Middle East and Other Musings: THE FIRST VIDEO IS A MUST WATCH. BEST I EVER POSTED. LOT OF GOOD MEAT ON THE BONE MEMO.

ONE OF THE GREATEST VIDEOS I HAVE EVER WATCHED AND/OR POSTED!!!!!!!

https://youtu.be/Q8JwXE53azs

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The kids decided The Wizard Of Oz was the Halloween theme this year. I portrayed a scary, disheveled Frank Morgan .

It was just a matter of time for Greta to show her true stripes. What a sick, sick girl

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I would like to apologize to anyone who I have NOT offended.

Please be patient.

I'll get around to you shortly

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BAD LANQUAGE, GOOD MESSAGE!

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Thank Ye Very Much

By Bret Stephens

Dear Kanye West, or “Ye”:

We’ve never met and I hope we never will.Still, I’d like to express a sort of gratitude. With a few outbursts in a few days — you threatened in a tweet this month to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE” and it’s been downhill from there — you’ve probably done more to raise public awareness about the persistence, prevalence and nature of antisemitism than any other recent event.

It’s remarkable how long it took us to get here. For 2020, the F.B.I. reports that Jews, who constitute about 2.4 percent of the total adult population in the United States, were on the receiving end of 54.9 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes. On many nights in New York City, Hasidic or Orthodox Jews are being shoved, harangued and beaten.]So far, this has been one of the most underreported stories in the country — itself a telling indicator in an era that is otherwise hyper-attuned to prejudice and hate.

At times, the reporting has all but accused Jews of bringing the violence on themselves, with lengthy stories about allegedly pushy Jewish neighbors or rapacious Jewish landlords. At other times — such as after the attack in January on a Texas synagogue by a British Muslim man who had traveled 4,800 miles to get there — reporters seem to have gone out of their way to find non-antisemitic motives for nakedly antisemitic attacks.

More often, attacks on Jews are treated as regrettable yet somehow understandable expressions of anger at Israel. In May 2021, Jewish diners at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles were physically assaulted by a member of a group that, according to a witness, was chanting “Death to Jews” and “Free Palestine.” A KABC report of the event was headlined, in part: “Mideast tensions lead to L.A. fight.”

To suggest that “Mideast tensions” led to a “fight” is to obscure both the nature and motive of the assault. Imagine the absurdity of a headline that read: “High Levels of Crime in Minority Neighborhood Lead Police Officer to Kneel on Man’s Neck for Eight Minutes.”Actually, Ye, you probably can imagine it, since you’ve also blamed George Floyd for his own death. But it’s worth pondering the extent to which, in American culture today, Jews are excluded from inclusion and included in the excluded. That is, the Jewish people’s status as an oft-persecuted minority goes increasingly unrecognized, while the Jewish people’s position as a legitimate target for contempt and ostracism is becoming increasingly accepted.

Take Hollywood, where the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened its doors last year with a panel dedicated to “Creating a More Inclusive Museum.” Yet, as The Times’s Adam Nagourney reported in March, “Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer” — the Jews who essentially founded the modern movie industry. (After an outcry, the museum now plans a permanent exhibition for them.)

Or take the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where nine student groups announced in August that they would not host any speakers who support Zionism, a move that is tantamount to the exclusion of most Jews. In an astonishing defense, law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky noted that the bylaw, which he acknowledged was “discriminatory,” had been adopted by only “a handful of student groups” and had not yet been acted upon — as if Berkeley or any other public law school would tolerate for one instant a single student group that announced its intention to exclude, say, a speaker who believes in trans rights.

Or take Israel itself. Is the Jewish state so uniquely evil that, alone among 193 U.N. member states, it has no moral right to exist? Or is it the unique evil of antisemitism that directs this kind of obsessive hatred at one state only — while generally ignoring or downplaying the endless depredations of regimes in, say, Caracas, Ankara, Havana and Tehran.

These are surely not the things you had in mind when you decided to go “death con 3” on my people. Nor were they necessarily top-of-mind for many of the celebrities who denounced you in tweets and Instagram posts. But your bigotry is as good a place as any to begin to have an honest conversation about antisemitism — one that will hopefully last longer than your own career’s self-destruction.

