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LBJ appointed Hoover for life to avoid J Edgar from spilling the beans on Johnson's nefarious affairs.
Bobby Kennedy was relentless in his pursuit of eliminating mob crime and bosses. He and Hoover hated each other. The CIA and FBI were ,apparently, authorized to assassinate Castro. When Hoover suddenly died in his home from a coronary in the morning his second in command immediately ordered Hoover's loyal secretary to destroy all private files. Therefore, we will never know what Hoover knew and what was in those files.
I will never believe the assassinations of Jack, Bobby and MLK were happenstance. To add more intrigue, Hoover was known to be a frequent visitor of a club where gays gathered. Finally, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were a go to, well connected group but Frank and Jack Kennedy broke off their relationship partly over Marilyn Monroe, partly because Jack was concerned about revelations of his mob associations could prevent his second term election and who knows the rest.
Bobby believed his pursuit of the mob was connected with his brother's death. Perhaps his own was connected.
Recent events cannot be ignored. D.C elites will stop at nothing to protect their desire to have matters their way. Destroying reputations and entire families, even a former president are all fair game. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of political weaponization. Politics is ugly and acts as a magnet in attracting some of the worst offenders who are not above doing anything. I offer such names as Pelosi, Schiff , McConnell, Soros and of late the California social media billionaires like Zuckerberg etc.. one f the biggest up and coming worms is California's current governor.
Sadly enough, today's cast of Democrat characters, when put under the light, look not much better than the Xi's and Putin's of the world. Obama was smitten with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and his closest friend, Turkey's Erdogan, who jailed adversaries. The current president allegedly has sold his office, various members of Congress are corrupt, trade on inside information and are worth millions. A candidate for the presidency destroyed evidence and arranged spying on her opponent and is associated with a lot of circumspect deaths. Her husband, and a former president, was a lothario and was paid off with honorariums. Some of their key members were compromised by associating with and/or employing Chinese spies.
Their across the aisle opposites have their own renegades. It is no wonder confidence in our government is at an all time low.
Meanwhile, today I had the distinct pleasure of watching senior members of various government agencies patting themselves on the back after disclosing a $7 billion fraud, after the fact. The accused was a 30 year old punk who enriched himself so he could become the second largest contributor to Democrats.
And so it goes in La La Land.
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Iran’s power-by-execution strategy will fail
It’s time for the West to look at the Islamic Republic with clear eyes and find new policies to end its menace to humanity, once and for all
As the revolution in Iran intensifies, the theocrats in charge have made a cruel wager. They are betting against their own citizens in a desperate struggle to remain in power. Now, before it’s too late, the international community must respond and reward the courage of the Iranian people.
With the execution of Mohsen Shekari last Thursday and Majidreza Rahnavard on Sunday, the Islamic Republic has opened a new frontier in the war against its own people. In a country where jobs are scarce, clean water is a luxury, and school buildings are collapsing, the Iranian regime somehow manages to do one thing very well: use its resources to issue and carry out death sentences against their own people in a bid to break their will and crush their spirit.
Executions like those of Shekari and Rahnavard carried out in recent days appear set to continue. Mana Sadrat, Mohammad Hosseini and Ali Moazzami who were arrested during the recent protests are at risk of being put to death for the “crime” of participating in a demonstration. Simultaneously, in recent weeks the regime also expedited the execution of previously arrested Baluch and Kurdish prisoners including Amonollah Rakhshani and Parviz Barhouhi. They also convicted two teenage brothers named Mohammad and Ali Rakhshani (no relation to Amonollah) of “enmity against God,” a charge punishable by death.
Iran has tried this strategy of power by execution before. Thousands of prisoners were killed in the first years of the revolution. The Iran Tribunal has documented at least 11,000 executions in the 80s, with at least 4,000 executions in 1988 alone. The actual number of executions during the decade is believed to be closer to 20,000. Those mass executions created an atmosphere of fear that paralyzed regime opponents and quelled rebellion for decades.
During the heat of the recent protests, Khamenei expressed nostalgia for the bloody decades of the past. He stated that “the G-d of the 80s is the same as today’s G-d,” implying the same threat to the citizens while assuring himself the likelihood of immunity, not only from the international community but even the Almighty himself. Despite such harsh rhetoric, Iranian people are no longer fearful of the fascist clerics. They have summoned the courage to face their oppressors on the streets, knock turbans off the heads of mullahs and stare down evil while chanting “no to the dictator.”
Remember that the worldwide outrage against Iran’s repression began with the brutal murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called Morality Police in September. Her name became a household name around the world, shorthand for the ruthlessness of the regime and the resistance of citizens. It evoked sympathy and prompted outrage among the international community. But since Mahsa’s murder, Iran has imprisoned more than 18,000 people and murdered an estimated 500 people, some out in the open, shot dead on the streets, others raped and beaten to death out of view in dungeons and torture chambers, and now an increasing number of them in public on the gallows.
The magnitude of this depravity can’t be reduced to a bumper sticker or covered in a single cable news segment. Imagine the pain of parents across the country whose young children were kidnapped by regime thugs and now face the prospect of kangaroo court trials and death sentences. The horror is more than any hashtag campaign can hope to capture. We need new tools to help people understand the extent of this terror campaign and new strategies to stand up to these atrocities.
No one should be surprised that the Islamic Republic is attempting to solve its problems with such barbarism. The government lost any moral legitimacy years ago. It lacks the vision to explore real solutions to the systemic challenges and widespread corruption crippling the country. The so-called “reformists” movement was exposed as a pathetic sham, little more than a PR campaign to buy time and bargaining chips for negotiations with the West.
