there is still room in the lifeboats. The president has won his spurs with his own party. While they waited as mute and spineless spectators, he wrestled the Russian-collusion leopard off his back and slew it.
The porcine judiciary chairman, Jerry Nadler, a virulent enemy of Mr. Trump for 30 years, splutters with righteousness, but he has no legal right nor the decisive political support to start all over again after Mr. Mueller has come up empty-handed.............If Speaker Pelosi can’t restrain the far-left imbeciles from voting impeachment............Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. They must put up or shut up, impeach or back down. .............Their attempt at regicide has failed completely; it’s still a bit of a long shot, but they might just manage suicide, not from justified conscientious shame, but out of witless antagonism............To Read More.....
A Hard-Left Tax Agenda from Mayor Buttigieg
But that doesn’t mean I’ll be silent. I’ve written several times about Crazy Bernie’s agenda, and I’ve recently opined about shortcomings in the plans of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren (I haven’t written about Joe Biden’s agenda since he presumably represents a restoration of Obama’s knee-jerk statism).
Today let’s turn our attention to Pete Buttigieg. Known as Mayor Pete, he positions himself as a pragmatic millennial.
Notwithstanding his moderate demeanor, though, he’s been very aggressive about proposing higher taxes. And, as revealed in this report from Fox, that includes promoting new taxes as part of his unconventional campaign.
On fiscal policy, Buttigieg pushed for four distinct tax hikes when asked about the deficit, saying he favored a “fairer, which means higher” marginal income tax, a “reasonable” wealth tax “or something like that,” a financial transactions tax, and closing “corporate tax loopholes.” …Buttigieg indicated that the long odds didn’t faze him. “There’s a lot of us running for president on the Democratic side, but I think it’s safe to say I’m not like the others,” Buttigieg told Wallace, noting that seeking the presidency is inherently “audacious” — especially given that he would be the youngest person to ever become president. “I would say being a mayor in a city of any size in America right now is about as relevant as it gets,” Buttigieg added.I agree. Mayor Pete is audacious.
But not because he’s running for President with so little experience. Instead, he’s audacious because his tax agenda is so troubling.
I don’t like that he wants to increase the tax burden. Especially since it’s easy to fix budget problems with some modest spending restraint.
I also don’t like that he wants higher marginal tax rates on households and businesses. Because of exponentially increasing deadweight losses, that’s one of the most economically destructive ways of extracting revenue from the economy’s productive sector.
And I’m most worried about his advocacy of two new sources of taxation. Both proposals would do considerable damage. A financial transactions tax would wreak havoc with financial markets. And a wealth tax would dramatically reduce incentives to save and invest since it’s an explicit form of double taxation.
By the way, Mayor Pete probably supports a national energy tax. At least that’s a logical conclusion given his views on global warming. So we should add that levy to the list as well.
P.S. The only good news is that Buttigieg hasn’t (yet) embraced a value-added tax.
What's Really Behind the Impeachment Con?
The Democrats have become a cult of anti-personality.
The ‘anti’ phenomenon is not unique. Past Democrat generations had built their identity around hating Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. But the internet monetized the cult of anti-personality in a big way.
And Democrats are paying the price.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Dem House leadership have tried everything possible to stop the talk of impeachment. But nothing that she and her deputies can do has made a dent in the madness.
In a sign of pure desperation, Pelosi has begun insisting that impeachment is a Trump conspiracy.
“Trump is goading us to impeach him," she actually claimed.
The Dem House leader is hoping to dissuade her faction from its self-destructive orgy of Trump hatred by tapping into that hatred to convince them that impeaching Trump is exactly what he wants.
And it won’t work.
Impeaching Trump is the obsession of a narrow slice of the Dem base. But it’s the one that provides much of the money and the manpower. The Democrats wouldn’t have won in 2018 without the Trump-haters, but they won’t be able to win in 2020 with them. Their fanaticism proved crucial in midterm elections where Democrats traditionally suffered from low voter turnout. But in a presidential election, voter turnout will be high. And the Democrats will need to win over independent voters.
