Thursday, November 18, 2021

Varied Articles.




++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is Biden actually incapable of handling the job because of his mental inability or is the press dong to him what they did to Trump?

Breaking: Biden's Mental Fitness in Serious Doubt Because of THIS!?!

Here's What We Just Learned >>> CLICK HERE!


And:

If so are we changing one suit of dirty underwear for another ?

                                                   +++++++++++++++++++++++ 
From a very dear friend and fellow memo reader:


CTC Sentinel | November 2021

VOLUME 14, ISSUE 9
Published by Combating Terrorism Center


It has been three months since the Taliban entered Kabul and retook control of Afghanistan. According to the head of the U.N. World Food Programme, “23 million people [are now] marching toward starvation. 95% of Afghans don’t have enough food. The economy is collapsing. Winter is coming. This is going to be hell on earth.” In this month’s feature article, Andrew Watkins assesses the Taliban’s efforts to rule Afghanistan so far. He writes that “The Taliban have busied themselves consolidating control, reacting swiftly and harshly to perceived threats. They have not clearly defined the scope or structure of their state, nor have they shared long-term plans for their rank-and-file, many of which continue to operate as they did before August 15, 2021. Taliban leaders have demonstrated the continued primacy of maintaining internal cohesion, a longstanding trait that will likely stunt the group’s response to Afghanistan’s impending economic and humanitarian crises.” Watkins writes that from their perspective, “accepting aid that might sustain their state would prove worthless if doing so fueled a fissure within their own organization. The Taliban would become the very thing their origin story professes they rose up to eradicate and replace: a fractious constellation of militant bands. To put it another way, if Afghanistan’s compounding crises pose the Taliban with the prospect of either failing to provide for the desperate needs of the Afghan people or their own potential fragmentation, the Taliban will put their own organization first.”

This month’s interview is with General Richard D. Clarke, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. In a commentary, Jerome Bjelopera argues that “given that the U.S. national security establishment has taken up great power competition (GPC) as its primary concern recently, and terrorism has slipped from the top position, it is time for the security policy community to place terrorism within a new conceptual framework, one that combines terrorists, violent criminals, drug traffickers, insurgents, and others under the heading of violent non-state actors (VNSA).” Interviews that Matthew Bamber conducted with 43 former Islamic State civilian employees shed light on two distinct categories: those who became full members of the group and those who did not. He writes that “there are significant differences in how these two categories were treated by the Islamic State, the positions they were able to fill, the financial benefits they received, and the processes through which they joined and left Islamic State employment ... Understanding the nuances is important in assessing the culpability of the Islamic State’s civilian workers and the danger they may pose in the future.”

Paul Cruickshank, Editor in Chief

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Biden is pushing the government into evert facet of life and it is becoming officious and must stop:

Biden Policy Disrespects Both Science and Religion

The administration seeks to force our Christian college to let men live in women’s dormitories.

By Jerry C. Davis

++++++++++++++++++++++ 

Uncle Joe Just does not understand what/who he is dealing with.


Group Biden Removed From Terror List Storms U.S. Embassy in Yemen, Takes Hostages

The high cost of Biden's appeasement policy.

By Robert Spencer



Isn’t great that America is back and the adults are back in charge? America is back, all right: all the way back to 1979, the last time we had a president so weak that enemies of the United States stormed one of our embassies and took hostages. On Thursday, the Yemeni media outlet Al-Masdar Online reported that Houthi jihadis in Yemen, which are backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, stormed our embassy in Sana’a, seizing “large quantities of equipment and materials.” Just days before that, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), they “kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy.” Biden’s team promised America would be back, but didn’t say anything about Jimmy Carter coming around again as well.


A State Department spokesman confirmed the Yemeni report, saying: “The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release. The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.” They are being “detained without explanation and we call for their immediate release.” The U.S., the spokesman continued, is “concerned about the breach of the compound” and is calling “on the Houthis to immediately vacate it and return all seized property.”


Yeah, I’ll bet the Houthis are shaking with fear now. Because Biden’s handlers are really going all out on this one: deploying the Navy? Sending in the Marines? Immediately imposing crippling sanctions? Come on, man! The Biden team, said the State wonk, “will continue its diplomatic efforts to secure the release of our staff and the vacating of our compound, including through our international partners.” That’ll show ‘em.


Contrast that weak and uninspired response with what is going on among the Houthis themselves. Last June, according to MEMRI, the Houthis’ Al-Eman TV featured an Islamic scholar, Dr. Ahmad Al-Shami, telling a room full of children that “the scam of 9/11 was a theatrical show produced by the Jews and the Americans. They killed a group of their own people so that they could have a pretext.… All of this is done under the pretext of fighting terrorism, which ‘emerged from your midst of Muslims and Arabs.’” Al-Shami declared: “When we say ‘Death to America,’ it means life for all the nations that America is killing. When we say ‘Death to Israel,’ it means life for all the people, around the world, in whose killing and corruption Israel is taking part.”