Honest would be to acknowledge that antisemitism is as much a left-wing phenomenon as it is a right-wing one. Honest would be coming to grips with the fact — as Henry Louis Gates Jr. did in these pages in 1992 — that antisemitism infects corners of Black politics as much as it infects the politics of white supremacy. Honest would be holding to account people who were complicit in your antisemitism — such as Tucker Carlson, who praised your “bold” beliefs while editing out your antisemitic remarks from his interview with you. Honest would be coming to terms with the extent to which anti-Zionism has become the antisemitism of our day, echoing the same sordid conspiratorial tropes about Jews as swindlers and impostors.

Honest would also be admitting that you speak for more people than many Americans would have cared to admit. For that, but only that, you deserve thanks.

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It takes a certain type of fanatic to be drawn to fads. America seems to be full of them. They must be stopped.

Today's Marxist Leftists Want to Trap Minorities in Permanent Victimhood

And

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/infantilization-of-the-apocalypse

And

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-great-reset-is-real-and-wrecking

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The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics

What's driving them? And how can they be defeated?

By Michael Shellenberger

“The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Over the last few weeks, climate activists in Britain have blocked highways (because cars emit carbon dioxide), poured milk onto the floors of supermarkets (because livestock emits methane), and thrown tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” (because climate change is more important than art. Or something). The activists are a kind of reboot of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate protests in the UK in the fall of 2019.

People in the UK are at risk of dying from natural gas shortages. Still, the climate activists with “Just Stop Oil” think it’s outrageous that their government is desperately trying to produce more natural gas for its people. But without more natural gas, there could be three-hour-long blackouts, which threaten the operation of medical equipment, and thus the lives of vulnerable people.

The various media stunts appeared authentically grassroots but were, in fact, financed by a $1 million grant from a philanthropic group called Climate Emergency Fund, which is funded by their heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller oil fortunes, and founded in 2019. The Board of Directors consists of a who’s-who of climate alarmism including “Don’t Look Up!” film director, Adam McKay, who donated $4 million, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben, and New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells. The Fund and their grantees have been cheered on by the Secretary General of the United Nations and much of the mainstream media.

A portion of the web page of Climate Emergency Fund.

In a series of recent articles I have argued that what lies behind climate fanaticism and narcissism is an apocalyptic religion born from nihilism. The power of science to explain humankind’s place in the universe (e.g., the big bang, evolution by natural selection) resulted in a dominant narrative coming out of society’s elite institutions for over 100 years that human life has no inherent meaning or purpose (nihilism). We’re just animals like any other.

This depressing story has led the ostensibly secular elite, which are educated and indoctrinated in universities that teach nihilism as unquestioning scientific gospel, to create a new apocalyptic religion (climate catastrophe), complete with a new victim-god (nature), a new reason for guilt (sins against nature), and a path for redemption (renewables and low-energy living). It, and the broader Woke religion, have found intellectual ballast since World War II from Rousseau, Malthus, and Foucault.

But that account only partly addresses the motivations of the fanatics. It doesn’t answer why some people become fanatics and others don’t. It doesn’t explain the specific role of fanatics, particularly in relation to other actors, such as the intellectual architects of the movement, and the institution-builders. Nor does it address how fanaticism ends and what, if anything, can be done to hasten its expiration date.

As such, we need to ask, who exactly are the climate fanatics? And how can their power over Western cultural and political life be reduced?

The Psychology Of Fanaticism

Harper and Row published Eric Hoffer’s now-classic work of political psychology, The True Believer, in 1951.

All mass movements have certain things in common, argues Eric Hoffer in his now-classic 1951 work of political psychology, The True Believer. Hoffer was mostly describing Nazis and Communists but his observations are incredibly fresh and relevant. I devoured most of the book in a single sitting and underlined many sentences and shouted to myself “Yes! That’s it!” as I reflected on how well it described climate fanaticism and Woke fanaticism more broadly. While at times Hoffer can sound reactionary, he was himself working-class, laboring as a longshoreman (stevedore), and he is writing in defense of liberal democracy, not pining for a return to the aristocracy.