A majority of Americans opposes impeachment. But impeachment fever turned otherwise obscure Dem politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Red. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff into resistance celebrities.
While Pelosi worries about losing moderate districts, the loudest impeachment activists can’t lose.
Most of the House impeachment noise has been coming from Congressional Black Caucus, California and New York House members who are safely ensconced in districts that Republicans can’t win. The more noise they make, the more they can fundraise, build their brand and get invited on MSNBC.
They don’t risk losing their seats through a challenge from the right, but from the left.
Joe Crowley’s defeat at the hands of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a warning. Alienating Democrats or infuriating Republicans poses no risk to Democrats in safe districts. They’re worried about another prog coming out of the woodwork and impeachment is their shield against a challenger.
While Pelosi wants to hold on to her speakership by getting and keeping House Dems in swing states, the impeachment caucus is only out for the interests of its members. Before internet fundraising, political grandstanding wasn’t nearly as profitable. But Trump and the internet have changed all that.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s fundraising take went from below a million in 2016 to $6.25 million in 2018. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s finances ballooned from $1.9 million in 2016 to over $3 million in 2018. Swalwell became so confident that he even decided to run for president. Rep. Sheila Lee Jackson had her best fundraising totals since the Bush era. Rep. Maxine Waters went from raising $729,000 in 2012 to $1.59 million.
With numbers like these, why stop?
Talking about impeaching Trump provides the old Democrats in safe districts with a cash flow and protection against usurpers backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Even if it hurts their party.
The House impeachment activism also reflects the split within the Democrat electorate.
At April's end, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed that42% of adults wanted an end to the investigation. Another 33% wanted more congressional hearings.
Only 16% were ready for impeachment.
Among Democrats, only 27% were ready for impeachment. Impeachment fever was highest among "progressives". 30% of Democrat women wanted impeachment, but only 23% of men.Support for impeaching Trump was highest in the big cities that are home to the resistance and lowest in rural areas.
(Contrary to Pelosi's exercise in reverse psychology, only 1% of Trump supporters wanted Democrats to start impeachmentproceedings.)
Support for impeachment was highest in the West.
If you want to understand why California politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff are all over the news networks talking impeachment, these numbers show why.
In the 2018 exit polls, support for impeachment was highest in California followed by New York. That’s also where much of the money that swung the midterm elections came from. California donors bought elections and special elections for Democrats in red and purple states in impeachment’s name.
But the rest of the country isn’t California or New York.
Impeachment was a con. Democrats solicited fortunes from bicoastal donors while promising them something that they knew they couldn’t and wouldn’t deliver. It’s a familiar con in politics. There’s just one problem. Pelosi, Schumer and the Dem leadership need the donors they’ve conned to keep giving.
The Democrats have been caught on the hook of their own con.
Their money is telling them one thing while their electorate is telling them another. The media desperately needs an impeachment push to goose their ratings. Impeachment is the only thing that would lift CNN’s ratings out of the toilet. And if the Democrats won’t give the media what it wants, the same outlets that profited from the Mueller witch hunt will go after Pelosi for standing in their way.
The Democrats can have the money and the media, or win elections. But they can’t have all three.
That’s why Speaker Pelosi is finding new convoluted reasons to avoid an impeachment push. The crazy lies are an effort to string along donors and media outlets until the election, without alienating the independent voters that her faction needs to win, in order to defeat Trump and the Republicans.
And that will take the impeachment question off the table and validate her strategy.
But if Trump is reelected, then Pelosi will fall. The Democrats are playing it safe by backing Biden and avoiding impeachment. But if Biden becomes the nominee and loses, lefties will claim that the election was lost because the Democrat leadership chose to play it safe instead of going radical.
Trump’s reelection will crack open the con and wipe out a faded generation of Democrat leadership.
That’s why Pelosi has made this her final rodeo. If her bet pays off, she retires after taking a victory lap. If it fails, she leaves in disgrace to sip chardonnay with Hillary Clinton and blame the Russians.
But even making it to 2020 will require keeping the lid on a furious donor class and unruly House.
