Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
--James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
-- Douglas Case, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University .
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Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
-- Frederic Bastiat , French economist(1801-1850)
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Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)
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The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.-- Mark Twain
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What this country needs are more unemployed politicians
--Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)
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Third Worldizing America
By Victor Davis Hanson
Our elites, like the Third World rich, have mastered ignoring—and navigating around—the misery of others in their midst.
In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s—hole of a city.”
The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.
Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times—but thought little of it.
Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder—the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.
Vineyard roadsides used as dumps—a normal scene along rural avenues near my home
Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.
After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.
Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted.
In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.
Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality.
One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the content without worry of arrest.
Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system.
So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the summer 2020 riotous destruction of property: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”
Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not.
There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence in summer 2020. The riots were variously characterized by the burning of courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church.
And there was also a frightening riot on January 6, where a mob entered the Capitol and damaged federal property.
Among those arrested in the latter Washington, D.C. violence many are often held in solitary confinement or under harsh jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a congressional investigation.
Some of those arrested are still,, 10 months later, awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.
In contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital charges.
A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification—after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.”
In the Third World, basic services—power, fuel, transportation, water—are characteristically unreliable: In other words, much like a frequent California brownout.
I’ve been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination—requiring either turning around or landing somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.
One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.
But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.
In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas.
But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages—often a few blocks from tony Atherton.
On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.
Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.
But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third W World rich who master ignoring—and navigating around—the misery of others in their midst.
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Iran Makes Nuclear Advance at Fordow During Talks to Revive Deal
by Reuters and Algemeiner Staff
Iran has started producing enriched uranium with more efficient advanced centrifuges at its Fordow plant dug into a mountain, the UN atomic watchdog said on Wednesday, further eroding the 2015 Iran nuclear deal during talks with the West on saving it.
The announcement appeared to undercut indirect talks between Iran and the United States on bringing both fully back into the battered deal that resumed this week after a five-month break prompted by the election of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi.
Western negotiators fear Iran is creating facts on the ground to gain leverage in the talks.
And:
By Victor Rosenthal
Did you ever notice how from time to time a particular theme appears simultaneously in various media? One that I’ve seen a lot of lately is “Israel doesn’t have the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, so we need to find a way to live with it.” Here is yet another example, from security analyst Yossi Melman, writing in Ha’aretz:
As the nuclear talks with Iran resume in Vienna, Israel must try to reach an agreement with Washington, by which the U.S. will extend it a nuclear umbrella and openly acknowledge it. …
The deployment of a nuclear umbrella is the ultimate guarantee of deterrence in the face of Iran’s nuclear program and, if Tehran succeeds in assembling a nuclear weapon, the possibility that Iran will threaten Israel in order to extract concessions from it. …
Read more...
The radical reach is very far:
An Alarming Trend in Psychotherapy
For our latest video, FAIR’s Christine Sefein explains how her field of psychotherapy has been taken over by what she describes as a “divisive and regressive ideology” that led her to resign from her position as a professor of clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles.
This ideology teaches people to see themselves as part of an oppressed group and to blame their hardships on oppressor groups. And sometimes that’s true! But most often this way of thinking, which encourages hypersensitivity, is harmful to people who are seeking help from mental illness conditions.
Sefein worries that her field, which is designed to help people overcome their mental illnesses, will actually exacerbate patients’ symptoms by causing them to view themselves as having no control over improving their situation. Instead, people are acquiring an attitude called “learned hopelessness,” which locks them into a feedback loop of pessimism and despair.
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He has been consistent in this area:
Why I’m Backing Charter Schools
The public school system is failing. My philanthropy will give $750 million to a proven alternative.
By Michael R. Bloomberg
American public education is broken. Since the pandemic began, students have experienced severe learning loss because schools remained closed in 2020—and even in 2021 when vaccinations were available to teachers and it was clear schools could reopen safely. Many schools also failed to administer remote learning adequately.
Before the pandemic, about two-thirds of U.S. students weren’t reading at grade level, and the trend has been getting worse. Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, show that in 2019, eighth-grade math scores had already fallen significantly.
