August 25, 2021
___________________________________________________
? Judd Garrett – Crisis of Courage
? Conrad Black – Democrats Will Have Hard Time Papering Over This Shambles
? Dr. Stan Alex – Teleologic Transmutations Toward Totalitarianism
___________________________________________________
Crisis of Courage
By: Judd Garrett
Objectivity is the Objective
August 25, 2021
We have all seen it many times. It happens way too often. We may have even succumbed to it ourselves. A young child standing in an aisle in Target, or Walmart, or Toys-R-Us, red faced, screaming at the top of his lungs, stomping his feet, demanding the new Paw Patrol toy, or a bag of Skittles, and the parents give him what he wants to quiet him down, choosing to give into his fit of anger to avoid an embarrassing public scene. They chose the easy way out, the short-term solution.
But what happens when you reward bad behavior? You get more of it, not less. Every time that child wants something, he will throw a fit because he knows that is the best way to get his parents to give him what he wants. The parents didn’t demand that the child behaves properly and respectfully to get the toy; they didn’t require that the child performs chores to get the candy, the parents used the toy to stop him from acting out, and they will wake up one day with a child who throws fit after fit after fit. It’s not the child’s fault, it’s the parents fault. They trained him that way. When we chose quiet over peace, we become slaves to the empty drums.
Eleven days after the United States military left Afghanistan, Kabul fell to the Taliban which begs the question, why is the Taliban still in existence? We were in Afghanistan for 20 years, and the Taliban is still standing? How did that happen? Why were they not obliterated 19 years ago? The Taliban is an empirically evil group, so there is no gray area on what needed to be done to them. Did we not want the optics that comes with destroying them? But their continued existence is the colossal failure of our time in Afghanistan. And what is the result of our failure? Afghan women have lost all rights and privileges, 12-year-old girls are being raped on a regular basis by the Taliban, gays will be dropped off the highest buildings. Our fingerprints are all over every single one of those rapes and murders because we had 20 years to obliterate the Taliban, and we did not do it.
One of the main reason the Taliban still exists is that Pakistan has supported and protected them for years. So, we give Pakistan over one billion dollars every year, and they take our money and use it to fund our enemies, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Again, why do we give Pakistan any money? What have they done to deserve our generosity? They have nuclear weapons, and we are scared that they may use them. So, all they must do is saber-rattle, and we immediately pay their demands in money to “keep the peace”, no different than the parent at Toys-R-Us. We purchase the short-term peace, even though we know that money will be used to fund warring machines that will continue to destroy any chance at long-term peace.
This what happens when we chose quiet over peace, when we chose to placate the problem instead of confronting the problem. In 2015, to get Iran to agree to the politically expedient nuclear deal, the Obama administration handed the mullahs in Iran hundreds of millions of dollars. Our army flew palates stacked 10-feet high with US dollar bills to Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism, with the promise that the mullahs would agree not to develop a nuclear weapon. What happened? Iran continued with their nuclear program, developing centrifuges, and testing long range missile capabilities, knowing full well, the closer they get to becoming nuclear, the more money we will send them not to launch their missiles, and that money will be used to fund terrorism. America has become the ultimate bad parent in the world, continually rewarding bad behavior for temporary peace.
America and Americans fall for these tactics all the time, though. Black Lives Matter riots in our cities, burning, bombing, killing, and maiming, and instead of arresting the rioters we hand their organization hundreds of millions of dollars to placate them, hoping they will stop rioting. Their leaders simply buy million-dollar mansions, and they encourage more rioting. This has become a regular cottage industry for them. We reward the bad behavior, and now have become slaves to the bad behavior.
We shouldn’t be surprised that BLM and Antifa have been emboldened. We have been treating left wing domestic terrorists with kid gloves for the last 50 years. On Monday, on his way out the door, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo decided to grant clemency to domestic terrorist David Gilbert, of the Weather Underground, who was convicted of murdering two police officers and a security guard while attempting the infamous Brinks Heist in 1981.
