The World as I See It! Profound, Provocative and Unfailingly Accurate

By Rich Kozlovich  

Let's start out with two thoughts I think absolutely represent insightful foundational thinking.  

1. You can't reform totalitarianism. 
2. Reform isn't a viable policy regarding Iran's current government.  

Yet we have comments from former Secretary of State Pompeo making comments that are a study in antithetical thinking, and are representative the administration's current thinking,  saying: 

.........the United States does not support regime change in Iran, but rather a change in the behavior of the Iranian regime" and that "the United States supported Iranians, wherever they were, who were fighting for greater freedom, so long as they did not advocate an end to the Islamic regime itself"........"We don't want them advocating for regime change, either…We want them working on behalf of the Iranian people, ordinary Iranian citizens who want nothing more than to live their lives, to be able to take their hijab off, to be able to go to work and raise their families and worship in the way they want to worship."

The major problem with this policy is that totalitarian regimes, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, can’t be reformed. Remember “Communism with a human face”? We never saw it. Instead, we saw the Red Army crush Alexander Dubcek’s reformists in the streets of Czechoslovakia. Ditto for Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost was widely believed to signal the transformation of Soviet Communism. It didn’t, and the Soviet system wasn’t transformed until Gorbachev was removed, and his successors abolished the Communist state. Italian fascism and German Nazism were both defeated on the battlefield, and abolished, not transformed.....  

This take by Pompeo is interesting since Iran was plotting to kill him.  Then there's Vance who clearly is on board with this foolish Iran Deal. 

• The Iran Deal is Already Crumbling 
• Doesn't Anyone Read History Books Any Longer?

I have conservative friends, politically active friends, who point out Vance originally was an anti-Trumper who converted, and they simple didn’t trust that conversion, and while he’s been impressive in some scenarios, he’s not doing himself any favors with this lousy deal and his failure to disavow Tucker Carlson, who I think is either mentally disturbed or on the take….. maybe both…. and that includes Candace Owens, along with a number of well known writers, and politicos.

Disagreeing with Trump isn’t irrational. De Omnibus Dubitandum (everything is to be questioned) is the motto of science, which government grant money ended, however it’s my personal motto and is foundation thinking to the rational mind. But for these who go from being solid conservative voices to far left, anti-conservative, anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and antisemitic, Islamophalic ranters isn’t the least bit rational, and it should be troubling to sane minds.  It appears this doesn't trouble Vance's mind.

Socialism

Socialism is the foundational philosophy for fascism and communism, and most of the other leftist isms, and are embraced with irrational enthusiasm. Every leftist controlled nation fails economically, philosophically, and are absolute disasters in human rights.  As Winston Churchill noted in 1948, "Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy." 

Yet with all that history of disaster we find these young and foolish radicals, many of them college graduates and/or students have been propagandized by far left leaning university leaders and professors to embrace insanity.  All of whom suffer from preconceptualism. They reach a conclusion before doing any research, and then dismiss anything that refutes their preconceptual views, ergo, since they never see anything that refutes their preconceived notions, they must be right!  What they are is certifiable and insufferable lunatics. 

The Race Card 

Let's take for example this issue over this book on slavery, The Grimkes, by a black Tufts professor, Kerri K. Greenidge.  Initially it was a big hit and widely lauded.  That was until historians started to take a good look at her book and found it to be:

"deeply flawed" and disputing Greenidge's accounts of key episodes and the location of certain letters the book cites."'

While denying these claims against her, she fails to refute them.  Instead she cries it's those white racist men who are against her.  Okay, well, maybe that's true, but that doesn't refute their claims.  Are their claims just racist, or are they accurate?  If she's playing the tiresome race card and not refuting those claims it's reasonable to assume their claims are accurate, and even if racism is behind their actions, which is a highly dubious claim, the real issue is for her to provably refute whether or not their claims are false.  I think it's clear the publisher thinks that's the real issue also, since they've pulled her book.  

The question that needs asked and answered is this.  If she wasn't a black woman would her book have been published in the first place?  Since it's been shown publishers are now giving precedence to black and female authors, I think the answer just might be.... NO! 

Update, 7/13/26: Renowned Feminist Historian Loses Professorship as Experts Tear Apart Her So-Called Historical Finding.    Here are five of the claims against her work. 

1.  ‘Where is she getting this?’.............Boy, it became a major problem.”
2. ...lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. 
3. Her work is also riddled with factual errors. 
4. ....repeatedly omits needed endnotes.
5.  “It seems well done, except when you look at the footnotes,” Fox said, noting that he could not find the material cited using the sources Greenidge listed
6. ........ key letters she cited were held by the University of Michigan, they were not.