Hoffer argues that fanaticism is born from personal frustration. Fanatics are people with more ambition than talent. Notes Hoffer, “most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize. Hitler tried painting and architecture; Goebbels, drama, the novel and poetry; Rosenberg, architecture and philosophy; von Schirach, poetry; Funk, music; Streicher, painting. ‘Almost all were failures, not only by the usual vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria.’”

You can see the connection to wounded pride. Many narcissists are seeking to feel relevant but lack the talent or stamina to become any good at their craft. They must thus resort to cruder actions that require courage but little creativity, or hard work, like throwing a can of tomato soup onto a Van Gogh painting, stopping traffic, or emptying milk onto the floor. It is notable the extent to which the first and last of those behaviors are typical of the temper tantrums of children. Konstantin Kisin aptly dubbed the climate fanatics as belonging to “tantrum groups.”

For Hoffer, the fanatic pursues politics for the same reason an addict pursues drugs: to escape inner demons. “The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft,” he notes. “What looks like giving a hand is often holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless… in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

Martha’s Vineyard church offers “kneeling every Sunday.” (Author photo)

All mass movements are religious movements, says Hoffer. Both the swastika and the hammer and sickle are versions of the cross. “The ceremonial of the parades is as the ceremonial of a religious procession.” Such movements aren’t only religious; they can be nationalistic or communistic, too. But they are movements offering the feeling of immortality to their true believers. Today we can see such religious rituals in the kneeling promoted by Black Lives Matter activists including (or especially) in secular places like uber-woke Martha’s Vineyard.

Harsh as it sounds, fanatics tend to be losers. They are those with the least to gain from the status quo and the most to gain from radical change. “The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present,” he writes. “They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both; hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.” Hoffer doesn’t mince words. He goes so far as to refer to fanatics as the slime that serves as the mortar for building a castle.

It is worth noting that Hoffer is not suggesting that there is never a role for outcasts. America was founded, after all, by them. “The stone the builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful, and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.”

The first fanatics tend more often to be bored elites than exploited or oppressed victims, writes Hoffer. But this is a “boredom” of nihilists. “The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom,” he writes. Such people lack the experience of “flow” that comes from being engaged in absorbing, meaningful work. Disruptive activism offers a kind of high. It’s the feeling of power that comes from breaking the rules. “The rules are for thee, not me,” says the law-breaker. For some, like Prince Harry and Duchess Megan Markle, who keep getting caught jet-setting to UN climate conferences, the hypocrisy is the point.

Other fanatics are oblivious to their privilege. Last month, a 16-year-old climate activist in New Zealand told a radio journalist that people should have to apply to take gas-guzzling flights. Under her rules, the reporter asked, would people be “allowed to go to Fiji”? Said the activist, “In the current climate crisis I don’t think that that’s necessary.” After the reporter asked what the last place she had flown to was, the 16-year-old admitted it was Fiji. Stressed the teenager, “Of course, I’m not embarrassed.”

In addition to attracting teens, the ennui of everyday life attracts church lady types — something I found in my research into XR in 2019. “Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements,” finds Hoffer. Such was also the case with the birth of the anti-nuclear and “population control” movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Conversely, marriage cuts against activism because it offers women a “new purpose in life, a new future, and a new identity… The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of barren, spoiled life…. Hitler made full use of ‘the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a ‘kick’ out of love affairs.”

Who, then, are the climate fanatics? They are frustrated, needy, and lonely. They are in the grip of nihilism and wounded, narcissistically. They are spiritual seekers and creative failures. They have both a strong need to feel special, and powerful, but also to lose themselves in the group. They are people who desperately want to get away from having to deal with themselves and the confrontation with inner demons required for personal growth

How Fanaticism Ends

Greta Thunberg: schon vor Ausstrahlung Wirbel um Interview mit Sandra Maischberger

Greta Thunberg on German television disavowing her extremist rhetoric from three years ago and endorsing the continued operation of existing nuclear plants over their replacement with coal in Germany.

Not everything Hoffer describes about the fanatic rings true. Hoffer famously concludes, “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of actions.” First come the intellectuals like Rousseau, Malthus, and Foucault. Then come the climate fanatics like XR and Just Stop Oil. And last come the “men of action” who will consolidate the movement into institutions. “Once the stage is set,” Hoffer writes, “the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable.” In reality, there’s no linear progression. The Malthusian and climate apocalyptic institutions (e.g., Greenpeace, Sierra Club, NRDC) have existed for over a half-century. Lenin was as much a man of action as Stalin.