After the bombing, Gilbert went into hiding, living with two other domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers who bombed the Pentagon, the US Capital Building and the New York City Police department. Both terrorists are close friends with former President Barack Obama and were Professors at Northwestern and University of Illinois at Chicago. So, if you are conservative, and you simply trespass at the Capital Building, you are placed in solitary confinement for 7 months, but if you are liberal, and you bomb the Capital Building, you get a cushy professorship at an elite University, and become close friends with a former Democrat President?
These are the same tactics that the “woke” are using to destroy our culture and society today. The “woke” are social and cultural terrorists. If someone says or does something they do not like, they throw a fit, threaten businesses, demand they are fired, and we comply with their irrational demands because we will always choose quiet over peace. We lack the courage to stand up for what is right over what is expedient.
Our lack of courage to stand against the bad actors and stand up for what is right has brought us to this point in time. So, what if Pakistan has nuclear weapons, they still should have to behave properly without us paying them off. We have thousands of nuclear weapons ourselves. We should never give Pakistan another dime, point a hundred nuclear weapons at them, and tell them to shut up and behave. You are risking a nuclear war, some will argue. What are we risking by paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan who funds the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or to Iran, the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world, or to Black Lives Matter, the leading domestic terrorist organization in our country?
If you haven’t noticed, the world is falling apart or being torn apart. Our country is disintegrating before our eyes. Why? Because America in its wealth and arrogance has decided to pay people and groups handsomely for their bad behavior, thinking it will stop their bad behavior. And like the child at Target, it shuts them up temporarily until they want something else, and then they behave badly again, until we reward them again, and the vicious cycle continues until civil society is destroyed.
___________________________________________________
Democrats Will Have Hard Time Papering Over This Shambles with Trump Hate
By:CONRAD BLACK,
August 25, 2021
It might seem that there is little to be added to what the whole world has witnessed viewing the unutterable shambles of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. But that would be an illusion. The story of the perilous departure from Afghanistan of NATO forces and civilians and their Afghan collaborators who are now in mortal danger is obviously a matter of great suspense.
The United States could certainly tell the Taliban government of Afghanistan that if all those whom the Western powers wished to evacuate were not allowed to leave it would be an act of war. If there were the will to act on that ultimatum, it would be successful.
Under the circumstances, though, the credibility of such a threat would probably have to be proved by acting on it. As some commentators have mentioned, this would be morally justified and is morally required, and the administration would simply have to accept that it has bungled the withdrawal and must execute an immediate but brief return. The Biden Administration, after seven months, has shown no competence whatever in foreign or national security policy.
A moron would know that when evacuation is intended, the vulnerable, the civilians, the dependents, and the local supporters should all be evacuated under cover of the military and the armed forces should leave last in an orderly manner and in a well-covered and protected retreat.
The United States had the military capability to do this and the explanation for not doing it, from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has been that everyone in Afghanistan and the whole world had plenty of notice that the Americans were leaving. He should have been fired within one minute of uttering that statement.
President Biden, in his address August 16, in his midweek interview with George Stephanopoulos, and in his address on Friday, uttered a series of egregious falsehoods that were quickly exposed. He said there was no expression of discontent from America’s allies. For the first time in history, references to an American president in the British Parliament were met with shouts of “shame.”
When Thomas Tugendhat, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee and a retired colonel who served with distinction in Afghanistan and was decorated by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division for combat bravery, said that it was shameful for a commander-in-chief who has not served under his own colors to mock the sacrifice of men who have, all parties in the British House agreed. No American president has been so severely or — unfortunately — deservedly insulted.
No American, consuming only mainstream media narratives, would realize that there were three times as many allied forces from assorted NATO countries in Afghanistan as there were Americans, or that they were not consulted before the Americans abruptly departed and brought the roof down on all of them.
The Western alliance, as former President Trump emphasized, has its problems. Most of the members were not pulling their weight. Germany, the strongest NATO country after the United States, has almost disarmed and has effectively made itself a Russian energy satellite through the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. But they did not deserve this.