The students then began chanting “Allahu akbar! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse be upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!”


Charming. Yet when Donald Trump had the Houthis designated as foreign terrorists, the Leftist political and media establishment was (as always regarding anything and everything Trump did) outraged. No fewer than twenty-two aid groups that were operating in Yemen demanded that the designation be revoked “immediately,” and when his handlers gained control of the presidency, Old Joe Biden did just that. Trump was right again. If any group deserves to be considered foreign terrorists, it’s the Houthis.


Nevertheless, in September the Biden administration quietly removed an advanced missile defense system from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the Saudis are suffering ongoing air attacks from the Houthis in Yemen.


Did Biden’s handlers think that removing the missile defense system would move the Houthis, or their Iranian backers, to make a reciprocal gesture of goodwill? Did they think that the Houthis would stop teaching children to scream “Death to America” and tell them that America turns out to be pretty nice after all?


The removal of the missile defense system was obviously another attempt to appease the mullahs in Tehran, who so far have not been moved by Biden’s handlers’ many overtures to soften their harsh anti-American rhetoric. Pentagon spinmeister John Kirby, however, said nothing about the Islamic Republic as he admitted to “the redeployment of certain air defense assets”; instead, he insisted that the American commitment to its allies in the Middle East remained “broad and deep.”


Kirby added: “The Defense Department continues to maintain tens of thousands of forces and a robust force posture in the Middle East representing some of our most advanced air power and maritime capabilities, in support of U.S. national interests and our regional partnerships.” But it is increasingly clear to the world that this is just empty verbiage and nothing more. The storming of our embassy in Yemen proves that anew.


Will this new act of belligerence by Iran’s Yemeni clients lead Biden’s handlers to abandon their policy of appeasement toward the Islamic Republic of Iran? Will they drop their pipe dream of reviving the nuclear deal and begin to deal realistically with the genuine threat that Iran and its clients pose? Once again: come on, man!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Why would the NYT's push this garbage?


Defending the Lies of The 1619 Project

In the tradition of Howard Zinn, an historian condemns America. 

By Mary Grabar



Nikole Hannah-Jones has a new defender of her 1619 Project, the hundred-page mishmash of essays, surreal “literary” contemplations on historical “moments,” and profiles, published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine to “reframe” the American founding in 1619 as a “slavocracy”—pushed with prepackaged lessons to over 4,500 schools, as history—until lawmakers in some states started taking actions.   


He does not merely echo Hannah-Jones’s claims about white nationalism and January 6, as David Blight and Ron Chernow did on MSNBC. He is doing battle for the damsel who cries she is being attacked by “right-wingers,” white people who want to “censor” her truthful history because it makes their children “uncomfortable” as they are forced to read (falsehoods) about how their European ancestors kidnapped families from the interior of Africa and how Thomas Jefferson ran “forced-labor camps” for the enslaved whom he viewed as “subhuman,” the “one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggl[ing] under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.”


To Hannah-Jones, only a racist would object to their third-grader reading, about post-Civil War America, “In response to black demands for [their] rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.”


This historian has been tweeting images of very old newspaper articles—from the eighteenth century—day by day. And he has vowed to do it till day 76. This is Woody Holton who is fighting Gordon Wood who had the temerity to, with four of his colleagues, write an open letter to the New York Times objecting to the statement by Hannah-Jones: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”


Hannah-Jones, busy speechifying about race, accepting awards, and demanding and then rejecting tenure, never addresses points of fact. The chore of replying went to Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, who cited the 1772 Somerset decision, which declared slavery in England unlawful, and Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 offering freedom to slaves joining the British Army. Silverstein added, without notice, the words “some of,” i.e., “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence. . . .” This rescue was orchestrated with the help of consultant, historian Leslie Harris, who dropped her outrage over having her initial objections ignored. She, like oft-critic Sean Wilentz, feels that it is more important to defend Hannah-Jones’s placement of slavery at the “center” of this nation’s history than to agree on points of fact with “right-wingers.”


But none have gone as far as Woody Holton. Holton, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, writes “bottom-up” histories of the common people, in the tradition of Howard Zinn. Except that Holton has footnotes, and he tweets images.


On October 23, he participated in a debate with Gordon Wood that was to focus on their new books on the American Revolution. Wood started off by praising Holton as a “superb” narrator of military battles and compiler of “extensive” research. He criticized Holton for a lack of proportion (only one out of his 36 chapters focuses on the Constitution) and context, and using present-day standards to make judgments on the past. Wood cited one of Holton’s Zinn-like accusations about the denial of the vote to slaves, women, and men who did not meet property qualifications. “Where in the world at that time,” Wood asked, did these people vote? In fact, Americans had “the largest electorate in the world,” with two-thirds of all adult white men voting, while in England only about one in six voted.