She 'was' a tenured professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, which prepares students to do .... nothing.... except to be radicals, and at great expense.  It's time to end this charade.  Bye, Bye, Black Studies

Update,  7/21/26 5:07 AM:   

• Trump Admin Applies Common Sense Test to Useless College Degrees - College enrollment is booming not because there’s any real need for it or any real value to it (just the opposite) but because there is the perception that college is the only viable path to a career and enough jobs are gated off behind college diplomas to create the pressure for massive student loans to finance a worthless woke degree to get a job that it turns out will pay less than anticipated. Then come the cries about student loans.  The Trump administration is using a common sense test to try and break the cycle.......The other half of this needs to be a stronger push to end the practice gating off jobs that don’t require college degrees behind those degrees… a practice that the Supreme Court at one point found to be illegal and which drives massive debt and taxpayer spending on subsidies for colleges that benefit no one except the colleges and their deans and faculty members.......

"Bias" Of Debate Moderators In Their Own Words

October 05, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Usually, I don’t waste much time watching the presidential or vice-presidential debates; but on Tuesday I watched most of the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. I applaud Vance on a skilled performance. But I particularly want to comment today on the overt hostility that Vance faced from the moderators, which is unfortunately typical of the hostility of the corporate media toward all Republican candidates.

If you watched some or all of the debate, you probably came away with a general impression of the moderators attempting to help Walz; but without a transcript it is difficult to remember specifics. Fortunately, CBS has produced a transcript of the debate. So I thought it might be informative to go through the transcript and compile some of the more absurd efforts of the moderators to give a boost to Walz. The moderators in this instance were Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS. What becomes noticeable when you do this is the extent to which the moderators insert into their questions contested, or even clearly false, Democratic Party talking points as if they were uncontested facts.

The second topic of questioning in the debate, introduced by moderator O’Donnell, was stated to be “Hurricane Helene,” which she used as a proxy for supposed climate change. Here is the text of the introductory question:

Let's turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?

O’Donnell takes her opportunity as moderator to assert as uncontested fact that “scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly.” In fact, the idea that climate change is making hurricanes worse is one of the most clearly false and thoroughly debunked of all the scary claims of the climate scam. On Thursday, Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, went on the Daily Signal podcast to give an extensive refutation of the claim. The link has both video and a transcript. From the transcript:

I’m using data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, from NASA, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disagrees with her. They all say that there’s been no increase in the big hurricanes. . . . [G]oing back to 1850, we know every single hurricane that’s made landfall since 1850, because they’re hard to miss. And land-falling hurricanes in the United States have been declining. I’ve looked at that data myself. . . . If you look at the U.N. data, go right to the source, and they show clearly that extreme or natural disasters have been declining by 10% since 2000.

As to Helene being “one of the deadliest [hurricanes] on record,” on October 2, CBS itself compiled a list of the top ten deadliest historical U.S. hurricanes (maybe in a failed attempt to support O’Donnell’s assertion). It turns out that Helene has a long way to go even to make it into the top ten. Helene’s current death toll (per AP at 9:30 tonight) is 237. The number one deadliest Hurricane was the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, with a death toll given as between 8000 and 12,000. Other hurricanes with death tolls over 1000 occurred in 2017, 1928, 2005, and 1893. Others with death tolls of 400 and up occurred in 1881, 1957, 1935, and 1856. How this proves that hurricanes are becoming more deadly due to increasing strength in recent years is a mystery to anyone who looks at the data.

At the end of about 10 minutes of the candidates responding to O’Donnell’s opening question, she closed the topic with the following statement, again asserted as if it was an uncontested fact:  

“The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” 

Neither candidate was given an opportunity to respond, the the debate moved on to other topics.

The next instance of the moderators explicitly taking Walz’s side occurred a few minutes later, when the topic was illegal immigration. During his answer on the subject, Vance had said “[I]n Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” After Walz had responded, moderator Brennan interjected:

[J]ust to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.

This interjection came despite an agreement on a ground rule that the moderators would not “fact check” the debaters. In this case, while there might be some room for disagreement, Vance had far the better side of the facts. The Haitian migrants in Springfield have almost entirely entered the country illegally, but the Biden administration has purported to grant them something called “Temporary Protected Status.” So there was nothing false about what Vance had said, and the basis on which the Haitians have at least temporary legal status is a result of dubious Biden administration executive action. When Vance tried to explain that situation, the moderators cut off his microphone.

Finally there is the idea that any difficult problem faced by the people is a “crisis” that calls for immediate intervention by the federal government to solve it. As the debate went on, that became a recurring theme. First up, it was the “housing crisis.” From Brennan:

There's a shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States and this contributes to the high housing crisis.

And then some time later, also from Brennan, it was the “childcare crisis”:

There is a childcare crisis in this country, and the United States is one of the very few developed countries in the world without a national paid leave program for new parents.

I think that the term “childcare crisis” is nothing more than a description of the fact — that has been true since the dawn of human history — that raising children is a difficult and challenging task. Fortunately in the world of CBS and other corporate media, such “crisis” and any others like it can always be promptly solved by the spending of sufficient funds from the infinite pile of loot at the disposal of the federal government.

Clearly, Trump has made a wise decision to decline to do future debates except on Fox.