After this horrifying fiasco, where the Americans scuttled and turned tail and left their European allies and Canada to fend for themselves, the NATO members have already indicated that they are in no mood to follow this administration anywhere. No one can blame them.
Mr. Biden said on Friday that the United States was not sending armored vehicles to collect its citizens and bring them to Kabul airport as the British and French were doing because, he explained, Americans were not being stopped by Taliban checkpoints. Half an hour later, the inarticulate Pentagon spokesman John Kirby squarely contradicted his commander-in-chief, and the official explanation was changed to advise Americans not to try to reach the airport because of the danger.
Mr. Biden said the Afghans wouldn’t fight so they weren’t worth the risk of American lives; but 50,000 Afghan soldiers and scores of thousands of civilians have died in this war. No Americans have died in Afghanistan in 18 months (in stark contrast to the soaring crime rates in almost all American cities).
As Mr. Tugendhat told the House of Commons, it is not for the commander-in-chief of this cowardly, shameful, and disastrous flight from American national responsibilities, who has never served in his own armed forces, to disparage those who have died in allied forces for a cause that he has abandoned and doomed.
The one potentially positive aspect of this horrible debacle has been the unarguable revelation that the president is not up to his job.
I would certainly wish to give him the benefit of the excuse of declining mental and physical powers, although I never imagined that even at the height of his powers the defamer of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, the candidate who cribbed a campaign message from a twice-defeated leader of Britain’s Labor Party, and a man who cannot tell the truth even about his own university background or most other things, could serve successfully in such a great office.
The powers that be in the Democratic Party plucked him out of the ditch where the primary voters had left him and put him in as president to execute Senator Bernie Sanders’ socialist platform. The administration has been a pantomime horse with the front legs and the back attached to different torsos.
It has been a catastrophic failure in every field: foreign and defense policy, illegal immigration, crime, inflation, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the Democrats’ chief ally in getting elected, both through the incitement of public hysteria and as the excuse in the selective rigging of voting and vote-counting rules.
In the consistency of its failures and its evident incapacity to govern effectively, this has been the most catastrophic presidency in American history. Though it must be admitted that at this point the consequences of the errors of the Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan administrations, which brought on the Civil War, and of the Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover administrations, which brought on the Great Depression and facilitated the outbreak of World War II, were more damaging than the Biden Administration’s blunders are likely to be — if it ends soon.
Messrs. Biden and Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan should all resign at once, after Biden has fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley. They are jointly responsible for the most horrible foreign policy fiasco in American history, and, to compound matters, they have all lied to the public and to Congress about it.
President Obama said Mr. Sullivan is “wicked smart.” He may have been half right. General Milley should have been court-martialed for denouncing President Trump’s walk to the church of the presidents after the attempted destruction of it by arson in June 2020, in which General Milley participated.
The Obama-elevated senior officer corps of the U.S. armed forces now believes that white racism and climate change are the principal obstacles to U.S. national security. Any officer above one star who believes that bunk should be sacked, and no retiring officer should be allowed near a corporate boardroom in a defense-related industry for five years after leaving the service.
The woke movement conducted by Presidents Biden and Obama has rotted and corroded most of the American state following the American academy and the national political media — they have atrophied in choreographed synchronization.
If this horrible fiasco contributes to the radical change of course necessary in American political society, it will be worth it — though it is cruelly unjust that the population of Afghanistan should pay for it. Americans might also wish to reflect on the fact that having smashed up Iraq and helped to foment the disintegration of Syria and Yemen and now, after attempting and having failed to drag Afghanistan into the 21st century, some level of self-criticism is justified.
The motives were positive, but no one can say that any of those countries is in better condition today because of the American-led interventions there. Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions displaced, largely because of American interventions in the Middle East.
The United States should show some awareness of what it has done, rather than simply cursing the Afghans for not fighting harder after they’ve been abandoned by their Great American champions. America desperately needs new people, new policies, and new public attitudes.
American students are taught to hate their country, and police are defunded and restrained to assure higher crime rates, while over-decorated military officers fret about wokeness and the climate. It all must stop and back up. At least the Democrats will not be able to paper over these shambles with more Trump-hate. That ship sailed and has sunk.