But Holton has gathered quotations galore to support the contention that colonists were worried about the proclamation threatening their right to own slaves. As the ever-vigilant World Socialist Web Site (upholding Trotsky’s class struggle narrative over race struggle) pointed out, Holton was forced by Wood’s points to go further south in the colonies to slave-heavy South Carolina, but then was flummoxed by a caller’s question about why those in the Caribbean, where slavery was even stronger, did not join the Revolution. So, when moderator Massachusetts Historical Society president Catherine Allgor gave the cue, noting Hannah-Jones’s recent disinvitation from the Middlesex School in Concord, Holton attacked Wood for his letter.


Holton charged Wood with being “a founding father,” of the group of letter writers, and leading “a massive campaign of censorship” of Hannah-Jones, who “like a good scholar” he claimed had corrected the error. He demanded that Wood immediately “write another open letter to Sen. Cotton and to Gov. DeSantis, and to all the other demagogues who are using your letter to ban the 1619 project, to say, ‘I am Gordon Wood, and damnit, I am not in favor of censorship.’”


With “dozens of printouts of primary sources on hand,” as William Hogeland reported in Slate Magazine, Holton seemed to be trying “to get Wood to accept personal responsibility for having deployed a category of criticism that has placed both the 1619 Project and Hannah-Jones herself in danger.” And he demanded that Wood also offer the “concession that preserving slavery motivated the Revolution.”


Hannah-Jones, who has been proudly exhibiting Holton’s screen shots, saw this as further confirmation of her own intellectual infallibility. On November 2, she rebuked the Daily Mail for the headline, “Nikole Hannah-Jones ADMITS new book [expanded hardcover edition due November 16] reworks reporting about the American Revolution.” “Wrong as usual, Daily Mail,” she tweeted. “We added the clarification—adding the words ‘some of’ in front of colonists—a year and a half ago. . . .”  


But the two-word addition hardly corrects what follows, such as, “By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western hemisphere.” (Actually, Britain was nearing her status as top slave trader internationally, and it was the colonists’ abolitionist movement that influenced Britain’s.)  The two-word qualification hardly addresses Hannah-Jones’s claim that the abolition of slavery would have “upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South” (ignoring other kinds of labor, such as indentured and wage) or that the “dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery” is what “empowered” Jefferson and the Founders to break from Britain. Furthermore, her claim that the founders would not have declared independence “if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue” remains.


It was an ugly scene as the 62-year-old Holton attempted to force the 87-year-old Wood to make a retraction, in the name of free speech.


But Holton’s own historiography is barely more sophisticated than Hannah-Jones’s, as he revealed in a July Washington Post essay. In discussing the letter the free black scientist Benjamin Banneker had written to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1791, Holton, like The 1619 Project (in the supplementary Broadsheet), presented Banneker falsely, as “upbraiding” Jefferson, in reminding him of his words in the Declaration of Independence, accusing him of “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”


Banneker’s letter, which runs to fourteen paragraphs, actually was strongly influenced, if not written, by the group of white scientist-abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush, who had welcomed Banneker into their group. The letter said nothing personal about Jefferson, who had agreed to appoint Banneker to Pierre L’Enfant’s team surveying the District of Columbia. Banneker’s interest was science, especially astronomy. The letter accompanied a manuscript version of Banneker’s Almanac. Jefferson treated Banneker with his customary respect and did Banneker the great honor of forwarding his almanac to the Marquis de Cordorcet.


The quotation that Holton plucks out comes in paragraph ten, which, like the rest of the letter uses the plural form when discussing abolitionism in the context of the Declaration. Clearly, Banneker refers to the founders, plural:


Here Sir, was a time in which your tender feelings for your selves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature.


It was “pitiable . . . to reflect,” Banneker continued, “that altho you were so fully convinced of” . . . [“the Father of mankind’s”] “equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges . . ., that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining . . . so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity . . ., [and] be found guilty of that most criminal act [slavery], which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves. (emphasis added)


Yes, context does matter. No amount of Tweeted images will validate The 1619 Project. It is not “censorship” to remove such error-ridden and hateful materials as The 1619 Project from the classroom.


Mary Grabar is the author most recently of Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America.

++++++++++++++++++++

 Unions, Philadelphia politicians a dangerous mix.

Politics and Union Corruption in Philadelphia

Two convictions expose the underside of the city’s power brokers. By The Editorial Board

++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
Some state voter rolls are dirtier than used toilet paper and Fitton intends to make them clean:


Judicial Watch pushes five states to clean voter rolls, or face federal lawsuits
Judicial Watch has sent letters to election officials in 14 counties across five states notifying them of apparent violations of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.

No comments: