Category Archives: culture

The Biden Coverup

Posted on by
Reply

What’s to be done about those who participated in the coverup? How do we hold them accountable—and by accountable, I mean how do we see them suitably and publicly punished?

The press’ complicity in the coverup is well known by all of us not already in thrall to their writings and television natterings. Most of us have learned to take their words skeptically, and we’ve moved on to other news and commentary sources, newer and perhaps no more trustworthy, but that’s yet to be demonstrated.

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians, though—they’re another matter. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the only Party member willing to expose the emperor was the back bencher Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who openly campaigned for President late in Party’s primary Potemkin contest on the premise that Biden wasn’t up to another four years either physically or mentally. Party castigated him as a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. Then, in a remarkable—and instructive—demonstration of Party’s dedication to democratic elections and to democracy of any form, Party canceled altogether their sham primary and pronounced by fiat Kamala Harris its candidate.

Party politicians other than Phillips contributed to the coverup of Biden’s growing mental incompetence either directly through their pronouncements of his fitness or indirectly through their studied silence on Biden’s capacities.

In sum, Party politicians openly lied to us citizens, and as the WSJ also put it, they denied the American people a better presidential choice, or at least in the eyes of some 77 million of us, a better alternative candidate for the office. They denied even their own voters the opportunity to choose a better alternative.

Party and Party politicians lied to all of us about so foundational a matter as who will lead our nation in its time of peril, who will exercise American influence around the world on matters central to our economic and political national security.

If Party politicians are willing to lie to us—have lied to us—about such a basic matter, what else will they lie to us about if reelected to their existing offices, or worse, if reelected to majorities in the House and Senate and in the White House?

“here’s an idea”

Posted on by
Reply

Allison Leigh Cowan, late of The New York Times had one concerning college admissions and how to weed out lawbreakers. Do some actual prescreening.

Start by asking applicants to pledge that they will be respectful, law-abiding members of the community if admitted. Assuming no one quibbles with that minimal threshold, delve a bit further using moral-reasoning prompts drawn from recent headlines. Applicants can reply with a simple “yes” or “no,” or submit longer answers:

      • Is it ever justified to spit on another human being?
      • Is it ever justified to pull a fire alarm in a crowded auditorium to protest a speaker some find offensive?
      • Is it ever justified to mar public spaces with hard-to-remove graffiti? Should perpetrators pay to clean it up?
      • Is it ever justified for a private individual to assassinate another private individual?
      • Is it ever justified to burn a Quran? What about destroying a mezuza on someone’s door?
      • Is it ever justified to restrain custodians or other bystanders as part of a protest?
      • Is it ever justified to set fire to the homes of authority figures?

These are, as Cowan acknowledges, navel-gazing questions, but diligent reviews of the answers can serve as useful prescreening.

Here’s another idea: in addition to that prescreening, a good idea in concept but as with all prescreening, it’s imperfect, take the follow-on step: those inclined to foment chaos or who change and become prone, should be expelled promptly and with prejudice when they do start to foment chaos, and those who broke laws in the doing should be criminally prosecuted, equally promptly.

I Want My…Maypo

Posted on by
Reply

Late in the Biden administration, as the lede notes,

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

After he was confirmed to the office, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin

called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

Naturally, the NGOs are suing, because they want their filch fruits restored. Just to be sure, they’re also suing Citibank, whose since the freezing has been nothing but obeying a government directive, which they have to do unless and until a court overturns the directive.

Never mind that the staffers expressed, in writing as part of their reviews of the grants during the application process, concerns about excessive-seeming pay for NGO executives; NGOs’ cost claims that had no explanation, much less rationale, for them; or apparent lack of oversight planning.

It’s illustrative of these NGOs’ entitlement mentality that they think they should have the money just because they want it. It’s also one more reason for the necessity of taking several machetes to the jungle undergrowth of Federal government spending.

Another Reason…

Posted on by
Reply

…we can’t trust those of the Left, and why even the Left can’t have nice things. This one is the smear campaign against the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senator from Pennsylvania.

It began with a once-trustworthy senior aid to John Fetterman, Adam Jentleson, who sent a letter to Fetterman’s doctor after Fetterman’s recovery from his stroke was readily apparent. Jentleson wrote that

the senator was suffering from “conspiratorial thinking” and “megalomania” while experiencing “high highs and low lows.” In “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues,” Mr Fetterman was “lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.” Mr Jentleson also said the senator was “preoccupied” with Twitter and driving “recklessly.”