In reality, regardless of its propaganda, the regime is propped up by a series of pillars that include forced hijab, gender apartheid, Shiite supremacy, and a draconian code of personal behavior. Without these structures, the Islamic Republic would lose its fundamental identity.
Justice would demand tearing down these pillars, upholding freedom and equality for all, an arrangement that would mean the total collapse of the Islamic Republic. This is why the protesters are calling for the foundational removal of the regime because there’s no legitimate partner for negotiations. There’s simply nothing to put on the table.
The regime recognizes this reality; this is why they no longer fake efforts to solve the problems. Abroad, regime supporters and their lobbyists have mastered the art of political equivocation. They are quick to distract from their failings and point toward the problems of others.
For example, Iran and its echo chamber vociferously object to any diplomatic rapprochement between the US and Saudi Arabia, citing the brutal and unforgivable murder of news columnist Jamal Khashoggi. This certainly was a heinous incident, but it is remarkable how Iranian leaders and followers lack the same passion for the citizen journalists who are arrested and killed on a daily basis in Iran. Indeed, the Islamic Republic continues to murder and execute journalists, bloggers and other innocents every day, men and women whose names may never gain the same profile as Khashoggi but whose deaths are equally tragic.
With each passing year, Iran has done little more than expand its malign activities around the world and target its own citizens. The time has come to look at the Islamic Republic with clear eyes and explore new policies to end its menace to humanity, once and for all.
What would such new approaches look like? In some ways, what’s old is new again. There are clear policy recommendations that would support the protesters. It also is time for western powers to convene stakeholders from a cross-section of expertise, including a strong representation of Iranian opposition leaders to chart a course for a free Iran and determine the best ways to give power back to the citizens who wish to rebuild the country.
Now is the time for democracies to respond to the calls for democracy from the Iranian people.
Born and raised in Iran, Marjan Keypour is a human rights activist and founder of StopFemicideIran.org, and ARAMIran.org. She’s a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and member of ADL’s Task Force for Middle East Minorities. You can follow her at @MarjanKG
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What's new?
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Palestinian President Threatens Return to Terrorism
Adam Kredo • December 8, 2022
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas indicated the Palestinian Authority may turn to terrorism, saying "armed resistance" against Israel could commence any day.
"I do not endorse armed resistance at the moment, but I may change my mind later," President Mahmoud Abbas said in a recent Arabic-language interview translated into English on the Elder of Ziyon website, a blog that tracks Israeli-Palestinian issues. "I do not adopt military resistance at this time, but it is possible that I change my mind tomorrow or after tomorrow, or any time." CONTINUE
The New Antisemitism, Laid at the Left's Doorstep
By Seth Grossman,
This new antisemitism should alarm every American. Antisemitism was never before deeply rooted here. America's most fundamental values and traditions included and protected Jews. We have toxic antisemitism today because the "progressive" left systematically attacked and destroyed them during the past sixty years.
Most past discrimination against Jews in America came from the typical mistrust of natives toward all newcomers. Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland faced the same thing. CONTINUE
RICHARD L. CRAVATTS-OPINION
CUNY continues its antisemitic campaign to purge Zionism
The disruption of a panel discussion was activists’ latest attempt to suppress free speech.
(December 13, 2022 / JNS) As if to confirm its reputation as an institution stewing in radical anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism and antisemitism, members of CUNY4Palestine and other activists did their best to disrupt and shut down a Dec. 8 panel discussion titled “A Conversation on the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” held at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
The panelists were Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network; Donna Robinson Divine, a professor of Jewish studies at Smith College; and Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. They spoke about how language used by students and faculty in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been contorted, redefined, and weaponized as part of the cognitive war against Israel.
……No sooner had the panel discussion kicked off than CUNY’s brownshirts started screaming and chanting at the panelists. They held placards using some of the very words that were examined in the journal, among them “apartheid,” “colonialism,” “settlers” and “occupation.” CONTINUE
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When I get a headache I take two aspirin and keep away from children, just like the bottle says.
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So, you drive across town to a gym to walk on a treadmill?
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Last year I joined a support group for procrastinators. We haven't met yet.
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Why do I have to press one for English when you're just going to
transfer me to someone I can't understand anyway?
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Worth reposting.
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Victor Davis Hanson: Our Parasitic Generation
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
"B assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
- Adam Smith
Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?
We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits.
We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.
Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.
We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.
The Breakdown of Basic Society
Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow.
Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.
The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?
What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits but cannot create.
Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar, quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths. We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what follows.
Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars, too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with so little reason for that confidence.
A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.
What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.
Institutions That Went Rogue
The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under oath.
In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.
As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the truth means nothing.
This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night counting.
The New Medievalism
Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking, if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.
Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.
In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support “transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”But like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not endangering, their own careers.
For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism masked by pretension.
Our Rhine and Danube
America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.
Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross illegally over it.
Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing, there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it down.
We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home, were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.
Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.
The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly absorb three messages from their hosts.
First, illegal residents will often be treated better than American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited "entitlements".
Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and "entitlements".
Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to “systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated, rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a different notion of borders.
The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will lead to two antithetical Americas.
So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.
A Nation of Thieves?
In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with several self-check-out counters.
Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and screws had not been ripped off.
A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.
I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.
Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit. Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who normally had used masks and for what reasons.
Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest, much less conviction, much less incarceration.
But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.
We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,” “discrimination.” Any will do.
We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of America—until now.
Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
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