___________________________________________________
Teleologic Transmutations Toward Totalitarianism
Or
How the left is transforming our nation toward Marxism
By: Dr. Stan Alex
fordrstan@yahoo.com
August 25, 2021
People have said that if you tell a lie often enough people will eventually believe it, but that does not make it the truth. Can that tactic work? Sometimes, especially if the audience does not have a great fund of knowledge on the issue or simply wants to believe it, whereupon it can become dogma. But if you debate an issue the debate winner should be the one who can clarify all the intricacies and the structure of the premises underpinning any conclusion and refute alternative theories. An issue of point [or sore spot for me] is the claim that the US has one of the poorest outcomes in infant mortality of Western Countries; and therefore, there is a rationale the government to take control over or fundamentally change our health care system – and thereby control up to 1/6 of our government’s budget.
The AMA did a study here, at my request, and found that different countries define infant mortality employing different measures: for some the newborn just must leave labor and delivery alive and for others the baby must survive outside of the hospital for a specified period of time, like up to the first birthday. We use the tougher criterion. So previously we compared apples and oranges. More importantly, what was found was that US obstetrical care and neonatal services are presented with more low and very low birthweight infants than other comparable countries. The root cause was determined to be a cultural issue rather than medical, i.e., not in health care delivery itself. In fact, we do as well or better with survival rates with those very low birthweight presentations than do other comparable countries. But you won’t likely hear that narrative: it doesn’t help certain politicians’ agendas. In this scenario some have been conveniently using a presumptive outcome or a preconception to substitute for causality.
Teleology is a mechanism for substituting popular myths, ‘folklore,’ partial truths, wishful thinking, and political or establishment ‘opinion’ in place of evidence-based research. Traditionally it has been applied to things like studies of evolution, where people are inclined to think that there is a purpose or a directive principle overriding the scientific analysis. In elucidating the Darwinian Model of Evolution (DME), teleologic thinking serves as an “obstacle” to the natural selection model [E. N. Meinardi, Univ Buenos Aires, Oct 2010]. An “obstacle” in this context represents an “established way of thinking that resists change due to its explanatory power.” This is what the younger generation is currently being spoon-fed by academia regarding issues like systemic racism. However, clarification of teleologic thinking and defining it as an obstacle could become a powerful tool for interventions aimed at enhancing or enlightening the recipients thinking. Clearly, this could be a hard sell in that ‘academia’ and left-wing teachers’ unions have deep roots which control the narratives so thoroughly in this country (a brain washing of sorts?) that it’s a high hurdle to overcome. How does this play out in the racism issue?
One of the most important social changes unfolding in the United States in the past half century has been the decline in the institution of marriage [per Dawne Mouzon, Rutgers University, Oct 2015], a decline that is especially steep in Black families. In the 1960s, roughly 74% of White partners were married and this dropped to 56%, a big drop but not bad compared to the plummeting rate amongst Blacks which dropped from 61% to 32% from being the highest in the 1940s [perhaps this is this what is meant by white supremacy?]. Blacks also get divorced more often and remarry less frequently than Whites, but those unwed mothers continue to foster more babies: by 2011, 83% of Black babies were born into out-of-wedlock families. People on the left argue that its ‘due to social deprivation (such that) it’s hard for Black women to find suitable partners,’ but isn’t that an inevitable consequence of such a (putatively toxic) social cycle? Isn’t that just a form of circular logic? And note, the thread for this goes back to Africa where the matriarchal single parent family (SPF) was common (See: African-American Family Structure, Wikipedia). Is that a problem? Answer: you bet!