Hoffer argues that fanaticism emerges during periods of profound social, economic, and political crisis, but Martin Gurri argues persuasively in his essential 2018 book, Revolt of the Public, that the radical protests in recent years were unleashed by social media, which are as disruptive as the invention of the printing press. Black Lives Matter started in 2015, when America had a black president, and the economy was six years into recovery. There was no economic crisis in 2019 when XR shut down much of London; in fact, it was booming. The case could be made that Brexit and the election of Trump fueled the climate protests. But it’s not the case that they created Black Lives Matter, which had more to do with the penetration of social media, which allowed for videos of police violence to go viral.

And fanatical leaders come and go. Greta Thunberg today appears positively passé, authoring books and acting like a very serious person for German television, even endorsing nuclear as an alternative to coal. She’s no longer on the cutting edge. Thunberg even implied she felt embarrassed by the fanatical rhetoric of her you-stole-my-childhood tantrum (“How dare you!”) at the U.N. three long years ago. And, dangerously for her future as a fanatic, she said she was happy. Thunberg is thus on the same long road as Al Gore to irrelevancy.

Those quibbles aside, Hoffer correctly identifies the most effective way to counter a fanatical, mass movement, in my view.

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We truly are beyond help:

Even the 'crazies' write to Dear Abby. It's frightening to think people whose minds work like these are out there and writing. No wonder the world is in such a mess!

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Dear Abby

DEAR ABBY ADMITTED SHE WAS AT A LOSS AS HOW TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

1. Dear Abby,

A couple of women moved in across the hall from me. One is a middle-aged gym teacher and the other is a social worker in her mid-twenties. These two women go everywhere together, and I've never seen a man go into or leave their apartment. Do you think they could be Lebanese?

2. Dear Abby,

What can I do about all the Sex, Nudity, Fowl Language and Violence on my VCR?

Dear Abby,

I am a twenty-three year old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.

3. Dear Abby,

I've suspected that my husband has been fooling around, and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again.

4. Dear Abby,

Our son writes that he is taking Judo. Why would a boy who was raised in a good Christian home turn against his own?

5. Dear Abby,

I joined the Navy to see the world I've seen it. Now how do I get out?

6. Dear Abby,

My forty year old son has been paying a psychiatrist $50.00 an hour every week for two and a half years. He must be crazy.

4. Dear Abby,

My mother is mean and short-tempered I think she is going through mental pause.

8. Dear Abby,

You told some woman whose husband had lost all interest in sex to send him to a doctor. Well, my husband lost all interest in sex and he is a doctor. Now what do I do?

9. Dear Abby

I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much, I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his.

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IN Bibi's autobiography he flat out states ISRAEL MUST BE FREE TO INITIATE. I INTEND TO WRITE HIM AND REMIND HIM WHAT HE WROTE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PRIME MINISTER WITH THE GUTS TO DO SO AND NOW IS THE TIME BECAUSE THE IRANIANS NEED SUPPORT. THEY HAVE DECIDED TO TAKE TO THE STREETS AGAINST ALL ODDS BY THE THOUSANDS.

BIDEN WILL DO NOTHING TO SUPPORT THEM.

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SENT TO ME BY A LONG TIME, DEAR FRIEND AND FELLOW MEMO READER:
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If You Wanted to Destroy the Country

A dear friend wrote this and I couldn't have said it better...please share if you feel the you want to...

If you wanted to destroy the country how would you go about it? Well maybe first you would elect a cognitively-challenged president and surround him with the most extreme radical socialists you could find.

Then you would choose as his VP a totally incompetent person who would protect him from impeachment.

Next, you would destroy the value of the currency and the citizens’ savings by spending the country into the worst inflation in 40 years while telling them it was only “transitory.”

Then you would destroy the country’s sovereignty by opening the border to all comers from all over the world with no vetting for disease, financial viability, criminal records or terrorist aims. You would offer the millions who arrived food, clothing, housing, education, medical coverage, transportation, etc., all at taxpayers’ expense.

