90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

When Democrats Talk About "Protecting Children"....

How Far The The Radicals In The Biden Administration Go? This Far:

Democrats Didn't Separate Children From Their Parents In Waco...

Democrats Didn't Separate Children From Their Parents In Waco #2...

Educated Idiots, Critical Race Theory, and Other Bad Ideas

A recipe for civilizational corruption and decline.

“Educated idiots” is how my old man described college-educated people who were completely devoid of common sense and moral intelligence, or what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” But what made them especially annoying was their arrogance, their assumption that because they were professionally credentialed in one area, they were equally knowledgeable about everything else.

This perennial character flaw was recognized by the ancients. Socrates in his defense speech noted this presumptuous claim among the Athenians he questioned during his search for someone wiser than he. The poets and artisans, for example, because they had many useful skills and technical knowledge, “thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Nor were the highly educated immune: “There is nothing so absurd,” the Roman orator Cicero wrote, “that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” Humans by nature are vain and crave recognition for being superior to their fellows, which make us vulnerable to this willful error of thought and character.

But over the last 150 years, the broadening of formal education to include the masses, the increase and hyper-specialization in university disciplines, and the prestige of the natural sciences from the technologies that improved material existence, have made this bad habit ubiquitous. Worse yet, the aggressive promotion during the last fifty years of “college for everyone”–– which necessarily required lower standards and a decline in foundational skills––multiplied the numbers of people with this affliction, even as the quality of their degrees was degraded.

Those trained in the humanities and soft “sciences,” that is, disciplines that lack the rigor and real-world accountability of real sciences, are particularly prone to this intellectual disease. This phenomenon explains why we see so many preposterous, unsubstantiated, politically biased, and just plain whacky ideas like Critical Race Theory or “white fragility” promulgated by self-styled “brights” with such arrogant certainty, and passed off as “science.”

The result of these changes is manifested in several ways. Human nature and human experience, once the province of religion, philosophy, and traditional wisdom, became the objects of “scientism,” new disciplines like sociology and psychology that adopted the quantification and jargon of real science to disguise as “science” dubious philosophical claims about human and social reality. These disciplines proliferated in the universities, and their conclusions and “knowledge” trickled down into K-12 teacher-training and school curricula. The big leap in the numbers of those attending college distributed this false knowledge more widely throughout the culture, from movies and television shows, to newspapers, magazines, and web sites.

The story of “scientific racism” and eugenics during the first half of the 20th century is a notorious example. The theories of Charles Darwin, particularly the “survival of the fittest,” and the false analogy with the cross-breeding of farm animals, were crudely applied to humans.

Darwin himself legitimized this practice in The Descent of Man: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” But misguided sentimentality, traditional religion, and short-sighted charitable impulses interfered with natural selection that culled out the unfit: “The weak members of civilized societies,” Darwin wrote, “propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” The positive and negative “traits” that were the object of natural selection were linked to the reductive notion of “race” to establish ethnic and racial hierarchies defined by biological superiority and inferiority.

These ideas were taught and studied in America’s most prestigious universities. Research centers like Cold Spring Harbor gathered immense troves of data purportedly documenting the transmission of “traits” through family histories. Newspapers and magazines ran stories about the impending “race suicide,” as Theodore Roosevelt called the failure of retrograde people to acknowledge the “settled science.” And books like...

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

"Whistleblower" Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.

But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own...

When They Outlaw Common Sense,

We Are The New Outlaws.

Japan Making ‘Preparations’ for Possible Chinese Attack of Taiwan

Japan’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it would consider its “options” and make necessary “preparations” toward supporting Taiwan if China continues to ramp up its military intimidation of the island.

Asked by reporters how Tokyo views Beijing’s record-breaking flyovers through Taiwanese airspace in recent days, Japanese Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu said he hoped “this matter is resolved peacefully between the two parties through direct talks.”

“Additionally, instead of simply monitoring the situation, we hope to weigh the various possible scenarios that may arise to consider what options we have, as well as the preparations we must make,” he said at an October 5 press briefing.