In the 1970s, the (now tarnished) actor and author, Bill Cosby astutely noted that when you raise a child in a father-less family “it’s a concern” but to have a “whole neighborhood of father-less children is a catastrophe.” While Cosby had observed this first-hand, the most important statistical confirmation of father-less family dysfunction had come in 1964 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assist Secretary of Labor, while garnering data for a speech at Howard University for President Lyndon B Johnson. What he found was initially confusing then stunning: for decades the rates of unemployment and applications for welfare had risen and fallen in unison. Then in the early 1960s, as unemployment fell, applications for welfare inexplicably shot up. The lines crossed (scissored). The resultant conclusion: there was (1) an entrenched transgenerational cycle of poverty, which was largely Black, which was (2) intertwined with loss of the nuclear family – again amongst Blacks. This became known as “Moynihan’s Scissors.” Please check out: U-Tube – Moynihan’s Scissors – The importance of the two-parent family.
Moynihan, later US Senator (D-NY), did not know how to address this issue. The government is not good at changing social mores. Governmental monies spent in support of SPFs, such as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) plus the now pending “infrastructure bills” of 2021, are actually toxic in that they promote an ingrained structural anomaly, where the government becomes the “pseudo father.”
Marriage has historically provided many benefits. Individuals who are married enjoy better mental and physical health; have more social ties and higher income; accumulate more wealth; and raise children who do better in terms of health and social outcomes than the children of unmarried parents. Despite this, some analysts find that Black women place little value on marriage, and pass along such views to the ensuing generations. No, it doesn’t “take a village” to raise a child, but a nuclear family would certainly help.
So, Bill Cosby was prescient: the neighborhood of Black SPFs, as defined by him and Senator Moynihan, often did became a catastrophe and, in turn, became associated by a ‘tangle of pathology’ which included:
- Nearly 6/10 children from such SPFs were at or near the poverty level,
- School drop-out or failure to attain a GED rate was twice as high in such poverty zones,
- 75% of children/adolescents in chemical dependent units were from a SPF,
- Over 50% of all incarcerations for criminal acts came from a SPF,
- 63% of suicides are from such a SPF,
- 75% of pregnancies – including adolescents – involve SPF.
Obviously, single mothers were not so likely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in a positive way. And if Sexual Liberation made this a problem, Black Pride and Feminism made it impossible.
But Moynihan’s exposé was hit back hard and with outrage by Washington, the Civil Rights leaders, academicians, and the civil servants of the ‘permanent government.’ They proclaimed this was a case of “Blaming the victim.” The NY Times wrote an opposition series, “Class Matters,” where they completely ignored Moynihan’s observations from his seminal report, The Negro Family, a Time for National Action.
According to Kay Hymowitz [Manhattan institute’s City Journal, 2005] several ‘think-tank’ persons noted that welfare policies of the 1960s, not racism or lack of jobs or the legacy of slavery was the cause of inner-city dysfunction and went further to profile the ‘‘welfare mother as the symbol of the ghetto’s ills.” Welfare money in particular “is a disincentive for marriage and is now turning us into a nation of separate but unequal families (Charles Murray) – one thriving and intact, the other struggling and broke.” Further these pundits proclaimed that “the poor would have to change their behavior instead of waiting for Washington to end poverty.” But the left was having none of this, although one of their own, William J Wilson, urged that (for any alternative theory), “…liberals have to propose thoughtful explanations for the rise in inner-city dislocations.”
No alternative solutions were forthcoming. In fact, the ‘Black Family’ became a growth industry’ inside academe, the foundations and government. Some posited that the nuclear family was really a “toxic White hang-up,” anyway. And no one asked what the nuclear family did or how it prepared children for a modern economy. During this time instead of looking for solutions there became a radical delegitimization of the nuclear family. This is certainly not looking for the root cause of Ghetto dysfunction. The result, ironically, was a galvanizing of religious conservatives around “family values.” At any rate, by failing to define the problem accurately, advocates were in no position to find a solution and the Ghetto underclass goes on, and we continue to pay the price.
So, for the past 57 years we should have known that there was no systemic racism, but those who control the flow of information have dodged the root cause and used a teleologic approach to the inter-city dystrophies, that is, something (a narrative) that suits their defined goal, while, in the meantime, those dystrophies have led to more crime, police confrontations and shootings, thereby inducing riots and lootings and mob violence. And the cause? We are told “White privilege.” Yeah right! But the left has been quite effective at making Caucasians feel the “White guilt.” And making Blacks fear the police. Remember about telling a lie often enough makes it seem like the truth? Well, “here we go again” Ronald Reagan would likely remark.