Next, you would take one of our most successful businesses, energy, where we had finally reached a point of “self-sufficiency” and “net exports” and announce that you were going to end fossil fuels by stopping pipelines, permits, by over-regulation, cancelling lease sales, etc., further driving up inflation, while spending hundreds of billions on competing technologies that are purchased from our most hostile rival and has no way of fulfilling our energy needs for the next 20 or 30 years.

Then you would use a pandemic that already had available vaccines as an excuse to unnecessarily shut down millions of businesses, churches and schools destroying millions of jobs and devastation millions of students who lost a year or two of precious education.

Next you would violate the first amendment of our constitution by forcing social media companies to prohibit any open discussion of scientific or medical views that were contrary to those of government agencies even when those agencies were demonstrably wrong.

Next, you would watch foreign drug cartels overrun the border with dangerous drugs and outright poison in the form of Fentanyl taking the lives of over 108,000 of our 18 - 45 year olds last year as they are entering their primes, shattering so many thousands of families and destroying a wide swath of the country’s future.

Then you would go against your military advisors and order an indefensible evacuation of Afghanistan sending a signal to your adversaries of American weakness, while having your military “leaders “ concentrate on “wokeness, white rage, equity, transgender accommodation, maternity uniforms” and anything but military preparedness.

You would sit by and watch criminals take over our major cities with ideological mayors, governors, prosecutors and justices let repeat violent criminals go free time after time to continue their crimes unabated while federal law-enforcement does nothing to stop it.

Finally, you would try to tear the country apart by calling one half the country “Fascists,” by shouting insults at large numbers of citizen and by impugning the motives of Supreme Court justices, while using your own Justice Dept and FBI as a weapon against political opponents.

When you vote in a few days, ask yourself, if one were trying to destroy this country, would they do anything different from what the Biden Administration is doing today?

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TV Networks Refuse To Air Obscene School Curriculum Material

Parents and parental rights supporters have recently brought attention to their cause by pointing out that the material taught in their children’s schools is so obscene that television networks refuse to broadcast it.

The Federal Communications Commission prohibits obscene content “at all times of day,” and parental rights advocates say this law has led television and radio networks to restrict them from talking about obscene content in school curriculums.

Erika Sanzi, director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, described how obscene the material must be to get to this point.

“When my kids were younger or just in my earlier life, I can’t think of a time that I would be talking about a children’s book, and I couldn’t discuss it on the radio,” said Sanzi. “This is a new phenomenon where you cannot discuss what is in a book used for children.”

In one instance, Sanzi described an encounter with a television producer who would not allow her to bring up the “Human Growth and Development” curriculum taught to 10-year-olds in a Wisconsin school district.

“There was anal sex, oral sex, and vaginal sex,” Sanzi explained. “She was like, ‘Oh, my God, like you can’t say that.’”

“The main thing that she was telling me was that I couldn’t use explicit terms for body parts and I couldn’t describe these different types of sex that the kids learn about,” Sanzi said.

Schools in New Jersey are teaching fifth graders how “pregnancy can be achieved” and introducing eighth graders to different types of sex, including anal sex, and the material is so obscene that parents cannot discuss or display the content on the television or radio.

At a recent protest, Scarlett Johnson, head of Ozaukee, Wisconsin’s Moms For Liberty chapter, held a sign with the pictures and words used in a Wauwatosa School District’s sexual education curriculum. She was told by a cameraman for a news station, however, that they would not be able to show footage of her sign due to the obscenity.

“He said, ‘I am going to have to blur the images so much that no one will be able to tell what they’re looking at,’” said Johnson. “The language on there, there was anal sex, there was erection, wet dreams.”

“There were the graphic images of the condoms and then the images of the vulva, vagina, penis,” she continued. “And they all came straight from the curriculum.”

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Who Rules The World?

Biden, Putin and Xi have been arguing about who rules the world - The United States, Russia or China?

Without resolving their dispute, they turned to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and asked him, "Who rules the world?"

Modi replied, "Here's what I know" ...

1. The CEO of Google is Indian.

2. Microsoft's CEO is Indian.

3. The CEO of Adobe is Indian.

4. The CEO of NetApp is Indian.

5. MasterCard's CEO is Indian.

6. The CEO of DBS is Indian.