Japan’s Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, wearing a face mask to curb the spread of COVID-19, sits at a table during bilateral talks with United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers meeting, at Grosvenor House Hotel, London, Monday, May 3, 2021. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

“Motegi’s comments on Taiwan mark a departure from the past by explicitly speaking of possible involvement, and were also aimed at drawing international attention to the issue and pressing China,” Reuters observed on Tuesday, citing the analysis of political experts.

“That part was always unspoken … but this time, they’re taking a stronger stand,” Yoichiro Sato, an international relations professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, told Reuters on October 5.

Japan’s use of assertive language while addressing the Taiwan-China conflict on October 5 signaled a significant shift in rhetoric according to Robert Ward, a London-based senior fellow for Japanese Security Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“It is drawing a line of sorts and thus creating expectations,” he told Reuters.

“The new government will continue with the harder line, as Motegi is showing. This fits with Japan’s broader push to balance China from a position of...

Across America, Parents Refuse To Be Intimidated By Biden’s Attorney General Labeling Them Domestic Terrorists

Instead of recognizing a mom as the hero that she is for protecting children from porn and pedophilia in school libraries, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued a declaration of war on America’s parents.

Local mother Stacy Langton stood before the Fairfax County School Board in a suburb of the nation’s capital two weeks ago, boldly exposing explicit examples of child porn and pedophilia in library books in area schools, available to children as young as 12 years old.

Langton’s witness ended in mayhem because the school board failed to do something very simple: listen to the stakeholders — and taxpayers — who are parents. Board members rudely interrupted Langton during her two minutes of allotted speaking time and called a hasty recess, a board member later incorrectly claiming that he faced two “exorcisms” by parents praying during the meeting.

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” shouted parents, horrified at the cowardice of the board members.

Now, however, instead of recognizing Langton for the hero that she is for protecting children, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued a declaration of war on America’s parents.

“I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to … [address] threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” he wrote in a memo to FBI Director Christopher Wray and the U.S. attorneys generals on Monday night.

Langton, of course, didn’t threaten anyone. But in this war, facts don’t matter.

In just five days, Garland issued that response to a September 29 letter by the National School Boards Association alleging, incredulously: “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Neither the school board association nor Garland mentioned the word “parents,” as if to acknowledge us, even in an attack, is to validate us. But we know. It’s now the United States vs. America’s parents.

Parents Taking a Stand

The attacks are clearly directed at the thousands of parents who have valiantly overcome their own fears of retaliation, public speaking, and confrontation to advocate in defense of their children, from Beaverton, Oregon, to South Kingstown, Rhode Island, only to be made a caricature by media outlets from...

NYPD arrested 29-year-old Queens woman seen pushing 42-year-old woman into moving train

New York City police said Tuesday that an arrest was made in connection to an unprovoked attack caught on camera at a Times Square subway station a day earlier, where a female assailant was seen getting up from a bench and shoving another woman into a moving train during the morning commute.

Anthonia Egegbara, 29, from Queens, New York, was charged with attempted murder.

Disturbing video released by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Monday shows a female suspect, believed to be in her 30s, wearing a multicolored scarf, black shirt and beige pants, getting up from a bench inside the 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue station and suddenly shoving a 42-year-old woman, who is standing off camera.

Anthonia Egegbara

The footage shows it happened as a northbound No. 1 train was speeding into the station. The assailant then appears to calmly walk away, as several other bystanders on the platform appear relatively unaffected. Police say the 42-year-old woman did not fall onto the tracks, but rather the force of the push knocked her into the moving train before she ricocheted backward onto the platform.

She was transported to a nearby hospital with injuries to her face and legs which police said were serious but not life-threatening.

Detectives canvassed the area and interviewed witnesses, but no suspect had been found as of Monday. NYPD Crime Stoppers is asking anyone with information to call 1-800-577-TIPS.
The same NYPD officers who responded to the shoving incident were back to work hours later, canvassing both the street and below ground after reports of gunfire at the same transit hub, WNBC reported. A man in his 30s appeared to have been shot in a leg on a...