That does not apply to those of us who have been around since WW-II and have seen the lot of Black families improve to where the great majority were out of poverty, only to devolve to what appeared to be a mass reversal after the 1960s. And as the left imports Critical Race Theory (CRT), we need to be able to fight back, which can only be done by taking charge of the narrative. Right now, the “obstacle” is leftism or, more specifically, the left-wing press and academia, which is slowly indoctrinating this country with the underpinnings of Marxism (See Mark Levin’s NY Times’ Best-seller: American Marxism – for more in-depth background research on this topic), which will lead to authoritarianism and, potentially,totalitarianism. If you have children or grandchildren, be sure to give them a good dose of true American History and warn them of their school’s teleologic methodologies.
CONCLUSION: Teleologic thinking in relation to humans is a fundamental characteristic of our psyche. The elucidation of its attendant “obstacle” (flaw) to open-mindedness can be a powerful framework for analyzing the implication of certain thought processes and opinions. People need to be cognizant of the existence of such ways of thinking: how it operates, how to distinguish it and how to overcome it. This may not be that simple since the thought process of so many Americans has been turned off or shut down. They simply don’t want to get involved. But without that awareness, the price could be severe.
We are now at a turning point in history, somewhat like the American Civil War in the 1860s. Let’s look at the current predicament, its allegations and cast of characters. On one side is most of the America people (Caucasians + Asian-Americans), who have been accused of illegal racism, resulting in job suppression causing poverty; Black subjugation to limited residential areas (bondage); providing poor education with attendant lack of top-level achievement; promoting police brutality and thereby engendering street hoodlums, rioting, looting, crimes and indiscriminate arrests; a ferreting out of successful Black males to White women, ensuring Black women to remain single and their children fatherless, all together resulting in Black victimology and a perennial subclass. These are clearly ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ The penalty is: monetary (reparations), humility, re-education camps (CRT) and Socialism, leading to its accompanying totalitarianism. In other words, we could lose the ‘land of the free.’
The Prosecutors are the Civil Rights Leaders, abetted by academia, the Left-wing press and the “Iron Triangle” (bureaucracies, congressional committees, and special interest groups). The Judge – to be determined; and the Jury is y’all, the conscience of the American People.
So, we will need an antidote to this teleologic processing. You just had a tutorial on the actual root cause of the Black community’s ‘failure to thrive.’ We used to simply say, regards their promoters and facilitators, “They have drunk the Kool Aid.” But perhaps we need to review the Jonestown Massacre and the death of their communal People’s Temple in greater detail – to add a little spike to their Kool Aid, helping to awaken their preoccupied neuronal receptors. In the meantime, our country is in jeopardy of tilting so far left that there might be little chance of returning to the ‘pre-CRT’ version, the one that has served so well, for over 240 years. Our founders dedicated their lives; their personal treasures and their sacred honor for a country of liberty and freedom (not equality) and Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and previous generations, our white ancestors, have fought to end slavery and passed Civil Rights legislation. We should not forsake their efforts and hardships and sacrifices for a teleologic phantom, like systemic racism and the potential for totalitarianism.
Stanley J Alexander, M.D., MS., FACP, FACR
Clinical Professor of Medicine/Rheumatology (Ret), USC/Keck School of Medicine ___________________________________________________
Illegitimi non carborundum
ACPeds Challenges HHS Gender Transition MandateNew lawsuit challenges HHS rule that forces doctors to perform controversial gender transition procedures on children
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), the Catholic Medical Association (CMA), and an OB-GYN doctor who specializes in the care of adolescents are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys in a lawsuit challenging a Biden administration mandate that requires doctors to perform gender transition procedures on any patient, including a child, even if the procedure violates a doctor’s medical judgment or religious beliefs.
Help us get the message out! 
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
You must be logged in to post a comment.