Teachers understand the severity of the problem, and many are doing heroic work, yet some of their union representatives are denying reality. “There is no such thing as learning loss,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of the Los Angeles teachers union, in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine this past summer. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.”
What nonsense. How about reading, writing and arithmetic, the critical skills we are funding schools to teach?
Instead of giving students the skills they need to succeed in college or in a trade, the public education system is handing them diplomas that say more about their attendance record than their academic achievement. This harms students, especially those from low-income families. When and if they graduate, they will try to find work in an economy that values knowledge and skills above all else, and their old schools will say to them: “Good luck!”
Other nations are rising to this challenge and racing ahead, but we are moving backward, creating an economic and national-security crisis that will worsen over time. Unless we have the courage to rebuild public education from the bottom up, we will continue to doom our most vulnerable to a life of poverty and, in too many cases, incarceration
We know what works, because we can see it in real time. Success Academy’s network of 47 public charter schools is serving New York children whose families predominantly live below the poverty line. Their students are outperforming public-school students in Scarsdale, N.Y.—the wealthiest town on the East Coast and the second-wealthiest town in America—by significant margins. Yet a statewide cap on charter schools is blocking Success Academy from expanding.
In New York and many other places, enrollment in traditional schools has fallen dramatically since the start of the pandemic as parents search for better alternatives. Meanwhile, across the country, charters saw their largest enrollment increase ever last year—240,000 more children.
Charters, which generally don’t operate under union contracts, also have more flexibility to manage staffing, curriculum, testing and compensation. This allows them to create a culture of accountability for student progress week to week that many traditional public schools are missing. As Ms. Myart-Cruz said, “You can recall the governor. You can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?”
Ironically, she’s right. And as school failures worsen, children are paying a terrible price for this lack of accountability. A union’s job is to represent its members, not to set education policy. They can have input, but schools should focus on the needs of students first, not the employees. It’s the job of elected officials to make that clear and not cater to their political supporters and campaign donors.
During my time as mayor of New York, I worked closely with Randi Weingarten, now president of the American Federation of Teachers. While we often disagreed, we were able to raise base pay for teachers by 43% in exchange for a longer school day. Our administration also worked with the state Legislature to raise the cap on charter schools, and over 12 years, we helped create more than 150 new charters, many of which have performed at the highest levels. These schools have helped reduce racial and ethnic achievement gaps in New York.
Today there are long waiting lists for charter schools across the country, but mayors and governors aren’t getting the support they need from Congress and the White House to open new charter schools. To begin meeting the demand for charters, Bloomberg Philanthropies is launching a five-year, $750 million effort to create seats for 150,000 more children in 20 metro areas across the country.
We will provide seed capital to open new, high-quality charter schools with leadership and staff members that reflect students’ diversity. This investment will also help existing charter schools grow. We will also fund work to strengthen schools’ data systems, train and develop principals and teachers, and study what is working well to develop best practices for the nation.
This initiative builds on the education work our foundation has been doing for years, including programs that train teenagers for trades and other fields that offer well-paid, stable careers that are not easily automated or moved overseas.
It also builds on our financial-aid support to Johns Hopkins University, which has made the school’s admissions process permanently need-blind. The idea behind the Hopkins gift is the same one driving this new charter-school initiative: There should be no connection between family income or skin color and a student’s opportunity to receive a great education—not in college, and not in elementary, middle or high school either.
We need a new, stronger model of public education that is based on evidence, centered on children, and built around achievement, excellence and accountability for all. The future of America’s most vulnerable children—and of our country—is riding on whether we can deliver it.
Mr. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP, served as mayor of New York, 2001-13.
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Hunter the gifted son:
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Read This Alert >>>+++++++++++++++++ |
Don't Be Surprised When Cuomo Returns to Prime Time 
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Alex Baldwin had an interview with the left's most favored interviewer because he provides cover and makes the interviewee's appearance appear authentic when it is as shallow as they get.
Yesterday, Baldwin laid the groundwork for his defense against what will become a multitude of law suits. It was obviously framed and allowed, if not encouraged, by his legal defense team. Baldwin is a good actor and knows how to tear up just at the most propitious times.
Each tear drop could save him $100,000.
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