Jentleson’s attack is only the most overt and blunt instance. There is a constant susurration behind closed doors and behind certain backs of concerns—carefully couched as being for Fetterman’s declining welfare, of course—for his mental state.

Fetterman’s mental disability? his deviation from the Left’s orthodoxy: he’s more moderate than the Left thought he would be and want him to be. He’s no radical, extreme Leftist firebrand thrower.

I was bothered, in the beginning, by Fetterman’s medical fitness for office following his stroke. But once he became able to communicate with the aid of a laptop translator so he could read what people were saying rather than having to process audio, the center of his stroke’s damage, it became clear that his mind was sound, and regardless of what anyone might think (anyone other than those of the Left) of his politics, he was, and is, quite rational. He no longer needs his laptop for this purpose, and his speaking difficulties, also typical of strokes, have long since nearly fully abated, too, outcomes increasingly typical of stroke rehab.

The smear and its rationale are reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s persecution, and consignment to its gulag, of those who disagreed with the Communist Party: such disagreement was ipso facto proof of their insanity and of the necessity of sequestering them away from “normal” society.

Five Thoughts on Five Takeaways

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Harvard University President Alan Garber and published “Five Takeaways.” I have five thoughts….

Students at Harvard no longer feel comfortable disagreeing
Upon returning to Harvard as provost in 2011, Garber noticed the spirit of healthy disagreement from his undergraduate days had disappeared. It is something he said concerns him and his colleagues. “Students today find it much harder to have conversations with one another about difficult subjects, particularly with someone they don’t know well with whom they might disagree,” Garber said. “And to me that is a big loss.”

And yet, in all those years he’s chosen to do nothing substantive about any of that. It’s only necessary to see the anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas terrorist physical attacks on Jewish students, protest “encampments” on University quadrangles with associated interference with Jewish students trying to get to class, and above all, his failure to address in any meaningful way those perpetrators and their faculty enablers and encouragers—expulsion of all of the student misbehavers and firing of those misbehaving faculty. He’s done a very few token expulsions while explicitly excusing the vast majority of campers from consequence, and he’s spoken stern words to some of his faculty and masqueraded those as serious moves.

The university wants more diverse viewpoints on its faculty
Garber knows the university has a perception problem with the general public…. …Garber said, “I really understand the resentment that people can feel when they think their problems are not taken seriously enough. That’s something we absolutely must address.”
… “Part of what we need to do is make sure that in the classroom and in other settings, we promote the idea that it doesn’t matter what your personal views are, you need to teach in a way that is fair to multiple points of view,” he said. “And furthermore, you need to enable students to speak up when they have a perspective that is different from the mainstream.”

It’s not perception, it’s fact; this is more Garber downplaying. The rest is empty words. He’s done no substantive hiring, and the nakedly biased teaching and limits on students’ ability to speak differing viewpoints and opinions remain—as he confessed just above.

Antisemitism at Harvard predates Oct. 7, 2023
Garber said he had hints that Harvard had an antisemitism problem but that it hit home for him when he met with Jewish students just after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Two lengthy reports Harvard put out last month detailed the history of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, acknowledging longstanding problems.

Here, too, despite knowing of the antisemitic bigots present at Harvard, he’s chosen to do nothing about them. The two “reports” are nothing more than his administration’s moral equivalence sewage, downplaying the real violence perpetrated on Jewish students while exaggerating anti-Muslim bigotry, which is both rare and nonviolent.

Columbia’s actions didn’t influence Harvard’s
Saying that he doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of Columbia’s negotiations, he said: “What I have heard from other people in colleges and universities is that Columbia had still not resolved their issues with the federal government after many weeks of negotiations.[“]

Here he is, relying on hearsay rather than direct knowledge that would come from directly asking the Columbia President. On the other hand, neither has Harvard resolved its issues. His suit is illustrative of his refusal to try.

More is at stake than winning a lawsuit
Federal funding “is not a gift,” [Garber] said, but money that Harvard uses to fulfill national scientific and other priorities.

It is, absolutely, a gift. The government has no obligation to send our taxpayer dollars to the school, and the school has no intrinsic right to it. Our taxpayer dollars are a government donation, nothing more and nothing less. Garber’s claim that Harvard uses the money for national purposes is wholly irrelevant to that fundamental fact; his claim is just more cynical obfuscation.