Speaker Pelosi has failed to control either the freshman radicals like Rep. Ocasio Cortez and Rep. Tlaib or the rest of her California delegation which won’t stop playing the impeachment card.
The Mueller report took more pressure off Pelosi than it did Trump. In its aftermath, she’s trying to channel Dem activity into endless hearings, which are always a safe bet in Washington D.C., and into going after Trump officials whose persecution won’t alienate independents or rile up Republicans.
But it won’t be enough.
The Democrats have become a party of hate. The haters have poured money and manpower into a moribund party. It’s their party now and they will settle for nothing less than destroying Trump.
Even if it destroys them too.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
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Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Cartoon of the Day
The (Seemingly) Inexorable Increase in the Burden of Federal Spending
Though I made sure to point out that the primary goal should be to limit the burden of spending. That’s because government spending, regardless of whether it’s financed by taxes or financed by borrowing, undermines prosperity by diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy.
We now have some new numbers from CBO. The number-crunching bureaucrats have put together their estimates of the latest Trump budget and that’s generated some predictable squabbling between Republicans and Democrats.
Most of the finger-pointing has focused on the (relatively trivial) fiscal impact of the Trump tax cuts.
The Wall Street Journal wisely put the focus instead on the growth of government.
You wouldn’t know it from the press coverage, but there’s some modest good news about the federal budget. The deficit is rising, but not as much as feared because tax revenues are increasing due to faster economic growth. …So why has the federal deficit increased by $145 billion this fiscal year to $531 billion? Because federal spending continued to rise rapidly—7% in the first seven months to $2.571 trillion. That’s $178 billion more than in the same period a year ago. …The media blame deficits on tax reform, but the facts show the main culprit is spending. No one in the political class wants to talk about entitlements but that’s where the money is.The WSJ’s editorial focused on short-run data.
I want to augment that analysis by looking at medium-run and long-run numbers.
We’ll start with this chart looking at what will happen over the next 10 years. As you can see, Washington is violating my Golden Rule by allowing spending to grow faster than the private economy.
As a result, the burden of federal spending, measured as a share of gross domestic product, is projected to climb over the next decade.
That’s not good news.
(For what it’s worth, since tax revenues will be growing at the same pace as spending, there won’t be any meaningful change in the deficit as a share of GDP.)
Now let’s look at the most-recent long-run data from CBO. These numbers are even more depressing because the spending burden continues to grow faster than the private sector. A lot faster.
Which is why the burden of federal spending is projected to increase from less than 21 percent of GDP today to nearly 29 percent of GDP by 2049.
That’s terrible news.
And if you include spending by state and local governments (which currently consumes more than 11 percent of economic output and also is projected to increase), the terrible news gets even worse.
Moreover, the tax burden is projected to climb as well, and that doesn’t even include any estimate of what will happen if politicians manage to impose a value-added tax, an energy tax, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax, or any of the other revenue-raising schemes under consideration in Washington.
In other words, the U.S. is on track to become just like Greece, France, and Italy.
P.S. There is an alternative to this dismal future. But can we convince politicians to adopt a spending cap and then make it work with genuine entitlement reform? I’m not holding my breath for any of that to happen.
Intellectual Poverty on the Left
By Ron Ross May 21, 2019
You may have noticed that conservatives are blessed with an impressive lineup of intellectual heavyweights. Liberals have none, literally none. A few of those on the conservative side are Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele, Jordon Peterson, and Mark Levin.
Thomas Sowell is an economist, ex-Marine, Hoover Institution scholar, and the author of over 30 books. If you’ve never read one you don’t know what you’re missing. Two of his classics areKnowledge and Decisions and The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. He is well known for his many pearls of wisdom which he terms, “random thoughts on the passing scene.” Those now can be found on Twitter.
Jordon Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Hillsdale College. He is best known for his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Several million copies have been sold. It was even a number-one bestseller in Sweden. If you read that book you will understand life better, and if you follow the rules you will be a better person. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Jordan Peterson is possibly the wisest man alive. Fortunately for the rest of us he shares his wisdom through his books, interviews, podcasts, and seminars. Peterson is despised by the left. That says much more about them than him............Liberalism is fundamentally about feelings rather than thoughts. Also the left focuses on intentions, the right focuses on results and the ways by which results are achieved..............The left also feels morally superior to any of our predecessors. Conservatives, on the other hand, possess a deep respect and reverence for the wisdom we’ve inherited from, for example, the Greeks, the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Founding Fathers.
Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Even Newton needed to know what those preceding him had discovered. On the left there’s no gratitude for the wisdom endowed to us by our forebears. Rather than gratitude there’s disdain, another reflection of their arrogance.............As long as the left holds on to its arrogance it will never match the richness of the right’s intellectual offerings. It’s another reason why being a conservative is a whole lot more fun than being a liberal..............To Read More....
Are You Sure You Want to Play Russian Roulette With Your Child's Values?
Dennis Prager May 21, 2019 @ Townhall.com
Most Americans are not aware how morally and intellectually destructive American colleges -- and, increasingly, high schools and even elementary schools -- have become. So, they spend tens of thousands after-tax dollars to send their sons and daughters to college.
But today, to send your child to college is to play Russian roulette with their values. There is a good chance your child will return from college alienated from you, from America, from Western civilization and from whatever expression of any Bible-based religion in which you raised your child. If you think this is in any way an exaggeration, here is some of what has happened on campuses in recent months:
Harvard University fired law professor Ron Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, a student residential hall, because he was one of Harvey Weinstein's lawyers. (He has since resigned from the Weinstein legal team.) Some female Harvard students said they felt "unsafe" with Sullivan as a faculty dean.
Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law, said the decision "may be the worst violation of academic freedom during my 55 year association with Harvard." Laurence Tribe, also a professor at Harvard Law, said he could not recall a "worse" blunder in his 50 years as a professor there.
Also at Harvard, all-black graduation exercises were initiated. And like most other colleges, Harvard has long allowed an all-black student dorm to exist on campus.
Other Minnesota schools already allow students "to don so-called 'identity adornments.'"
Those who still believe that one of the primary purposes of American public (and most private) schools is to Americanize students should know this is no longer the case. On the contrary, most American high schools now celebrate every identity except American identity (which the left brands a euphemism for white supremacy).
Meanwhile, at its commencement next month, the City University of New York will award an honorary doctorate of humane letters to Al Sharpton.
Among the many nonhumane activities Sharpton has been involved in was the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he fabricated a charge that four white men had raped a young black woman named Tawana Brawley.
Sharpton also runs a phony civil rights organization called the National Action Network, which has collected many millions of dollars from corporations in what essentially amounts to an extortion racket that enables those corporations to buy racial peace.
And Sharpton helped stoke the Jew-hatred that sparked black anti-Jewish riots in 1991. In a book published in 2006, Edward S. Shapiro, a Brandeis University historian, described the riot as "the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history."
In Pennsylvania, the Sabold Elementary School in Springfield announced that its principal will no longer say "God bless America" after the Pledge of Allegiance. The school district released a statement two weeks ago stating that the principal saying "God bless America" "violated the law."
And of course, college students across the country are increasingly taught, often from their first day at college, that being male and female is a choice, not a biological fact.
Other than Hillsdale and a handful of other colleges and religious colleges, the American university has become nothing more than a left-wing seminary.
Buyer beware.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is "The Rational Bible," a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
It’s Time for California Parents to Defy the Law
As followers of Jesus, we are called to submit to the laws of the land and to honor those in authority. The New Testament is very clear on this (see especially Romans 13:1-7). It is also very clear that there are exceptions to this rule, namely, when the authorities require us to disobey the Lord (see Acts 5:40-42). In that case, with respect, we say, “We must obey God rather than man” (see Acts 4:18-20; 5:29; to be perfectly clear, I’m speaking of non-violent resistance to the law.)
That time has come for parents in California.
In good conscience, they must say NO to the school authorities and YES to the Lord. It’s time to declare to the schools of California, “Quit using our children as pawns in the culture wars! Quit sexualizing our kids!”..........To Read More....